Core Competence
User Experience – A Brief Introduction
The term “user experience” is best described as the experience that an individual has as a result of interactions with particular product or service. Well designed user experience in particular product or service means that user will feel satisfied about the way they interact with the product or service. While some may argue that satisfaction can not be exactly measured and quantified, user experience experts believe that users’ satisfaction will be achieved when they are able to achieve their goal by using the product or service.
In IT field, user experience refers to human-computer interaction related experience. User experience design goal is to enable software that pleases users and make it easier for them to use and to learn using IT products and services. This goal is achieved by utilizing user centered design approach which includes several aspects: usability design, information architecture design, and user interaction design.
Happy User, Productive User
As explained before, the goal user experience design is to enable IT artifact to be more joyable for users to achieve their goal assisted by the software. To enable this, well designed user experience software will provide users a tool that is not only powerful but also easy to use and intuitive to learn. User experience goal is not to remove the need of learning to use software at all, but to make the daily use is easy and the learning process is intuitive to follow. For instance, if you are an architect, a well designed user experience architecture-software should be intuitive to learn for you based on your expertise in architecture.
Having their goal achieved, users are happy users. Imagine that you are one of these users. Whether you are a designer using design software, or you are head of enterprise looking for enterprise resource planning system, or you are a new media enthusiast seeking for breakthrough ideas of human-computer interaction, you know that when you can easily use and learn to use software, you can get your tasks done effectively and efficiently. Removing the complexity of understanding and learning the tool will help you to focus on doing what you do best in your field of expertise.
Further Reading
Even though user experience field is considered young, firstly introduced by Alan Cooper in 1998, this article will not be enough to explain the whole concept of user experience. If you are interested in this topic, we have several articles in this site, some articles are cited from international experts such as Alan Cooper while some articles are written by us.