We'll first of all look at why it is that user experience has become so important now. Now, anybody who's been around the usability or the human-computer interaction area will be aware that user experience has become perhaps the major buzzword when employing anybody. So, in the past you might have got a job in interaction design or as a usability engineer.
Now, what you'll see more than anything is that people ask for *user experience specialist*. Now, very often what they mean by that is exactly the same. They want you to include the same thing. So, in the past, if you were designing interactions, you'd think about user experience.
If you were asked to design user experience, you'd think about usability. But the fact that the *name* has become dominant tells you something about a change in emphasis. And so, whereas it perhaps used to be a *minor* aspect of the role of designing interfaces and designing interactions, now it's become perhaps one of the major roles.
Experience clearly matters, whether it's iPhones or Facebook. It's now *why* people often go to a computer system. They want it to make them feel things.
They want it to be part of excitement or interest or basically emotion in general. You might be talking to a loved one over a video channel or you might be playing a game in Facebook. These are clearly very, very critical. If you think about the phone as an example, if you went back – I was trying to think – 20 years, now even this – and I've got my house phone here, which is a pretty big phone – that would have been little.
The first mobile phones were like bricks. It was almost like holding a book to your ear. Now, it's the iPhone. The first mobile phones were about communication, wanting to be connected with people. And, actually, if you see satellite phones today, they're still pretty much like that – chunky things.
Whereas the iPhone is very much about being an iPhone user, about the sleekness of it, about the design of it. Interestingly enough, even those early phones – there was a strong set of emotional values attached to them. People would have *fake* phones because they couldn't afford a real phone. This is fake *mobile phones*.
So, you have a fake mobile phone. So, you could sort of pull it out on the train and have it sitting there, and people would think, "Oh my goodness! There's an important person, having a mobile phone." So, actually, even those early phones – the actual phone (the real phone) was about utility.
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| Why is UX Design so Important? |
However, those fake phones were about the fact that a phone says something about who you are. And – boy – is that true of phones nowadays! Emotion is part of being human. It's not just part of our technological experience of being human; it's part of being human. Without emotion, in many ways we don't exist fully. And that's sort of evident when things go wrong and people have accidents or illnesses which damage their emotional being.
However, this isn't a new thing. You know, emotion has *always* been important. This isn't something that's happened in the last five to ten years. In fact, within the user interface community, one of the early standards that mentioned usability was ISO 9241. And it talked about three crucial issues for user interfaces.
One of them was *effectiveness*.Does it do the right thing? Does it get things done that are important? The second was *efficiency*. Does it do that with the minimum effort – the minimum mental effort, the minimum physical effort? Or is it taking extraneous effort that's unnecessary? And, very often, people only quote those two because there was a third one, as well, which was *satisfaction*.
Does it make you feel good? Do you feel happy having used this system or used this piece of software? And that last one is often missed entirely. And it's all about the emotion – the way you feel. And so, it was often ignored, often missed in the past.
What's now happened is that's become perhaps in some ways more important than the other two. Emotion is important because it's good to feel emotion.
But also, emotion affects the bottom line in business. If your employees are happy, they tend to be more productive.
So, if you're designing a production line or an office or wherever the environment, if you can have software and systems that make people feel good, they'll tend to work better. And certainly you want your *customers* to feel happy because they are the people who are usually going to buy your goods.
So, if you've not made your customers happy, they don't buy anything. So, emotion is important to us as humans, but it's also important from a business point of view...
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