“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. 

Letting Go of the Words

Janice Redish’s article, Letting Go of the Words; Writing Web Content that Works, is about exactly what the title suggests; writing web content that works and can be interpreted by your audience. This is MOST important when writing web content, thinking about the kind of people who you want to reach out too. If you have a specific group of people who are intended for, you must learn to understand your audience in order for the content to appeal to them.

Redish provides a list of seven small things to do in order to know and understand the audience or audiences that you are hoping to reach.

1. List your major audiences

2. Gather information about your audiences

3. List major characteristics about your audiences

4. Gather your audiences’ questions, tasks and stories

5. Use your information to create personas

6. Include your persona’s goals and tasks

7. Use your information to write scenarios for your site

After reading into each one of these suggested steps to knowing and understanding the audience, it seemed like something similar to an interview or a detailed research on your audience. The only way to reach out to them successfully when starting to write the content, is to do this research and gather as much information as possible. Once content has been started and there is a site that people (hopefully people from the audience that you are trying to reach), you will be able to gather even more information about what your particular readers will want based on their traffic on your site.

I found this diagram that I felt was another way to show how to go about finding information about the audience that you want to reach. After having done the research, the information gathered is what helps you create key phrases, emotions and other ways to really relate to the audience when they visit your site.

After reading the article, I found that the key phrases is probably what I think is one of the most important things to know and display when developing web content. Key phrases are in my opinion the most important because they are what the people relate to the fastest and they find that that”s what continuously brings them back to a site.

 

This video describes the main points of this article very well, and it’s pretty short! It just emphasizes the importance of selecting an audience or two in order to have the most successful experience possible.