User Experience is about people
Everyone who works with UX has been there. Someone comes to you and asks: “What do you work with?” And you’re wondering how best to respond. Nowadays, I often say that I try to make computer systems easier for people. When I say it is not unusual that those who hear me say, “Oh, you work with your computer.” Whenever I walk by it, comes to mind: “Well, not exactly. Nevermind”.
This story is just to remind each of us that whoever makes the user experience working with people. The goal is to solve problems and make people’s lives better, easier, more fantastic. Jesse James Garret has written in his The Elements of User Experience about the “product experience creates for the people who use it in the real world”.
Designing for people, solve their problem, make your life better requires talk to them, understand what they do know their conditions and their limits. What makes someone give 5 stars to an application of your store? What makes someone sharing something on a social network? Understand someone’s excitement to see a notification on your website, help a doctor save a life, knowing that someone will be on time to the job interview of your dreams because the “snooze” button was not right next to the “dismiss” button on the phone’s alarm clock. Make the user experience is to make people happy.
Bill Buxton leaves his personal mantra on your page: Ultimately, we are deluding ourselves if we think that the products we design are the “things” we sell, instead of individual experience , social and cultural they generate, and the value and the impact they have.
What about you? What difference is doing in the lives of those who get what you design? Work more with computers or with people? You will talk to your user? You know how he uses the product that you design? Designed thinking of him? Observes people on the street, in line at the bank, the cinema? How much its users are satisfied with your project? Remember, experience is from user.
Work to experience is this: observe and experiment in the laboratory that is outside. Away from the office chair.
Original post from Interaction South America ’13 blog
