Deluxe Applications

UX or User Experience is starting to become a buzz word in every industry, particularly IT. User Experience is defined by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) that discusses the ergonomics of human-computer interaction as "a person's perceptions and responses that result from the use or anticipated use of a product, system or service. UX includes all the users' emotions, beliefs, preferences, perceptions, physical and psychological responses, and behaviors that occur before, during and after use of a produce, service, or experience."

So why is this so important? Think about the apps or websites you encounter on a daily basis; you decide in seconds whether it is easy to use, if it's something that responds quickly, and if it's something you'll want to use again. UX is not just something that "happens" and it is not an accident. You don't wait until the implementation phase to incorporate it. UX is extremely important for developers. Users drive the demand for your product or service, and expect the applications and technology they work with to be easy to use and to get a meaningful experience from it. Tools like surveys can tell us directly what the customers want, and can be taken a step further by looking at physical evidence of user analytics and trends. We can allocate resources and design something that makes sense to each of us, but there's more to it than that. If I were to design something that I absolutely love it would be decorated in black and gold and covered in chocolate. This hardly relates to anything IT, but goes to show that only a small percentage of the user-base will share the same desires as your own personal biases. If the product falls through, it is us to blame, not the user. You don't want to make the user confused or have to think in any way when using your application.


Many employers and organizations thrive on analytics, so if it can be proven that you can enhance user experience based on data from a source like Google Analytics, why wouldn't you user-center your design? In Google Analyics, you can see demographics of locations, behaviors, the bounce rate, the number of hits on each sub-page of your site, what people are searching on your site, and even the technology behind your web-site traffic. For example see the screenshot to the left of this blog's mobile technology metrics.

As you can see, the only hits we've gotten on our page have been from desktops. We could use this to justify the revision of our site to make it more mobile friendly. Of course, this is just an example, but this is one way that you can use analyics to start the user-experience process to make all of your applications, technologies, products, or services deluxe applications.

Related UX Reads:
UX Design Magazine
UX Defined

-Bailey