Blog

Designing User experience

It’s always nice to read about usability & user experience. And it’s difficult to say that who preaches these will practice these. We all know that the market is matured and looking to get the best out of the experts. Who would not like a quality ride? A value for money.

For me user experience is like me traveling to a destination.

My ride can be good, bad or ugly. That’s my experience if a great amount of thought process is not put in your approach, then whole exercise is going to be ugly. It’s a team effort. And everybody should take the challenge. It’s going to be tough, but if you can convince others, the out come will be rewarding.

Being in the industry for more than a decade, I know how difficult it is. As I said earlier that market is matured and now people are thinking seriously about user experience. But I still feel that there are only a few players who know how to execute it.

In the industry there are more look around people, then the leaders. People practice what they read, not analyzing or put their thought in what they come across, and there are people who stand tough on their decisions. End of the day the product or may be we can say the user is going to suffer. Who cares? If this is the attitude! one can expect only a slow rate of quality product in the market.

What is best practice? If you think it’s already been discovered then I believe that you are not enjoying your profession and not doing justice to your organization you are in. You need to seriously think about it. We need to drive this vehicle first so that a user who drives it later can ‘feel the comfort’. It’s not just the comfort. They should ‘FEEL THE COMFORT’ that’s important.

Setting new standards are always challenging because industry follows the standards. A few have the courage to set standards like the apple. I always feel good about it and refer to it whenever I find the hurdle that stops my creative input.

I still don’t understand why people ask the designers to design for dumb users. Is it because somebody said so, that the users are dumb. After so many years of technology touching people, why can’t we design for everyone, for the dumb & the experts? If a user is frequently using your product, is he/ she going to be dumb forever? NO! they would explore your product and become an expert tomorrow. So as a usability practitioner we should design our product for both phases, so that our product would never be outdated.

A change is what I think the market would appreciate. A change is now or never should be the approach for a breakthrough development. Practice what we learn and experience can add value to whatever profession we are in.

I would say accessibility and task based approach should be given first priority. An ease of use and an alternative path for all the approach would be appreciated by the users.

Suppose you are traveling to a destination and suddenly your vehicle breaks down. You would need a backup plan to reach your destination. If you don’t have an alternate option it would be impossible. for example: You are filling an online transaction form and suddenly you realize that mouse is not working properly, what would be your next move? To get an alternative way that you can successfully complete your form. It could be a keyboard support or you can extend further to voice censored navigation or a touch screen support etc... (no limits) If the product doesn’t have an alternate option user would need to stop then and there. This would be disgusting.

Me as a practitioner would always advice my readers to ‘Design for You’, own the product. You as a user should get the experience and satisfaction before anybody else can.