“The Elements of User Experience”

Jesse James Garett, writer of the book”The Elements of User Experience”, is one of the founders of Adaptive Path which is a user experience consultancy located in San Francisco. For more information on information architecture resources, you can visit his personal website at www.jjg.net.

For today’s reading, I had to read chapters one and two in his book “The Elements of User Experience”. The first chapter, User Experience and Why It Matter, is all about the importance of user experience in the making of products and why it should NOT be overlooked in production. Garett defines user experience as “the experience the product creates for the people who use it in the real world.”

Before leading into user experience and the web, he talks about the importance of not how the product works and if it works, but how the product actually works from the outside. Like he suggests with the buttons, it makes me wonder how many products that I have had or have that work, but not consistently because of the design.

It’s not the cat’s fault, but the product’s poor design.

User experience on the web, is just as important if not more important that the experience with a product. If someone has good user experience on your site, than that means good business. The content of your site, regardless if you sell anything, is going to get more people to come back to view your site. THIS IS GOOD BUSINESS.

Once you understand the concept of good vs. bad user experience, then you can begin to build a better experience for your users. Chapter 2, Meet the Elements, talking about the decisions that are made in order to make a good user experience. They are as follows:

1. The Surface Plane

2. The Skeleton Plane

3. The Structure Plane

4. The Scope Plane

5. The Strategy Plane

Each of these planes help the website to become the most useful for a user to have that good experience that Garett is talking about and play into all aspects of the design of a good website for users.