Wednesday, July 02, 2008

Importance of "User Xperience"

Let me share a little secret with you :-p whenever I blog, I try to think from the 'readers point of view' and then extend my thoughts , i.e, make a connection between the readers' thoughts and my thoughts :$ . Here, thinking from the 'readers point of view' is very important as readers should have a good eXperience while reading my blog. I am talking about 'User eXperience'. Whether you are a software developer,carpenter or a CEO, How can you make the end user experience your product/service in a smooth and sexy :D way? Is there any myth involved in getting a better User Xperience? :o Is User Xperience the User Interface? hmmm let me think.

Yesterday I received an e-mail from my friend Sreedhar Ambati (from Proteans) , it was about 'User Xperience', Vic (from infragistics) who took a session in Bdotnet on User Xperience shares his views and showcases the basic guidelines for a better 'UX'. He talks about the basic entity of a USER, answers some curious questions about UX... here is my friends e-mail

"Kalpesh(aka Vic)started his session with a slide which had a question like "Is UX=UI? Or is it just another buzzword.." He answered all the questions and also shared the importance of it. User Experience is about everything like adaptability,extensibility,scalability,reliability,performance. He explained the different roles played by different persons in the industry like Information Architect,Interaction Designer,Usability Engineer,Visual Designer,software architect and how these people fit in User/Human-Centered design. If the developer has taken some care about the UX while coding , it will show great impact on the user acceptance and it differentiates in the market place which helps organizations in deciding where to invest and how much to invest... That graph shows user-adoption vs purpose.
Choose agile for a UX-friendly process like Test Driven Development,Behavior Driven Development,Domain Driven Design Testing UX can be done using heavyweight ,lightweight ,tunnel vision. He discussed about UX patterns. Can find at infragistics.com/ux. Re factoring also plays a vital role in UX. Internet gives you so many technologies but not UX expertise and design or Human - Centered Thinking. So you have to incorporate those qualities. For better UX change your approach, Design from OUTSIDEIN"

As I was going through the presentation, there was this slide
"Guiding Principles - Design from OutsideIn" which caught my curiosity and made me ponder..
It said....

"Design from the Outside In
Don’t Think About What You/the App Need; Think About What the User Knows and What the User Needs
Don’t Assume: Preempt Questions/Avoid Confusion by Guiding Users
Make Software Smarter, More Context Aware
Consistency. Consistency. Consistency."

Here are the slides :




Some references:
www.welie.com
www.lukew.com/ff
www.uxmatters.com

Thanks a lot to Sreedhar and Vic for sharing this wonderful session on 'UX'.
I Hope you(readers) also enjoyed it :-)
Vic can be reached at vic@infragistics.com

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

It must be a great session.. UX is something all developers should keep in mind when designing any applications.. Nice slide too!

Lakshman Srikanth D said...

@krishna - thanks a lot man :-) I hope to see great apps from your side :-)

rakshitha.s said...

tat was an intrstin one..! m sure u kept tat in mind too.. its pretty informative n tat was a great job..! :)

Unknown said...

Its wonderful post yaar.Really I liked the way you explained with photos.

Lakshman Srikanth D said...

@sreedhar - Thanks :-) thanks also goes to 'danscartoons' :-)