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
Engagement as the Fourth Wall
The fourth wall is a term from theater that is often used in filmmaking. The action on the stage is bounded by three walls, one in the back and two at the sides, but there is no fourth wall between the action and the audience. The audience members watching an engaging play infer and build that fourth wall in their minds, ignoring its absence. Just as the gamer loses awareness of the space between the screen and himself, and of the screen itself, the audience members become so engrossed in the action that the theater around them fades away. If an actor flubs a line, or a baby starts crying in the back of the theater, that fourth wall is “broken,” detracting from the experiential quality of the play. Rather than being engrossed in the plot and action, the audience members are suddenly reminded that they’re in a theater and have been sitting in their chairs for an uncomfortably long time.
Most filmmakers pay a tremendous amount of attention to the fourth wall. They attempt to keep the audience in a constant state of high engagement through the art of good filmmaking. The art of filmmaking helps them build and maintain engagement, and ensures that they avoid the simple little problems that break the fourth wall and remind the audience they’re in a theater watching a film—like when the boom mic briefly appears at the top of the frame, or when actors or extras look straight at the camera, or when the special effects are noticeably fake or overdone. The filmmaker wants to keep the audience immersed in what’s going on in the movie, and not on anything else outside it.
Engagement as Frictionless Accomplishment of Goals
We’re beginning to arrive at the heart of what engagement is: an undistracted, unencumbered focus on the ultimate goal of the activity a person’s engaged in. In movies, as in video games, that goal is to be engrossed and entertained, to be carried away by a story and an experience. The point of software isn’t necessarily to engross your users in the experience of using the software, it is to keep them focused on the ultimate goals they’re trying to accomplish in using the software, rather than on the actual use of the software itself. Software is, after all, just a tool people use to accomplish certain goals. To be truly and unobtrusively useful, software must clear the straightest, most frictionless path to the accomplishment of the user’s goals.
One of the most common instances of frictionless user experience that people encounter comes while driving a familiar route, such as from work to home at the end of each weekday. Almost everyone has had the experience of arriving in their garage or driveway with no memory whatsoever of the drive. In this case, rather than the product being software, it’s the car, and instead of a keyboard and a mouse, the user is operating pedals and a steering wheel. The high degree of familiarity people have with the operation of the car allows for such a frictionless experience that their awareness of all the little tasks involved in driving slips away. On leaving work, the driver decides on the goal of returning home; the more familiar the route and the more skilled the driver, the less attention is required to accomplish the goal.
It’s easy to imagine ways in which friction could be increased and attention drawn to the tasks involved in driving. Swapping the positions of the accelerator and brake pedals, for example, would shatter the driver’s acquired easy familiarity with driving and would force her to pay very careful attention to working the pedals for the entire drive home. By changing the goal from going home to going to a restaurant in an unfamiliar part of town, the driver must focus her attention on navigation. And if something important in the car is malfunctioning—say, one of the tires is running flat—the driver will need to focus on controlling the steering wheel. Each of these will make for a more memorable experience of driving because the driver’s attention will be on managing the little tasks involved in driving.
Engagement in Software
The goal of UX design in building engagement in software is to help people be more focused on and effective at the accomplishment of their goals. This involves expert combination of the science, technique, craft, and art of UX design to create user experiences that effectively engage their target users. It also involves avoiding or smoothing over things that tend to create friction and diminish or break engagement. Breaking engagement, like breaking the fourth wall, is crossing the line where the user must focus on operating the software instead of achieving her goals. Broken engagement both causes and indicates difficulty for the user, which in turn causes displeasure. Strong engagement, on the other hand, both causes and indicates ease for the user, which in turn brings about pleasure.
The aim of UX design, with its principal goal of creating and maintaining engagement, is therefore to bring software past the point of frustration, difficulty, and displeasure, to first create engagement and then to deepen it according to the needs of the user and the aims of the product. UX design tries to reduce the friction that diminishes from engagement and that interferes with a user’s ability to focus on accomplishing his goals. UX design works to apply a certain artistry that helps elevate simple engagement to higher levels of ease and pleasure, which are what make exceptional software.
Why Engagement and Good UX Matter
If you understand that positive engagement leads to greater pleasure and effectiveness for the user, and negative engagement leads to difficulty, displeasure, and wasted time, it’s easy to imagine why engagement and good UX are important in customer-facing products and internal information systems. To ask whether good UX should be a priority for an organization is essentially to ask whether assisting and pleasing customers and helping employees to be happy and effective are important goals in business. If a software product has been well conceived such that helping users accomplish their goals is directly connected to an important business goal, then reducing the friction experienced in achieving the users’ goals should be the same as reducing resistance against the accomplishment of business goals.
With the growth of the customer experience (CX) trend, there’s been an increased recognition in business that every aspect of a company’s interaction with its customers (“touch points”) is an effective, rewarding experience. There’s also an increased understanding of the importance of experience quality over just service delivery. Simply having a well-stocked, conveniently located grocery store is not enough; the store must be visually appealing and clean, the checkout process must be quick and easy, and the store must have ample and accessible parking. The corollary to this in software is that it isn’t sufficient to simply provide the user with a complete range of features; a good experience in using those features to accomplish one’s goals is also required. The grocer doesn’t want to waste his customers’ time by not having enough checkout stands, or to trouble and confuse them by not organizing and labeling the shelves properly, or to deter potential customers by being hard to access or appearing unprofessional and untrustworthy. Likewise, companies with customer-facing products should avoid wasting their customers’ time, confusing them or insulting their intelligence, or pushing them away. The linkage between acquiring and satisfying customers and business success is uncontroversial, but the direct relationship between UX quality and those goals is under appreciated.
The value of good UX and engagement extends to internal information systems and isn’t limited to customer-facing applications. The goals change, but the means of accomplishing them remain the same. In the case of internal applications, exceptional UX has the ability to increase productivity, improve the timeliness and relevance of business data flowing to decision makers, increases adoption of the product and therefore the reach of its benefits, improves employee satisfaction, and generally reduces cost and increases opportunity.
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/
Copyright 2010 O'Reilly Media, Inc. All rights reserved. Except used with permission.
