What is User Experience (UX)? What Gives a Good User Experience?

Shalom Solomon 11th March, 2021

Since we started a post on User Interface, it is only natural that we talk about user experience. User experience also known as UX, evolved along with user interface. It has grown to mean more than a tech term. Infact, it is used in the marketing sector, business sector as well as the tech world.

In essence, user experience is a combination of knowledge from fields such as psychology, marketing, business, design and of course, technology.

What is User Experience?

User Experience was first coined in the 1990s by Don Norman when he was working as a scientist for Apple on the production of the Macintosh.

According to him,

"User Experience encompasses all aspects of the end-user's interaction with the company, it's services and products".

That means that UX design would involve planning how a product or service works and looks to make using it easy, enjoyable and appealing to the users.

Photo Credit: Dreamstime

Now like I said earlier on, User Experience is used in the marketing, business and tech sector.

This is primarily because these sectors have of recent become somewhat intertwined through innovations in their niche.

All the strides in business has brought them to a point where they interact with the end users directly. This is where e-commerce comes in. Technology made it easier for businesses to connect with their target audience and offer services without physical contact.

This is the point where user experience became important not just for offering services online but also for branding and marketing too.

As a result of this, UX is a term you'd hear from web designers/developers, app developers, marketing experts and business experts.

What does a good UX look like?

Although, UX professionals have varied opinions about what User Experience is and should be, one thing all their definitions seem to agree on is that:

User experience is and should be focused on the user.

A good UX would therefore mean a pleasant interaction with a product or service from the users first contact to after the product or service has been used.

Now since UX is mostly applied on websites and apps, we'd explore what a good user experience is supposed to be online.

1. Speed

Technology aims to achieve the most in the shortest time, because that is what people want. So a good user experience should involve speed. When a user goes to a website, how fast does it load, how much time does it take a webpage to load? Most people according to Google leave a page if it takes more than 30 seconds to load (wow). This shows how much people value their time over your services.

2. Usability

Usability is sometimes used interchangeably with user experience. Because some experts argue that users do not care about user experience when they are focused on what they would gain from a product or service. Either way, usability in UX is the attribute that assesses how easy user interfaces are to use. So the user interface of a website should be easy to use so that users can have a good user experience.

3. Attractive

Looks always matter in every aspect of life. Since user experience is focused on the perception of a website or product asked on the end user's experience, the website has to make the most of it's reach. If you have access to the five senses of the end users, by all means use it. Websites on the net that have access to only the users sight and should use it to their benefit. This is why websites and apps for children have interfaces that differ a great deal from that of let's say a university school portal. The website should have colours, fonts, images and graphics their end-users would find appealing to further heighten and improve their user experience positively.

4. Produce results

All the above qualities would mean nothing if the user's need is not satisfied at the end. Imagine if you go to a website for straeming movies online to watch Coming to America 2. And the website loads quickly, all the icons were responsive, it was very easy to understand and use but at the end there were only articles on Coming to America 2. No movies.

Would you say you had a great user experience? No.

Bottom line is that a good user experience must end with results for the user.

To Conclude,

User Experience is a general phenomenon that can be applied on all forms of products and services. It is mostly used in web development and design and also in app development.

A website needs to have speed, usability, appeal and produce results in order to give good user experience.

Hope this was enlightening?

Adios...