Chapter 8: The Foundations of User Experience
Customizing an interface for your visitors’ benefit
Your sites fall short of your goal if people don’t visit and enjoy them. Even though the web in which you design is rich and immersive, your users can remain in a position in which they rarely get a fair deal. Visitors want and expect more from designs, and designers expect and demand more from users.
In this chapter, I examine the fundamental principles of the user-experience field, which lead into all sorts of directions in this book and the e-book. You explore the importance of customization and personalization, as well as subjectivity and objectivity. Then I cover some information on value-based design, along with attention grabbing and feature layering.
Customizing Creativity
Designers have put a lot of energy into creating artistic sites that people can browse dynamically. In this book, I put a great deal of emphasis on giving users an experience. The simplest way to convey user experience is by the sights, sounds, feelings, sensations, and responsive elements within an interface. The experience is the memory and reaction to those elements.
Although it can be argued that a web experience is less tactile than a real-world experience, people emote and connect to what is being served in front of them, in a sensory way. Website customization and personalization becomes paramount.
A designer must build an interface for a mass audience, but provide each user with a personal experience. ...
