experience design stories ::

Experience Design  by MA Neff

User experience design or UX refers to designers, and increasingly, to teams of cross disciplinary collaborators who seek striking solutions to difficult problems in the world today.

Applying usability and human factors criteria to experience design is about ease of use. Designers look for ways to induce clarity, meaning and understandability in urban planning, retail marketing and display and of course, digital tools and websites. Designers connect the brand experience in the world to technology and places. Design can inspire conversation with users. As business brings designers into increasingly strategic roles, they lead by widening the dialog between users and producers.

The goal behind experience design manifests in streamlined ecommerce check-out processes, improved product page design, more effective marketing campaigns, clearer online training and educational programs, simplified business processes, smoother site navigation and contextually pertinent and better organized content.

chatter ::

Well-crafted content does far more in raising conversions rates and costs lots less than key word buys.

A chief quality of content is its ability to stimulate user awareness. Content is mostly about increasing the userís knowledge and ability to take advantage of features or benefits. Businesses, brands, products and personalities arenít the topic; the benefits to the audience are what matters. Customers may deem campaign or company centered content a hollow experiene.

Sincere content goes hand in hand with sound design and usability tenets.

Research shows that users will to some extent overlook less pleasing aesthetics of sight, sound, touch and awkward structure to get at meaningful and relevant content.

But why should they?

Creating content capital means that web and mobile platforms provide ease of use that makes it simple and fast to act. The purpose of content is satisfaction. Content that is not satisfying discourages adoption of products and services and is counter-intuitive to strategic business goals. The final usability tenet for creating increased content value concerns how to convey belief and trust.

Content needs to be measured on its conversion rates, usefulness, ease of use, satisfaction, user awareness and trustworthiness. But there is one more facet of content creation that is less visible, and that is site architecture or information architecture. The difference here is that the more invisible or transparent the structure the more prominent your content becomesóand when done right, the more elegant the solution.

Of course, itís not easy to measure absence. You can get around this by developing success metrics that focus on conversion rates, usefulness, ease of use, satisfaction, user awareness and trustworthiness. In this way the requirements of a project such as your strategic plan, product design and underlying system architecture become guideposts. By using usability tenets as markers, at Picture the Worlds we think of your project in terms of refining business and design processes to deliver satisfying content experiences to your audience.

[The Return on Investment in Usablity of Web Applications, Chapters 10 & 4 by Clare-Marie Karat, IBM TJ Watson Research Center and Arnold Lund, Microsoft Moble PC from Cost Justifiying Usability, 2005, Edited by Randolph Bias et al.]