UX for Beginners

Chapter 13. What Is An Experience?

There are probably many, endless conversations we could have about a philosophical “experience,” but I am not qualified to teach you philosophy, so I won’t. In UX, we need practical answers.

There are six big parts of an experience discussed throughout this book:

1. What the user feels

   In UX forums, this is what inexperienced designers talk about most. Making the user “happy.” Asking them what they “like.” Making users say “wow!” Users have feelings, and they are useful, but they are only a small fraction of an experience. The good things about feelings are that we can see them on a user’s face, users can tell us about them, we can measure them, and we can relate to them, so feelings are easy to study.

2. What the user wants

   Much more important, but not as easy for the user to describe. A user’s motivations are the engine of their behavior. Everything they do, click, choose, buy, and even what they see and hear depends on what they want. “When you’re a hammer, everything looks like a nail.” And if you change the way they see the situation, sometimes they will want something different.

3. What the user thinks

   It is helpful to imagine “thinking” as something the user carries, like bricks. Psychologists might call it cognitive load. Every time you make a user figure something out, or read more than a sentence of instructions, or learn a new feature, or hunt for the right link, or do two things at once, you’re giving them another brick to carry. Most people can only ...