User Experience (UX)
Definition
Are you having a good time on this website? (We hope so!) That’s what UX is all about: designing for the user.
As a discipline, UX involves all the considerations around how humans engage with technology products. In the world of software, this involves the journey a user takes across multiple pages on a website or through channels and elements of an application. When it comes to hardware, UX designers research how users adopt certain functions, learn, and engage with a technology to build experiences that are intuitive and seamless.
What defines a good user experience?
Above all, UX designers aim to build products that are usable. While a good user experience can be subjective—some people like loud music or bright lights; minimalist or maximalist approaches—usability cuts across the board.
That’s why UX best practices include guidelines like making sure that the font and text size is legible. Accessibility—making sure that technology can be used by all users, including the disabled community—is often studied alongside UX.
What are the 5 elements of user experience?
As defined by Jesse James Garrett in The Elements of User Experience, the 5 elements of UX are:
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Strategy
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Scope
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Structure
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Skeleton
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Surface
What are the 4 Cs of UX?
The 4 Cs—foundational principles in UX and product design training—are:
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Consistency
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Continuity
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Context
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Complementarity
While the first three are self-explanatory (good UX offers a consistent and seamless journey appropriate to the context of the interfaces), “complementarity” UX (sometimes written as “complementary”) can be a little confusing. It means developing a user experience that complements a user’s other digital journeys across an ecosystem of various devices. For example, aspects of the Apple Watch UX are complementary to the iPhone.