The Elements of User Experience

Not everyone is as lucky as I was.

While some people stumble onto the principles of UX by asking deeper questions about their software designs (Is the navigation intuitive? Does it make sense to users to put this button here?) they are forced to find their way through the field alone.

I got lucky in simultaneously finding a field and a mentor.  Diane Deseta with UX mentors thoughtfully brought me along in the UX world, starting me off with the basics.  After studying the Morville and Rosenfeld 'Polar Bear book' on information architecture, she insisted I read The Elements of User Experience by Jesse James Garrett.

While much of what I've learned has helped me to hone skills related to specific aspects of software development, this book lays the foundation on which all of those skills are useful...which is why I'm so lucky that Diane insisted on my reading it so early in my education.

Garrett says products are essentially a conceptual layered column (shown at the right) built on the foundation of a strategy with each successive layer building on the one below it.  He says that without a strong, clear concept of the lower layer, each successive step is more fragile.

For example, every product must have a clear strategy.  Not only a clear business strategy, but a clear vision of what the purpose of the product is.  Some large companies make the mistake of keeping this information closely held at the highest levels of the company, but that leads to lower level decision makers blind to the intended strategic direction.  Without a clear vision of what is to be built and why, all the following decisions made for the product will be determined by varying visions of the goal.

Below that is the scope of the product.  The concern of feature creep and scope creep comes in here.  Without a clear sense of what the product should do (and, more importantly, what is outside the scope of the product) its design can never be finished.

After this is the structure layer.  In the case of content sites this means information architecture.  Clear organization for all the various information that populates the product BEFORE the other steps in product development are taken will lead to a seamless experience for the user.

Only after discussing these crucial considerations does Garrett address the skeleton and surface of the site: the buttons, color, icons and graphics of the page.

In first learning how websites work, I made the mistake of designing the front-end stuff first.  My experience had only been with the buttons and graphics of a site.  Well-designed sites make their inner working invisible to the user, and this book showed me the unseen elegance of a well-designed site.

Sites that excel are brilliant not just because of a beautiful interface -- they excel because every layer of the site represented in Garrett's diagram was designed congruently with the preceding layer.

Ironically, as the book teaches that well-designed sites have a thoughtful and robust foundation, the book itself provided just such a foundation for my own education.