19 Jun 2011 1702H

Where do user experience problems come from?

If we accept that user experience is a person’s conversation with numerous elements of a service or technology offering — they need not and indeed should not have to know anything about the technologies and business models that gird that face-level interaction — then it also quickly becomes apparent that user experience problems arise from various failings of the layers and components that support that surface.

Typically as UX professionals we’re often called upon to solve problems having to do with the cross-streets of user-facing strategy and implementation, either some absence of understanding, perhaps unsubstantiated assumptions made about that user’s real needs, and how they were concretized in the user interface, that itself is comprised of some usability problem due to structure, which translates further into poor assumptions made regarding the communication design or interaction design.

Garrett’s famous Elements of User Experience model (Strategy-Scope-Structure-Skeleton-Surface) can be simplified a bit further to reveal that user experience problems can be diagnosed and treated at one of three levels:

1) Surface level UX problems. While assumptions were substantially if not fundamentally correct about the user’s needs and that their requirements were adequately captured and realized in the UI, something failed between the translation from structure to the UI, either due to interactions between the graphic design, the information architecture, and the interaction design, performance issues having to do with the technical architecture or implementation, or failures of the interaction design on the whole. Usability tests and observations of user behaviors, whether contextual or quantitative, will reveal these problems. Interaction design and communications design changes are required here to correct these types of problems. Many UXers, Front-End Engineers, Graphic Designers, IxDs, Rich Media professionals are engaged in trying to implement at this level.

2) Structure level UX problems. Although the assumptions made about the user’s needs were substantially or fundamentally correct (or validated as such through prototyping), they were not translated or integrated into well-structured labels, organizing schemes, hierarchies, categories, mappings, functional blocks and modules of interactions. This is a failure to adequately capture understanding of the user’s mental model and translate this into the touchpoints where the user interacts with the service or the technology and will almost certainly affect everything downstream of it, but often this is the root cause of the problem, not per se the surface UI, which is only the control layer. Most UXers who call themselves IAs and IxDs are engaged here, trying to implement at this level. The major challenges at this level involve understanding the strategy, translating the strategy into the structure, then integrating it into some kind of whole for handoff to creatives and technologists.

3) Strategic level UX problems. The fundamental assumptions about the user’s needs were substantially incorrect, due in part to absence of learnings, user engagement, validations, and that any requirements derived from these learnings were essentially poorly translated due to this lack of understanding. This is perhaps the most difficult type of problem to diagnose since the assumptions about the user translate forward into bad results in the structure and the surface, but this is the root cause of the problem. If the fundamental business assumptions that undergird the service or technology offering are incorrect, this is quite likely a fatal error that no amount of implementation optimization or spin can ever help recover. Comparatively few UX professionals are engaged at this level, but this is where they can have the greatest impact not as value-adders, but as value-creators, by using integrative thinking on observations collected from multiple data sources: indirect or secondary sources like service data, quantitative usage data; primary or direct sources like contextual observations, surveys, usability tests, interviews, anecdotes, complaint reports, so on.

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