User Experience – Main Concepts

First of all, what is UX??

To begin, I think it is interesting to establish the difference between UX and UI. These terms are often used as if they meant the same thing. So I brought Donald Norman’s definition of User Experience, he says that it includes all aspects of the person's experience with the system including industrial design graphics, the interface, the physical interaction, and the manual. It is about the whole experience, not just one part of the sales funnel.?

The acronym UI refers to User Interface or the creation of intuitive interfaces that lead the user to complete their objective without having to think too much. The UI is just a part of the UX umbrella.??

The UX umbrella

Here we can see the three areas of UX: Information Architecture, Interaction Design and Usability, with their respective job descriptions. This scope is valid for any digital project, but the form that the teams are going to organize will depend on the manager's will, the size of the UX team, the company, etc.?

There are UX design teams without specialist management, where is common to see the same professional working in different squads. Or teams with specialist management, where it is common to see designers working in pairs in each squad. There will also be specific professionals for writing, others for research, and others for interface design, for example. If the team is large, there may be more levels of leadership and discipline-specific leadership.?

So, UX is a very broad area that encompasses several other disciplines.?

But what is its real value to companies??

What is really the impact of Design, in commercial terms, for a company??

There is a McKinsey study from 2018, that talks about the business value of design. They have an index, the McKinsey Design Index, which ranks companies according to how strong and mature they are in the area of design.? So this study compares companies that have the strategic pillar of design in decision-making with companies that don't have it. What it showed was that, over 5 years, companies that have this high index had a revenue growth of 32 percentage points and ROI of 56 percentage points. These are very significant numbers.?

Three areas were analyzed in this research: medical technology, consumer goods and retail. This suggests that a good design is important whether you are a company that works with physical goods, digital products, services or a combination thereof.?

Important concepts?

Now that we have explored what is User Experience, let’s talk about some concepts that guide this area. Starting with Mental Models, which must be the most important to understand others. ?

Kenneth Craik developed this concept and he says that our mind builds models of reality. It is the lens through which each individual understands the world, based on their past experiences. The mental model does not distort reality, but it influences the way we read phenomena, especially when there is a high level of abstraction involved. That's why digital environments are so influenced by mental models because everything there is a simulation, not the real world.?

The developer, the designer, the QA, and the business analyst have their mental models and can eventually develop a product centered on what they understand as necessary, not on what the primary user needs.?

That's why it's very important to know how to separate and classify users so that we can have an observation point that is outside our contaminated mental model.?

So who are the users??We can divide users into three classifications: primary, secondary, and tertiary users.??

Primary users are our target audience, the people we should focus our attention on. The primary user is in a different perspective from us (product developers), they have a particular interest and are not concerned with our business goals, company organization, and how the software works, they just want to solve their problem. This generates a divergence between our objectives and the objective of our clients.?

The secondary users are us, the developers of the product. And tertiaries are an unplanned audience.?

As I said before, primary users, who should be our focus, will have usage scenarios that are completely different from ours, without prior knowledge of what we are offering. That's why it's very important that we don't assume that they will behave the same as us when interacting with an interface that we designed.?

Different perspectives?

Finally, I brought these images as a joke to clarify two things. The first is that there is no point in designing something based on what we believe is ideal for our end user, we need to validate this with him first, through research.

The second thing is that we design an interface expecting the user to use it in a certain way, but how he will actually use it, we have no control over that. Something that is obvious to us may not be obvious to our primary user.

A mistake that must be avoided at all costs is thinking that if the user is unable to perform a certain task, it is certainly his fault. No. Users have very valid questions that should be taken into consideration. We know how the interface we designed should work, but the user doesn't. We have knowledge about our product that our primary user does not. So if he shows us that he is not managing to reach his goal (this can come through recurring support calls for the same issue, for example), our role is to improve the path to help him?achieve it.?