Defining user experience is a hard task. It’s still an evolving concept and field. Generally, when one speaks of user experience, one is talking about web sites. But user experience is inherent in all products. When you’re trying to choose between two digital cameras, the one that is easier to use, perhaps due to less buttons or clearer labels, is the better user experience. Someone using a stove, phone, MP3 player – any kind of product you can think of, really, has a user experience associated with it. So what is that experience?

“User experience can extend to nearly everything in someone’s interaction with a product, from the text on a search button, to the color scheme, to the associations it evokes, to the tone of the language used to describe it, to the customer support,” states Ann Light from Usability News.

Providing a positive user experience, whether on the Web or in a store, can help a company make money even if the customer doesn’t buy the item in question. Good experiences promote customer loyalty, so the customer will return to the brand again when another product is needed. Look at Apple: people loved the Mac, due to its style, platform and ease of use. When Apple introduced laptops, people snatched them up because they knew the brand meant a positive user experience. You even see people driving around with bumper stickers promoting Apple. That’s loyalty right there.

Good user experience design can make a company money by gathering loyal customers and by keeping customers that want a product that they don’t have to read a 500-page manual to figure out. 

3 Categories of Defining a User Experience
Ms. Light from Usability News offers three general categories in terms of creating a user experience. She says thinking about user experience as a whole can be “vertigo-inducing” and I agree. The three categories are:

Information architecture: This is the most basic, abstract level on which people create an experience. The user experience is based on how information is arranged.

Interaction design: This defines the buttons, knobs, displays and other things that make up what’s usually referred to as the “user interface.” Anything that the user comes in contact with and “sees, hears, reads and manipulates.”

Identity design: This is the “style, feeling and vibe” of a product or Web site. This is what makes the product or site different from others. It’s the unique factor.

These three categories meld together to define the whole of user experience design. User experience designers must create a plan, or architecture, that will be the building blocks of the design. Then, add the bells and whistles of interaction that are different from competitors to give the product its own identity. All of this constitutes user experience.

For a more in-depth look at these categories of user experience, check out Ms. Light’s review of Mike Kuniavsky’s book “Observing the User Experience” at http://www.usabilitynews.com/news/article1093.asp.