Demystifying UX

November 12th was World Usability Day. If you weren’t hard at work updating your low fidelity prototypes into delightful GUIs, no worries. If you haven’t the slightest what a “GUI” is, or you think “low fidelity prototype” sounds like a David Bowie album, fear not. User experience (UX) and usability don’t need to be intimidating concepts.

User experience, simply put, is all the aspects of the user’s interaction with a company’s services and products. And user experience design has become a critical issue. A recent article in Fast Company just declared a global usability crisis. Too often user experience design is designated as an attempt to “make it look prettier.” But as UX founding father Don Norman recently suggested about Apple, user centered design (designing with the user’s needs in mind, sometimes abbreviated as UCD) is about so much more.

How much more? In his book Designing for Interaction, Dan Saffer represents the different disciplines of User Experience like this:

I show you this graphic not to make you feel intimidated, but to show you that User Centered Design contains quite a few disciplines, and that coming up with a UX solution can be easier said than done, as there are multiple paths and strategies that may have vastly different scales, requirements and timelines.

So where to start? As noted UX Designer Yogi Berra would say, when you see a fork in the road, take it. Obviously, Mr. Berra was referencing heuristics. Heuristics are broad rules, that can be used to identify and prioritize usability issues, to provide an initial analysis that helps to uncover critical issues. There are many sets of usability heuristics out there, including Gerhardt-Powals’ cognitive engineering principles and Weinschenk and Barker’s classification list. But the most influential set of usability heuristics are Jakob Nielsen’s 10 Usability Heuristics for User Interface Design.

Each heuristic is assigned a severity score from 0–4, with 4 meaning PANIC RUN FOR THE HILLS. I’ve put together a visualization of what a heuristic evaluation might look like:

In this example, two heuristics are higher than 3, “Recognition Rather Than Recall” and “Help and Documentation.” It’s as good a starting point as any. The next step would be to confirm these usability issues and dive deeper into what might be wrong. This could be the time to run some tests with real users, for instance. Or if its a particularly touchy subject, perhaps you ask around to see if these issues have come up before, and what the proposed solution is. Perhaps you have someone in your organization that has a job title that looks similar to one of Dan Saffer’s UX disciplines, like an Information Architect or Industrial Designer. Show them; they shouldn’t give you a puzzling look.

UX doesn’t have to be an oracle. You can start improving the usability of your product or service right now, even if you don’t have a dedicated UX department. If you get stuck, ask around the organization, try a google search, reach out to peers in your industry. When you get to a point that seems overwhelming, contact a UX agency, like Boston Human Factors. The UX designers can suggest strategies and projects that will further your own, and you’ll have a useful head start for them progress on.

For more introduction to user experience, check out Jakob Nielsen’s “Usability 101.”