User experience (UX)

User experience (UX) involves a person’s emotions about using a particular product, system or service. User experience highlights the experiential, effective, meaningful and valuable aspects of human-computer interaction and product ownership. – wikipedia

What really is User Experience? To many time I come across a guys profile on LinkedIn and one of his/her skills listed is UX, and I’m like, “Is that a skill?”. Turns out, it is a skill. It isn’t so much a Web Development skill as it is more of a Web Designing skill. What is the difference? Lets just think of it as a process.
(Design>Development>Production) The design process is when a Graphic Designer/Visual Designer/Web Designer, they all are the same when designing websites, creates a mock-up using tools like Adobe Photoshop. When they finish the design a UI Developer/Web Developer/Front-end Developer, takes the design and adds functionality. So what does all this have to do with UX? Allow me to answer this with another question. Who’s Responsibility is it to decide on how the website interacts with the user? Example: should the website have an accordion menu, or a drop-down menu, should the button call a overlay or should there be a break in the page and everything drop down. these interactions between the user and the website are crucial to the overall site experience. It is the UX Designer’s responsibility to make these interactions/experience as pleasant to the user as possible. In a way the UX designer is engaging in psychology, by trying to get into the head of the user and understand how they will react to the site. Here is an example of user experience: lets say you come up to a door and you try to open it. It is a glass door and there is an aluminum bar stretching horizontally across the mid section of the door. What is your first reaction? To push the door open. what if the door was supposed to be pulled and wouldn’t push. The person (User) would pause and stare at the door with a puzzled look and read the sign and then proceed to pull open the door. this is an example of a poor User Experience. The door did not behave like the user expected it to. Instead the door should have had a vertical bar.

This prompts the user to want to pull and a horizontal bar on the other side to prompt the user to push. the same thing goes for Website, we want the user to feel like their actions on the website are natural, that they don’t have to stop and pause and read all the fine text to fine what they want to do. This task falls to the UX Designer, it is their responsibility to make sure the User Experience of the website is smooth and enjoyable.