User experience design is a subset of the field of experience design which pertains to the creation of the architecture and interaction models which impact a user's perception of a device or system. The scope of the field is directed at affecting 'all aspects of the user’s interaction with the product: how it is perceived, learned, and used.'
#30025
The Composite Intelligence of Virtual Assistants
Five levels of software intelligence can, in my opinion, make the dream of virtual assistants a reality. Collectively, they make up the concept of composite intelligence, which comprises various software components--each gifted with some moderate degree of intelligence.
Ostinelli, Roberto. UXmatters (2007). Articles>User Interface>User Experience>EPSS
#28664
Connecting Cultures, Changing Organizations: The User Experience Practitioner As Change Agent
Every time we reach across discipline boundaries to keep a product team focused on users, drive changes to products or services based on user data we've collected, or design interactions with a clear focus on the target user, we are functioning as agents of change within our organizations.
Sherman, Paul J. UXmatters (2007). Articles>User Experience>Collaboration
#31877
Constructing a User Experience: The Cost-Benefits Compass
A common frustration among UX professionals who are employed in the software development industry is the perception that executive-level management gives lip service to user experience rather than supporting specific UX activities by allocating sufficient resources for them.
Werner, Ben. UXmatters (2008). Articles>User Experience>Methods
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Crafting a User Experience Curriculum
It isn’t often that one has the opportunity to create a course about user experience, let alone an entire sequence of user experience courses. Jason Withrow's opportunity forced him to examine his perceptions of the user experience industry.
Withrow, Jason. Boxes and Arrows (2005). Articles>Education>User Experience>User Centered Design
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Creating a Digital World: Data As Design Material
The common wisdom is that we now live in the age of information; the freedom and access we have to data is unprecedented in history; and the efficiency and convenience of online commerce, research, and communication has already transformed our lives for the better. While this is true, of course, our excitement should be tempered by a few realizations.
Follett, Jonathan. UXmatters (2008). Articles>Information Design>User Interface>User Experience
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Creating a User Experience Specification 
Creating any system of sufficient complexity requires a diverse team and a dizzying amount of documentation. While these documents do a great job of conveying components of the system, they do not provide an integrated view. This is because each covers different aspects of the system, written by a different author for a different audience. This paper proposes that project teams should create a user experience specification, a document that shows what the system looks like, how it behaves, and how it works. This specification needs to describe the system for all team members, at a useful level of detail, in a form that encourages team members to read it and inviting enough to get them to participate in the design, as well as allow developers to build from.
Oye, Phil and John Payne. STC Proceedings (2004). Design>User Experience>Specifications
#19464
Creating the Out-of-the-Box Experience: A Case Study
While producing a new deliverable to improve the out-of-the-box experience for a major software product, the team of writers, graphic designers, human factors engineers, and marketers responsible for the deliverable faced many challenges and overcame many obstacles. Anyone involved in the production of such a deliverable will learn from a discussion of the problems we faced and the approaches we took to solving them. This discussion will be particularly relevant for anyone creating such a deliverable for the first time.
Hogan, Tim. STC Proceedings (2001). Articles>TC>User Experience>Collaboration
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Cross-Cultural User-Experience Design: What? So What? Now What...
Applying culture to user-experience design theory and practice.
Marcus, Aaron. University of California Berkeley (2005). Presentations>User Centered Design>User Experience>International
#29763
Customer Satisfaction Lessons Learned from Building Furniture with Wordless Documentation
Documentation and package design play a major role in customer satisfaction. The author tested three sets of wordless documentation by building pieces of furniture from three different manufacturers. While the construction methods, packaging, and wordless documentation methods were on the surface very similar, small differences had a significant impact on the usability of the instructions and the overall customer satisfaction with the documentation and the product. Decisions that were handled differently included visual verification of parts, whether or not extra hardware was provided and how it was provided, the appropriateness of the hardware, the quality of the hardware, the need for additional tools, and the care evidenced in packaging and labeling of parts. From these experiences, she makes recommendations for enhancing customer satisfaction that apply not just to wordless documentation, but to other consumer products.
Norris Bradford, Annette. STC Proceedings (2004). Articles>Documentation>Technical Illustration>User Experience
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A weblog about web, user interface and user experience design.
Deshpande, Amit. Blogspot. Resources>Web Design>User Experience>Blogs
#27022
Data: The Essence of a Digital Lifestyle
I've been thinking a lot about metadata recently, but not from the standpoint of XML or programming or helping to organize and index data. My interest is in the future of content ownership, delivery, and value. I see a future for media that looks very different from the media of today. The germ of this idea actually came from my experiences with online movie rentals.
Knemeyer, Dirk. UXmatters (2005). Articles>User Experience>XML>Metadata
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Deafness and the User Experience
Because of limited awareness around Deafness and accessibility in the web community, it seems plausible to many of us that good captioning will fix it all. It won’t. Before we can enhance the user experience for all deaf people, we must understand that the needs of deaf, hard of hearing, and big-D Deaf users are often very different.
Herrod, Lisa. List Apart, A (2008). Articles>User Experience>Accessibility>Audio
#27441
Emotion is one of the strongest differentiators in user experience namely because it triggers unconscious responses to a product, website, environment or interface. Our feelings strongly influence our perceptions and often frame how we think about or refer to our experiences at a later date.
