Why User Experience?

Given that satisfaction aspect that was in ISO  standards and early talk of HCI – it was in NORD for so many years – why is it that now you've probably got a title – you could well have a title – like User Experience Designer or something like that. So user experience has become an intimate part and often the dominant part  

of the way in which we look at people  interacting with computer technology. So why is that the case? Well, part of it was the  shift to service orientation, and that's quite crucial, obviously, for what you're doing today. If you're service oriented, there's a different aspect of user experience than things that are more pay once and go on. So the Internet pushed this movement towards service orientation, the digital goods,

the paying on a subscription basis, rather than the paying once and for all. But because as soon as something becomes a service, then there are multiple choice points. If these are domestic products, then there's a choice point based by the actual user, rather than a client on behalf of the user, perhaps their boss. And if there are more choice points,  then usability and user experience increase in importance. Because if the person  isn't enjoying what they're doing,

if they're not feeling it's fulfilling them, then they're  going to choose another service and swap services. It's easier to swap services than to swap  harder, once-and-for-all bought products.   So there's a sort of a criticality to user  experience that grew out of this service orientation. However, that's not the end of the story. In some ways, and you might have heard that phrase,

"You've never had it so good." – there's an element of this towards user experience. Some of you will probably come across Maslow's  hierarchy of needs. There are multiple memes   with variations of this triangle going round  social media. You've probably seen the ones with Wi-Fi at the bottom. What Maslow said was that there are different levels of need. At the very base there are things like our  physical need for food. Are you hungry? Are you thirsty? Are you cold or too hot?

Above that, there are slightly higher-level needs for safety and security. And this involves shelter. Is your roof leaking? Is it a solid house you're in? Do you feel secure where you're at or do you feel  in danger? Next up the hierarchy are what's called love needs or social needs, for your children, your parents, your partner, your friends.

Next in the hierarchy again, is esteem or ego. The things that make you feel good. Prestige  in your job, status, self-worth, self-confidence. Then Maslow placed at the top of this, although there's variance sometimes, even additional layers. But the original one at the top of  this was self-actualization, things like being creative, autonomous, a sense of personal growth  and identity and learning, like you're doing now.

What Maslow suggested was we fulfill these needs in a fairly strict order. So we don't try and worry about higher-level needs when the lower-level ones are unsatisfied. So first of all, [if] we're hungry, that dominates everything. After that, there's safety. After that, there's love needs. That was Maslow's suggestion about the way these worked, and these have been used quite a lot in the psychology literature in order to try and

understand the kinds of decision making that people do. And there's certainly a truth to that. Now you can sort of see an equivalence of this for user interfaces. In one sense there's raw functionality. Does it do the job? Does my phone help me make a phone call or help me connect to the Internet?   Once you've got that bare functionality,  you know, does my light come on when I want it to come on? You then start [thinking] about usability. You know, is it easy   to phone somebody? Is it easy to use the Internet?  Is it easy to get my lights to come on when I want to?

And then, once you've got that usability,  you can start to worry about user experience. Is it a joy, the way in which my lights come  on, perhaps automatically, subtly, in just the right way? Or perhaps when I just make this faintest suggestion it's getting dark here and my household assistant realizes that means I'm about. And there's a suggestion in a way you  can think of these a little bit like the Maslow ones.

The functionality comes first. Then once you've got functionality, you then worry about usability, and then you worry about user  experience. And so you can think about it that, over the years, we've sorted out how to get  functionality and technologies improved. Our ability to work out what people need has  improved. Then we've sorted out usability, and then of course user experience becomes important at the top of the cake. And again, there is a truth to that. There is... in some sense we need, the lower level needs to be satisfied.

And certainly if you look in certain sorts of situation, if particularly – say, a safety-critical situation – functionality and usability, probably  more significant there than user experience. So again, there's some truth to it, but  not entirely true, I should say. There are contradictions. So I think there is a truth to this, it's worth thinking about and realizing that when you make design decisions, where you're putting your focus,

is it on user experience, is it on usability, is it on functionality? Think about which are *most critical* for people. However, if you look at both the Maslow's hierarchy and then think about this in terms of user experience,  there are clear contradictions. So, the Western obsession with slimming, which is about putting ego and self-actualization potentially, arguably,  puts prestige versus hunger

and sort of saying, “I'm prepared to be hungry in order to be the ideal shape that society says I should be.” If I'm talking too long, if my video is too long  and you get hungry, does your need or your desire for learning, self-actualization, overcome your desire for that hunger? Now there'll be a point when that probably won't be the case. But we do trade these things off.

Apple, of course, known for their user experience. They create delightful products that make people feel committed to them. It's about identity as well as about joy. But if  you unwrap an Apple box – their packaging is an experience, it's like opening these things.   However, often over the years, and this is going  back, you know, not a recent thing. Apple has sacrificed usability and functionality in order to get something that looks good, feels good,  

but sometimes may be a little harder to use.  And sometimes doesn't even do the right thing. And yet the computer I'm using now is an Apple  computer. So clearly they get something right, even though I know that they lose things as well along the way. So, there's both a truth to this hierarchy and not, but this certainly helps explain

one of the reasons why experience is so crucial. If everything else is right, then it becomes the key differentiator. The thing that says somebody wants to use your product, that you've designed, rather than somebody else's.