user-experience
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User experience, often abbreviated as UX, refers to the total experience a user has with a tool, or even an entire company, across all methods of communication and interaction with that tool, including both direct interactions using a tool UI and indirect interactions via other tools such as email, SMS, phone calls, in-person human representatives of the tool or company, etc.
Why
Why UX? A good UX should/will make you more productive, more in control (user agency), while minimizing frustration.
- 2018-07-17 Don Norman in Fast Company: Why bad technology dominates our lives, according to Don Norman
We must change our mind-set from being technology-centric to become people-centric. Instead of starting with the technology and attempting to make it easy to understand and use, let us take human capabilities, and use the technology to expand our abilities. We need to return to one of the core properties of human-centered design: solve the fundamental issues in people’s lives.
How
Iterating with your own use-cases (scratching your own itches, per principles) helps you at least build a good UX for yourself, as long as you do use it yourself (selfdogfood).
Then if/when you have a second user, watch *how* they use your software, and take notes. Watch where they get stuck, or frustrated. Listen to them verbalize *what* they want to get down, but be very ware of anything they say about *how* they want to do it, or any opinions about tools etc.
UX first
UX-first is an approach to making a software project by focusing on UX first, as opposed to plumbing.
By focusing on UX instead of plumbing, you'd get better experience in the end, the one that is less constrained by what's easy to implement.
Beware of
Beware of just "asking" users what they want. They're usually wrong (they don't have sufficient self-cognition plus design skills to do so, not their fault) and you'll usually get bad outcomes if you try to build accordingly.
See video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pw9gaEiQAxY
Or:
Developer Experience
Developer experience describes the way in which a developer interacts with a tool such as a programming langauge or a framework. Developer experience should be considered second to building an excellent user experience (i.e. build for users first rather than using your favourite tools without considering their impact on users).
See Also
- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_experience
- UI
- design
- 2017-11-19 Convenience isn’t digital / Why we need a different response to convenience in a digital age
- Bad mobile UI example: Fast Company: https://twitter.com/fredbenenson/status/1127020290947436545
- "Congratulations to @FastCoDesign for one of the most egregious examples of mobile cruft I’ve ever seen. It’s actually impressive how bad this is: the initial page load manages to display zero actual content" @fredbenenson May 11, 2019
- ^^^
- https://daringfireball.net/2004/04/spray_on_usability
- Thread: Anime computer human interface design examples and inferred principles: https://twitter.com/Foone/status/1238561450727112704 (see gifs / photos / videos)
- "I want to build an anime computer.
big CRT monitor, very high res.
weird boxy shape.
keyboard: lots of unlabeled rectangles and/or triangles
(from https://specialkam.tumblr.com/post/67820544102)" @Foone March 13, 2020
- "I want to build an anime computer.
- https://twitter.com/DudeWhoCode/status/1327416318308466688
- "Client: We don't want to spend time on UX. Our product is easy to use, anyone should underst...
User:
https://t.co/0tnZ6NfbOk" @DudeWhoCode November 14, 2020
- "Client: We don't want to spend time on UX. Our product is easy to use, anyone should underst...
- Criticism (and warning of dark patterns): 2021-01-28 Why I'm losing faith in UX (UX as User Exploitation)
- Why: https://twitter.com/danyork/status/1463273764679045131
- "Perhaps most importantly, the platforms spent an enormous amount of time, energy, and money on providing a quality *user experience* to keep people engaging.
*** User experience (UX) is the key! ***
It's a good part of why the platforms are successful.
10/" @danyork November 23, 2021
- "Perhaps most importantly, the platforms spent an enormous amount of time, energy, and money on providing a quality *user experience* to keep people engaging.
- Why: https://twitter.com/danyork/status/1473419263625019392
- "Yes, the original Web 1.0 was, and still is, massively decentralized. And many aspects of "Web 2.0" were as well.
But to your point, the independent projects didn't have product designers who could create the UX that consumers wanted.
The platforms DID create easy UX." @danyork December 21, 2021
- "Yes, the original Web 1.0 was, and still is, massively decentralized. And many aspects of "Web 2.0" were as well.
- If you are implementing UX for either displaying content from others on your own site (e.g. receiving Webmentions) or posting content to other sites (e.g. POSSE or sending Webmentions), consider these UX design patterns: https://socialpatterns.adl.org/
- Brainstorming: consider problems of UX abstractions and/or metaphors too distant from the mechanics of the underlying technologies: 2022-06-05 Douglas Rushkoff: Don’t Hide the Tech / Too much artifice is a symptom of something wrong
- 2023-09-04 Zeldman: A faster horse
“The user is never wrong” means, when a user snags on a part of your UX that doesn’t work for her, she’s not making a mistake, she’s doing you a favor.
- 1997 customer experience first, technology second: https://www.ddinstagram.com/reel/C7QEgDmvE-W/
- to-do: consider renaming / reframing from "user experience" to "human experience", for reasons provided in Let’s replace “user experience” with human experience and per the IndieWeb community motto on the home page of The IndieWeb is a *people-focused* alternative to the “corporate web”. *Emphasis* added.