January 27, 2005
The Power of Experience Design
I went to my first Experience Design meeting for the AIGA Colorado chapter last night so I could watch Peter Merholz give a great presentation on "The Power of Experience Design". I didn't take extensive notes because I'd heard parts of the presentation in other writings of his and others at Adaptive Path, but I did find the following of interest:
- User Experience is the Venn diagram of: Viability, Feasibility, and Desirability. His example of nirvana here is the iPod.
- Quick anecdote that User Experience is not a rule set, like Jakob Nielsen's usability rules, but rather a philosophy, a discipline to inject into your existing processes.
- His example was Quixtar, a very successful ecommerce site that breaks all of the Nielsen's rules, but has a different interaction model that includes the salesman at the point of contact
- "We don't even know what else they are doing!". User experience hinges on understanding the context of use and environmental variables (baby's screaming while buying tickets to go see the parents in Arizona).
- Top down: observe users, develop mental models, derive site's main areas of content
- Bottom up: inventory what you have, develop a content model, librarianship, users participate
- What unifies UX (all disciplines) is that we all play with stickys (Post-Its).
- Group IA is an exercise and should be inclusive of users and stakeholders where applicable. UX or IA role is more as facilitator leading to answers
- A couple of great diagrams of a Mental Model/Content Map, and ROI diagram for design process
- Example sites:
- Best Cellars - a great classification scheme that evokes experience as opposed to wine.com
- Kohler - is a good example of faceted search
- Gary Fisher Matchmaker - Go through the survey and you'll find some humor at the end (be sure only 2 bikes are compared so a mysterious 3rd option is available)
That was most of the points I took away. It was also really nice to just have a conversation based in UX in Denver. I can't express enough how glad I am that Denver appears to have become some level of destination for UX professionals to share their ideas, in no small part due to the work of the AIGA folks here in Colorado. In fact, I'm talking to my boss soon about getting memberships for me and my team so we can attend more events in the future!
- Posted in:
- Design Tools, Web Design, Web Education, Working on the Inside
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