I have to admit there is a lot of documentation around the field of UX.
When preparing UX courses for LinkedIn Learning and books for Apress, I do a lot of research, reviewing articles from a variety of credible industry sources, reviewing the posts of the members of a variety of User Groups, following tutorials, and I even use ChatGPT to reveal something I may not have discovered. I have learned there is a lot of focus on UX that is either highly technical or reads like an academic research paper. Trying to distill all of this into something easily grasped by someone new to the field is difficult at best. As a result, I have developed three uncommon UX principles that are distilling the field of UX into something understandable.
Principle #1: UX is both a Mission and a Process.
This one came out of a series of rather deep conversations with Louis Morais, who is a UX Kahuna with Wayfair in Europe.
What it does is distill the term User Experience into its fundamental components. When asked to define UX, I facetiously ask: “What do you want it to mean?” I ask because the term has become jumbled up to the point where it is confused with job practices more than anything else.
Look at it as a Mission and a Process, and things become a lot clearer.
Process is how things are pulled together. The process includes everything from the initial research and conceptualization to upload and distribution. The process also involves some skilled individuals, including researchers, designers, developers, etc. It also consists of a lot of tools, planning and team work that moves in a straight line to an iterative product.
In my recent Apress book- A Guide to UX Design and Development- I explain the Mission:
“The UX Mission goes above all of that. It focusses on the person who will load the product onto their device or open it in a web page. It focusses on making life easier for that person, in such a way that they will continue using the product.”
Which leads to my second principle.
Principle #2: Fall in love with the User, not the Technology.
It never ceases to amaze me that much of the literature around UX focuses on technologies. Want to learn how to create a Design System? Here are a bunch of technologies. Want to make an On-Boarding sequence that works? Here are a bunch of ways to do just that in various prototyping applications. Want to address Accessibility? Here are a bunch of plugins that do exactly that. Pop into , say, a Figma User Group, and you will be inundated with examples of techniques or portfolio pieces. Peruse the UX Collective library and a lot of the articles, mine included, spend time talking about techniques or concepts.
When seeing a Figma demo in a Figma group, I will occasionally pop in and ask, “Who is the user?” The inevitable response is the person that will use it. What can’t be articulated is who the human being is that will actually use it.
This is also common with actual machines.
In my city there are parking lots with machines, such as the one above, that are used to pay for parking. I love watching people of every age, demographic and anything else you can think of trying to decipher how to use the machine to pay for parking. I recently had to have an Xray done at a local hospital and was completely confused with this kiosk. I finally figured it out and then grabbed a seat in the lobby watching other patrons either grapple with how to pay for parking or completely giving up and taking their chances with a parking ticket.
Another example is this one in an elevator in a hotel in Buffalo, New York. This one is a classic case of cool winning out over falling in love with the user. During my stay at the hotel, I constantly saw people pressing the pad under the interface because they assumed it was nothing more than eye candy.
The third principal is this:
Principle #3: UX is Common Sense.
When I first articulated this in a couple of UX groups, the blowback was virtually immediate. The feedback was I had no clue about what I was talking about and academics with PhD’s and other UX degrees questioned my lack of an academic credential. It was no big deal to me and was expected. So let me re-explain because this principle has everything to do with the UX Mission.
We have all encountered making online purchases where we just walked away from the shopping cart. The main reason being it wasn’t easy to use or so confusing we give up.
As a Canadian I encounter this all the time. I select my Province from the pop down and when I enter my postal code I am rejected because it isn’t a U.S. zip code. Conversely I have encountered sites that ask me to choose my province or state and the pop down contains only States. It strikes me that it is common sense to accommodate Canadian Postal Codes if I select a province. It is common sense to include Canadian provinces if you ask me to choose one.
The fact that websites and apps are marketing tools should be more often noticed.
On a broader scale, Peter Drucker’s observation: “The purpose of business is to create and keep a customer” applies to apps and websites. It is common sense that apps and websites want to grow their user base and keep their current ones. It is common sense that no one deliberately sets out to lose, repel or alienate potential customers.
When you step back from the whole discipline of UX and consider that the first letter refers to a User, these three principles become essential. The Mission is to create intuitive, user-facing products that regard technology as a tool to achieve the mission. Ultimately, it is common sense that guides the focus on our Users because creating and keeping Users is what UX is all about.
References and Further Learning:
User Experience for Non-Designers
Tom Green
LinkedIn Learning
A Guide To UX Design and Development
Tom Green, Joseph Labrecque
Apress
Don’t Make Me Think Revisited
Steve Krug
New Riders
The Design of Everyday Things
Don Norman
Basic Books
