Book Excerpt: Effective UI Part One

February 19, 2010 · by O'Reilly Media

Cover Image Released in January of this year from O'Reilly Media, Effective UI, The Art of Building Great User Experience in Software guides readers through the process of developing engaging and high quality user experiences. The book not only addresses some of the code and design pattern challenges, but also delves into project management and organizational challenges.

Recently, Ecommerce Developer's site director interviewed John McRee, one of the book's three authors, along with Jonathan Anderson and Robb Wilson. After that interview, O'Reilly Media granted us permission to publish an excerpt from this new book and give-a-way two copies. What follows is from chapter one.

The Book Excerpt

Understanding User Experience (UX)

Good and bad UX is typically easy to identify but difficult to define in generalities since the medium of UX is individual, subjective human experience. But in order to understand whether your company’s products or internal systems have successful UX design and to convince skeptical executives of the value of UX, it helps to have a clear explanation of UX design and what makes its contribution valuable.

Diagram showing that UX is at the intersection of art, science, and craftmanship User experience is, as the name suggests, the experience a user has when interacting with software. Just as is the case with music, a software product’s UX falls somewhere along a range between subjectively good and subjectively bad. This is obvious enough, but in that simple analogy are a number of truths that are often misunderstood or overlooked in software development. The process of creating good music involves a combination of the underlying mathematical principles of music that govern how we interpret sound, the technical skill required to write and play the music, and the artistic sense required to know how to make it all come together pleasingly in the subjective consciousness of the intended audience. Take away any of those elements, and you make it impossible to bring new music into being. Also, the quality of music is not an objective one, but is specific to the subjective experience of the individual listener. A group of people might love techno and hate country, but that doesn’t mean that techno is objectively good and country is objectively bad; it just means that if you’re making music for that group, you need to bear their subjective needs in mind.

All of that is also the case in software UX. There’s no such thing as objectively bad or good UX, only subjectively bad or good experiences specific to the user. The process of creating great UX involves some combination of quasi-scientific disciplines such as human factors engineering, usability, and information architecture; the technical skills to produce not only great UX and user interface design but also the working software itself; and the artistic sense required to intuit and design for how the different subjective perspectives of different users will experience any given aspect of the software. Briefly, building great UX requires the combination of science, skilled craftsmanship, and art to address a subjective need.

In the way your company has approached the development or improvement of its software products, has it demonstrated an understanding of these concepts? Evidence of failure is easy to perceive in hindsight. If you’ve neglected the scientific aspects of building software, you’ve built products that are confusing, hard to use, cumbersome, poorly organized, and frustrating. Undervaluing the technical need on the engineering side usually means you’ve produced gorgeous UI designs but a disappointing, hacked, utterly compromised final product that performs poorly. The technical need on the UX design side—and yes, design for software is highly technical and not just subjective artistry—is also often overlooked or misunderstood. This leads to product UIs designed in ways that are graphically interesting but that cause undue difficulty in how the software will actually work and be developed. And finally, if you haven’t recognized the subjective nature of UX, it’s likely that, despite all the best of intentions and efforts, you’ve built products that users hate or reject. It also means you’ve worked with team members who narrowly focused on their own disciplines and deliverables without being constructively mindful of how their work assembles into a larger whole.

This entire book is dedicated to ways you can avoid those bad outcomes, but it’s important at the outset to point out explicitly that delivering on the promise of great UX requires that you and your company’s view of and approach to software development is sensible and correct. Just having some talented team members won’t lead to success if your general approach to the endeavor is wrongheaded. And it’s not enough to have just one person on the team who understands how things need to be done; this is knowledge that needs to be shared and needs to become part of a broader organizational competency. And so you’ll find that most of the insight you’ll gain in this book isn’t specific to innovation, design, technique, or artistry; it’s about how you can clear the way for innovation, design, technique, and artistry to come together successfully.

What Good UX Accomplishes

Having a strong UX in your software product is a good goal to have, but high-quality UX isn’t in and of itself the real goal. It’s the means to another, more important end that, though it’s easy to appreciate firsthand, is incredibly hard to describe. Good UX enhances user engagement, and UX design is the art of creating and maintaining user engagement in software. Whereas UX is an abstract concept and UX design is a professional discipline, user engagement is the all-important subjective experience.

This naturally begs the question, what is engagement? This is best explained through analogies.

Engagement as Immersion

The easiest, most intuitively obvious example of engagement in software is the experience of playing a great video game. Video games—particularly those of the first-person variety—aim to create a high degree of immersion for players. Deep immersion occurs when the player becomes less and less aware of his surroundings, and his perception of the space separating him and the screen starts to fade. His experience of the game becomes one of being the character rather than just being a guy in a chair manipulating the controller. If you’ve ever seen someone leaning his body to one side to try to steer a car in a game or dodge an incoming missile, you’ve seen someone who’s heavily immersed in the game. Robbie Cooper produced a wonderful video for the New York Times Magazine showing just how immersed kids get in the game play experience: http://video.nytimes.com/video/2008/11/21/magazine/1194833565213/immersion.html.

Creating that deep immersion is an art form, and many things must be controlled lest they diminish or entirely break the immersive experience. A player can be snapped out of immersion and the game play experience can be destroyed by simple problems like controllers that are difficult to operate, jarring inconsistencies in the game’s physics or rules, badly delivered lines by voiceover actors, or any jumping and skipping in the video or audio.

The example of immersion in gaming may seem quite remote from what you’re trying to accomplish. If you’re building a new Customer Relationship Management (CRM) tool for internal use at your company, for example, your goal in focusing on the UX of the product isn’t to make your sales team so enthralled by the experience of managing their customer interactions that they forget where they are, mentally merge with the application, and stay up until 4 a.m. trying to reach the next level of enterprise marketing automation efficiency. Well, maybe that wouldn’t be so bad. But certainly most software products are meant to be useful—not entertaining.

Deep immersion is, however, just an extreme example of user engagement. In the case of games, the goal is to bring the player’s focus away from manipulating the controls or comprehending the game dynamics, and even away from being aware of playing a game, and to put it squarely and deeply on goals internal to the game: winning the race, killing the aliens, solving the puzzle, and so on.

For more information about Effective UI, visit O'Reilly's website.

Effective UI By Jonathan Anderson, John McRee, Robb Wilson,The EffectiveUI Team. 978-0-596-15478-3 http://oreilly.com/catalog/9780596154790/

This article is filed under Design Techniques & Showcases and has the following keyword tags: user interface, user experience, ui, ux, effective ui, John McRee.