| User Experience Design

A good User Experience is one of the cornerstones of a successful product; analog and digital

The topic of User Experience is a broad field that, in my view, is thought of far too narrowly. Why does User Experience Design limit itself so often to only making websites and apps? And why do all projects that User Experience Designers work on end up looking more or less the same? There are of course many practical reasons for that that I only touch on lightly here in this article. This is merely a stream of consciousness writing than a thoroughly researched analytical writeup and it’s function is mainly to get related thoughts out of my system.

The only thing that really matters is how well your app satisfies the practical and emotional needs of the people you are designing for.

What is User Experience Design?

The term can be applied to a whole range of disciplines, but most people first think about UX Design for digital products like apps and websites. It can be more broadly understood as describing any touchpoint where people interact with products, services, or systems—whether digital or physical, transactional or not.

Human Needs

A central element of User Experience Design (abbreviated to UX in this article) are how a certain product satisfies the basic human needs while using a certain application

The core basic human needs that are relevant here are the following:

Safety
Predictability
Clear and helpful information
Streamlined and simple workflows
Knowledge
Meaning
Understanding
Beauty
Joy
A delightful experience

Creating a Framework

When thinking about UX and how to translate it into a good product it is helpful to treat UX not as a set of strict rules, but more of a framework in which to create. Often there are multiple ways to arrive at a solution that are tested iteratively with real users. The main advantage that digital tools have here is that they can be tested and verified quite economically. A solid UX framework guides us through a maze of vague ideas when tackling a new project and can help in visualizing pain points you where not aware of before. A solid framework also helps in re-visiting legacy projects from time to time for a health check and to see if they might need a refresh or a bigger update. Ways of useage and interactions shifts as new demographies and technologies gain wider traction and change the way people interact with the products we create.

UX as a discipline has never mattered more. As devices multiply, software touches every corner of daily life and now autonomous agentic ai is getting into the mix as well, the gap between a good interface and a bad one becomes impossible to ignore.

Friction remains

Despite the professionalization this field has made over the last two decades it is still amazing to see how many digital products still leave a lot on the table in the UX department. My main example in this regard is how hard it is on a lot of mid-sized business websites to quickly see where that business is based and contacting it. Especially on mobile devices. This is just a basic example.

And when you look a little broader at examples like buying a ticket, renting a car, streaming a video, returning deposit bottles, filing your taxes, paying for a purchase — bad user experience is still everywhere.

You would think that with all those billions flowing into Silicon Valley and all the artificial intelligence, the problem would be solved by now. It is not.

So, how do we approach the increasingly complex requirements for good usability and a good user experience?

Approaches to defining Usability and User Experience Requirements

When beginning a project I always start with a set of rules that I call common sense heuristics. This is basically my personal stash of rules and regulations I have acquired over the years when working on different projects. Frankly, it is stuff I like and stuff I don’t like.

But after that comes the second step and here I zoom out and put on a more professional lens through which to look at the project. This is the stage in which I often work in tandem with other people in a larger team to arrive at a set of requirements for a given project.

Defining UX requirements is an iterative process that needs structure while leaving enough room to discover problems you didn’t know existed. I always try to leave enough wiggle room for new ideas while trying to ground everything on a firm (as firm as possible, at least) footing. The wiggle room is very important, because this is the space where new ideas and new ways of working can arise. Navigating the wiggle room is exploring new ideas and unknown unknows with the hope of discovering something new.

The goal of all these exploratory work at the beginning of a project is to create a framework that guides your problem-solving without locking you into rigid solutions. Think of it as a map that helps you navigate ambiguous territory. It shows you where to look, what questions to ask, and how to test your assumptions.

This approach serves several purposes:

It makes the invisible visible Many usability issues hide in plain sight. A structured approach forces you to examine each touchpoint systematically, revealing friction that users experience but rarely articulate. This is especially important since typical website projects today are comprised of a myriad interconnected parts that are similar in general function, but quite different in implementation. Getting all these ephemeral platforms, applications and services hooked up into one coherent experience where the different parts can interact with each other is quite the feat.
It enables iteration Rather than pursuing a single “perfect” solution from the start, you work through cycles of defining, prototyping, testing, and refinement. Each cycle brings you closer to something that actually works for real users in real contexts. Depending on the use case you can even publish an early iteration as a kind of MVP to the public to test how it performs with real users.
It documents decision-making When you work on a project over long periods or hand it off to another department, the framework shows why certain choices were made. This is crucial for maintaining consistency as products evolve. And while this article quickly glances over it, proper documentation that is up to date and accessible for every collaborator is actually the most difficult and most time consuming part on any project.
It balances constraints Every project has competing demands: business goals, technical limitations, user needs, time pressure, different tastes, undefined vision, too many stakeholders (and the list goes on). A good framework makes all those constraints visible early and helps to weigh these tradeoffs explicitly rather than letting them battle it out implicitly.

The practical application looks like this: You define your users and their contexts. You map their current workflows and pain points onto the business goals. You compare the current state of affairs regarding the business to the desired goal by asking “What is this brief really about?” You establish measurable usability criteria that help you to track the progress on the way to those goals. You prototype solutions. You test iteratively with real users, ideally of different (usage) demographics. You refine. You test again.

This is not a revolutionary approach. It is simply disciplined attention to detail combined with feedback loops with the goal of being systematic about putting user needs ahead of assumptions.

Sources

http://uxbooth.com/ A blog that deals with the topics of Usability and User Experience. The main focus is on websites and internet applications.
http://52weeksofux.com/ This website compiles clear weekly posts on the topic of User Experience for 52 weeks. While these are generally kept general and can be applied to a variety of application areas, they repeatedly return to the core topics of software and “Web 2.0”.

The Design of Everyday Things Donald Norman