Question: What is user experience and what does it mean exactly? How does it fit into usability, interaction design, user center design, and so forth?

Posted by: John S. Rhodes on February 10, 2003 10:39 PM

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Question: "user experience" is often only used to describe user interactions with web sites. How can the term "user experience" be applied to other *business* and *interface* scenarios? What positive future implications does this have on the "usability" consulting field?

Posted by: Daniel Szuc on February 11, 2003 12:06 AM

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Question: The footnote on the "semi-famous diagram" mentions that the model "does not describe a development process nor does it define roles". Could you briefly describe your ideal UX development process, and what roles would you consider important?

Posted by: Peter Boersma on February 11, 2003 03:55 AM

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Question: How do you draw the line between the design of elements that are very obvious and clear to your target user and elements that may confuse him? Of course, provided that you don´t have the money/time to do extensive user testing.

Posted by: Gustavo Grillo on February 11, 2003 07:29 AM

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Question: What efforts do you recommend to enhance the design or organization of actual content, the words or help that appear on screen, in order to enhance overall user experience. In most discussions surrounding user experience, the actual content of a web page itself often takes a back seat to other more popular discussions of IA, process, wireframing, prototyping, etc. I feel that this content step has been the ugly stepchild of user experience in the sense that very few discuss what they do in this "bottom-up" part of the development process (Adaptive Path a rare exception). It is often the most torturous part of site development, time consuming, fraught with marketing tension and politics, and yet the ultimate thing that users are intended to find/read/use as part of their task completion is a site's on-screen content.

Posted by: Bryan on February 11, 2003 10:34 AM

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Amazon's editorial reviews page for your book includes kind comments from Alan Cooper, Steve Krug, and Louis Rosenfeld. In what capacity do you know these gentlemen?

a) Good friends. Steve hosts a mean BBQ pool party.
b) Virtual friends. We exchange e-mails or talk on a listserv.
c) Work, or used to work with them. Run when Alan pulls out his Nerf crossbow.
c) Occasional professional contact. Their business cards are in my Rolodex.
d) My publisher handled it. The book industry is a soulless marketing machine.

Posted by: Rotwang on February 11, 2003 11:48 AM

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Imagine a scenario where both schedule and budget is tight, but you can choose one of the following options: user test with a large group on core features, or user test with a small group on everything. Which would you choose and why?

Posted by: Lydia on February 11, 2003 03:45 PM

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I live in a bi-cultural society (infact most would say "mutlicultural"). When conducting usability studies I've noticed a number of differences between the various cultural groups.

For example, I've noticed that people of European heritage tend to take a self-centred view ("it's all about me"), whereas Polynesian people tend to see the world from a wider 'human family' context (what Maori call "iwi" or "whànau"). A specific example was a link called 'FEEDBACK' - some Polynesian users thought this meant it would contain feedback *from* the website's owners *to* the wider community - but not as a device to send their feedback to the website owners.

Differences such as these can potentially impact on every aspect of a web design from labels to imagery, to physical placement of objects on screen (Arabic websites are a classic example). I would be interested to hear of your experiences in dealing with cross-cultural websites and any solutions you've come up with (keeping in mind that we often don't have the luxury of expensive multi-templated websites catering for every langauge and culture!).

Posted by: Zef, Wellington, Aotearoa (New Zealand) on February 11, 2003 04:03 PM

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Comment (not a question):

After recent threads about blog writers getting economic compensation for their work, does anyone find it ironic that John R is compensating us for reading and contributing to his site, via these book give-aways? Backwards, surely!

Posted by: Che Tamahori on February 11, 2003 08:20 PM

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You keep saying several times in your book that we should not "leave any aspect of the user experience to chance". After seeing the response on SIGIA-L, do you wish you had qualified this statement?

From what you say about tabs it seems like you don't like them that much since you mention them under the heading of "design by mimicry". Do you find that they are often used where they do not work, or are they just boring because they are overused?

Since the idea for the book started with the diagram, it can be seen as a "concept book", and those often fail. How do you feel that it worked out? Did it end up like you expected?