Spillers, Frank. Demystifying Usability (2004). Articles>Usability>User Experience>Emotions
#31998
We create software and websites to display and represent information to people. That information could be anything; a company’s product list, pictures of your vacation, or an instant message from a friend. At this moment, there’s more information available to you than at any other time in history.
van Gorp, Trevor. Boxes and Arrows (2008). Design>Web Design>User Experience>Emotions
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Design for Emotion: Ready for the Next Decade?
The experience profile of a product can be described in terms of these experiential components. Once such an experience profile has been properly defined, it must be translated in all product properties the designer can affect. It has an effect on the sensorial aspects of the product, but also on the way it functions, it affects the way people operate the product and even the way the product is marketed. In sum, the profile has an impact on all aspects that together shape the human-product interaction.
Hekkert, Paul and Pieter Desmet. uiGarden (2007). Design>User Interface>User Centered Design>User Experience
#29556
After the eras of the Commodity Economy, the Manufacturing Economy, the Service Economy and the Information Economy, we have now entered the era of the Dream Economy. The key to success in the Dream Economy is an in-depth and holistic understanding of people. It's not only about meeting people's practical needs, but also about meeting their aspirations and providing a positive emotional experience.
Jordan, Pat. uiGarden (2007). Design>User Centered Design>User Experience
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Designers' Roles in Communicating with Users
Defining 'the user experience' is difficult since it can extend to nearly everything in someone's interaction with a product, from the text on a search button, to the color scheme, to the associations it evokes, to the tone of the language used to describe it, to the customer support. Understanding the relationship between these elements requires a different kind of research than merely timing how quickly a task is accomplished or testing to see how memorable the logo is.
Light, Ann. Usability News (2003). Design>User Centered Design>Communication>User Experience
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Designing Ethical Experiences: Social Media and the Conflicted Future
Questions of ethics and conflict can seem far removed from the daily work of user experience (UX) designers who are trying to develop insights into people's needs, understand their outlooks, and design with empathy for their concerns [2]. In fact, the converse is true: When conflicts between businesses and customers--or any groups of stakeholders--remain unresolved, UX practitioners frequently find themselves facing ethical dilemmas, searching for design compromises that satisfy competing camps. This dynamic is the essential pattern by which conflicts in goals and perspectives become ethical concerns for UX designers. Unchecked, it can lead to the creation of unethical experiences that are hostile to users--the very people most designers work hard to benefit--and damaging to the reputations and brand identities of the businesses responsible.
Lamantia, Joe. UXmatters (2008). Articles>User Experience>Community Building>Ethics
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Designing Ethical Experiences: Understanding Juicy Rationalizations
Designers rationalize their choices just as much as everyone else. But we also play a unique role in shaping the human world by creating the expressive and functional tools many people use in their daily lives. Our decisions about what is and is not ethical directly impact the lives of a tremendous number of people we will never know. Better understanding of the choices we make as designers can help us create more ethical user experiences for ourselves and for everyone.
Lamantia, Joe. UXmatters (2008). Articles>User Experience>Ethics
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Designing for Bridge Experiences
The practice of user experience lacks the historical pedigree of many of its constituent elements, including human/computer interaction, library science, social-science research methods, product-development methodology, and, most of all, design. What it does enjoy, however, is a pragmatic, multidisciplinary approach that encompasses the intertwined social, economic, and technological forces it engages. It's a contingent amalgamation--an assembly of what works--and a set of perspectives and problem-solving techniques that define how we, as practitioners, think about creating products and services.
Grossman, Joel. UXmatters (2006). Articles>User Experience
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Designing for Nonprofits: User Experience Professionals Can Make a Difference in Society
As information architects, interaction designers, usability consultants, and developers, we don't have to change our careers to do something good for society. All we have to do is connect with the right nonprofit: One that shares our goals and whose mission we support.
Sanchez-Howard, Olga. Boxes and Arrows (2007). Articles>Web Design>User Experience
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Many technology companies, consultants, and academics are hyping the future of Web services. But how will this background transfer of data between applications affect the user experience?
Lombardi, Victor. New Architect (2002). Design>Web Design>Content Management>User Experience
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Designing the Out-of-the-Box Experience: A Case Study
To improve your product’s out-of-the-box experience, you must first define the experience that you want your users to have. The next challenge is to design the specific elements that will achieve that experience. These elements must be designed harmoniously with each other and with the functional improvements planned for the product. By enhancing those improvements, the overall experience will draw the customer into the product. If designed appropriately, these elements can improve not only the out-of-the-box experience but also the marketability of the product.
Kowalski, Lee Anne. STC Proceedings (2001). Design>User Centered Design>User Experience
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Designing User Experiences for Applications Versus Information Resources on the Web
The relatively recent adoption of user-focused design practices by the Web design and development community--including personas, participatory design, paper prototyping, and the like--highlights important distinctions between the user experiences of desktop applications and those of information spaces. With the growing desire for usable Web applications, these distinctions become more topical and important to understand. Though the process of designing and creating application and information space user experiences for the Web is virtually the same--even if the deliverable design documents may differ--their user experiences are fundamentally and profoundly different. For designers, business analysts, marketing consultants, and others who are sincerely interested in delivering the best user experiences online, understanding these distinctions can reduce the cost of design and improve the likelihood of user acceptance.
Frishberg, Leo. UXmatters (2006). Design>User Experience>Programming>Participatory Design
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Document Engineering in User Experience Design
Document engineering is a methodology for specifying, designing, and deploying the information models and repositories that enable document-centric applications, and a synthesis of information and systems analysis, business process modeling, electronic publishing, and service-oriented architecture.
Glushko, Robert J. University of California Berkeley (2008). Articles>Document Design>User Experience
