on User Experience design

Opinions on a subject close to one's heart can be quite difficult to express. UX certainly is one I've procrastinated on for a long time and probably will never be able to capture in a short neat post. However, I feel compelled to start boiling it down hoping that in time a well distilled elixir of love will emerge. When unable to precisely define a notion of what one stands for, it is always best to eliminate the superfluous and the opposites from the spectrum of likely candidates for core interests and beliefs.

Rather than the “look and feel” of landing pages or navigation issues, which appear to dominate many UX debates, these days, transitions of interactive devices and mechanisms in user workflows e.g. content authoring tasks, are of particular interest to me. The nature of users' dialogue with the contraptions facilitating task oriented actions within the system is an increasingly important aspect, especially when we consider their impact on the extent of engagement in creating content.

Not intending to discount the significance of navigation, wayfinding and landing page design, I'll focus on the wizards enabling authoring, ongoing maintenance and organisation in ad-hock created content on the web from a user perspective. A few issues immediately come to mind and given time I'll attempt to attribute those to aspects of success and failure in context of user adoption and capability to evolve with changing needs. The cumbersome authoring process of this system (blogspot.com) and blogging systems at large, should provide ample opportunity to discuss failed workflows in contrast with later generation of Social Media sites.

I suspect that much of the failing User Experience can be directly attributed to system design based on code engineering tasks as opposed to usability principles and User Centred Design process in particular. This leads me to the role and the general fit of UX practice in business culture and an interesting paper by Zafer Bilda on this very subject. The report comprises of a number of propositions Bilda presented to a group of 15 UX practitioners in order to solicit their views. I felt motivated enough to respond to the issues raised myself and in part to address the answers he obtained from the group. Read the original paper and my comments on “Chris Khalil’s Musings” blog.