Printing in two colors really does wonders for the book. How much more expensive is it than one color? At which point in the writing process was it decided to do the book in two colors?

After reading the book the thought strikes me that this is a book that should be read by the people who are not likely to read it. It is a high level book that should be read by the people who make decisions because it's recommendations concern so many people in an organization, but it is likely to be read by people like me on the bottom of the hierarchy with no power to implement much of the recommendations. Do you agree?

The one thing that the diagram did for me was to help define the words Information architect, information design, interaction design, and so on. It was a really wonderful in the that cleared up confusion without being too specific like you would have had to be if you had written it down and not made the drawing. But people don't seem to remember your definition. Right now information architecture seems to include everything and the kitchen sink. * holding up "blueprints" and "practical information architecture" as examples * It at least reaches far into the strategy plane and the scope plane. Instead of "the user experience" people seem to be talking about "information architecture" all the way because "user experience" is not as good a buzzword probably. Is this an example of worse is better, or will your terminology prevail in a the end?

Posted by: JEH on February 12, 2003 10:27 PM

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Sorry, the link to worse is better didn't work. This one should.

Posted by: JEH on February 12, 2003 10:34 PM

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I've always been a big believer in defining business problems before building a website. The reason I love Garrett's model is because it minimizes the "surface" plane -- it's one step in a long process, and not the focus of the entire site development. Many people start at surface and find themselves backpedaling to strategy later. It's the classic cart-before-the-horse phenomenon.

Unfortunately, I find that some clients don't believe me, or want to rush through the other 4 planes before arriving at surface.

What is your advice for selling the process to clients? Do you have an effective way to convince clients that the 5 planes are a successful model for site development?

I typically use money as a convincing factor: it's expensive to make changes once the code is being written. However, some clients swear that they "know it when they see it", my site maps and wireframes mean nothing to them (even though I explain them), and only when they see sketches do they start providing meaningful feedback.

Posted by: Jen on February 13, 2003 12:14 PM

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Many sites have a wide variety of audiences they want to reach, and each audience has different needs when accessing the site and the site publisher has different communicative goals with respect to each audience. A single site cannot be optimal for each audience simultaneously. One popular fix is impose a multi-audience starting point which is suboptimal for each audience but allows for optimized interactions beyond that point. An example might be three columns of links on the front page, with the audience labeled at the top of each column, so each group can get right to their appropriate links.

However, this approach assumes that either there will be little to no overlap in terms of the content for these groups, or that the site publisher has resources to re-purpose the content for each specific audience and maintain multiple versions of similar content. For many site publishers, this is not the case.

What approaches have you taken when addressing the issue of multiple audiences needing similar content which would ideally be presented slightly differently to each audience? What factors influenced your desicions when making compromises?

-matt

Posted by: matthew wickline on February 13, 2003 01:08 PM

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Are we getting answers soon?

Posted by: Mr. Presto on February 14, 2003 09:26 AM

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I'll be announcing the book winner today or tomorrow. I'll send the best questions to JJG today. We'll see how fast he can answer!

Thanks to all for the excellent, high-quality questions.

Posted by: John S. Rhodes on February 14, 2003 11:53 AM

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Why can't Jesse read this web page and respond? Why not have Jesse choose the "best questions?"

Posted by: Gunslinger on February 14, 2003 01:14 PM

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Gunslinger, that is a good question. I'll submit it to JJG. ;-)

Posted by: John S. Rhodes on February 14, 2003 07:27 PM

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The good questions may not be the ones JJG wants to answer. :) or the ones John chooses.

Hmm. Any way is probably OK.

Posted by: JEH on February 14, 2003 08:18 PM

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Because John's raffling off his own copy of a book he paid for, it seems rude to dictate how he should go about giving away his own property, wouldn't you agree?

Answers to the remaining questions are forthcoming.

Posted by: jjg on February 15, 2003 02:53 AM

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the interview is up

Posted by: Eric on February 18, 2003 02:21 AM

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