Research on UX

Today, if the companies want to be successful, the first thing they need to acknowledge is the fact that they are in the business of customer experience, since competing based on existing products and services is no longer enough (Verhoef et al., 2009). What matters is how the companies deliver those products and services. Therefore, the focus is not just on what the companies deliver but also on how they do it (Berry et al., 2002). The experience could be good, bad or indifferent, but it’s always there and the focus must remain of how effectively it is managed by the provider. One crucial point to remember is that regardless of how complex the whole journey is, the customers are not usually aware or interested to know all the touchpoints involved such as separate processes or indi-vidual experiences within the whole journey. They want to receive an end-to-end experience with a well-defined beginning and end (Meyer & Schwager 2007, 116-126).

When we think about good design in the offices, it’s not just about getting aesthetics right, but also about how to create a working space that would make people comfortable and allow them to be more productive (Becker & Steel, 1995). How can one know whether design is good or bad? Just like with many other things, we know it through comparison and identifying weaknesses and strengths.

The two most vital features of a good design are discoverability and understanding. Within the dis-coverability it’s crucial to come up with the actions that are possible and figure out how and in which circumstances they can be fulfilled. As for understanding, the importance lays in comprehension of the meaning, functions, support and ease of usability (Norman 2013, 3). Users have significant inputs when it comes to providing feedback on usability, yet it is important for designers to know when to listen to users and when not to. The reason behind this is simple. Users may not always know what is possible to implement, but if they are really listened and guided and sometimes coached in a careful way, their opinions, knowledge and suggestions could be enormously valuable (Lowdermilk 2013, 17-18).

Usability is a quality feature evaluating the ease of navigation through user interface and it also refers to measures for refining ease-of-use during the design phase (Nielson, 2003). It is the study of how people relate to any product and it also refers to human factors (Lowdermilk 2013, 5). According to Nielson, usability is defined by five key elements:

1. Learnability - when faced with the design for the first time, how easy it is to complete and learn the basic tasks?

2. Efficiency - once users are familiar with the design, how long will it take for them to ac-complish the tasks?

3. Memorability - if design hasn’t been used for a while, how easily the users can restore their competences when they return to the same design again?

4. Errors - what is the number of the errors made by the user? How serious are those errors and how the user recovers from them?

5. Satisfaction - does the user find the design pleasant? (Nielson, 2003).

By focusing on usability, designers and developers can meet the needs of users and conse-quently save a lot of time in own work and use it for identifying possible problems. Because of careful evaluation, they can avoid the re-designing process of products and services and as a result can save a lot of money (Lowdermilk 2013, 8-10).

2.1.1 Interaction design

All modern devices and different types of artificial things have been designed and some re-quired certain complexity with different aspects in mind, such as layout, operation, mechanisms and others. There are different areas of focus in the process of design depending on the purpose of the final product. For example, interaction design concentrates on how people interact with technology.

It aims at increasing people’s understanding of what can be done, what is happening right now and what may happen later. Interaction design is based on the principles of psychology, art and emotion to ultimately provide users with positive and pleasant experience. There is also experience design that has its efforts on quality and overall enjoyment of the experience. So, if interactive designers under-line usability and understandability, experience designers emphasize the emotional impact (Norman 2013, 4-9).

When focusing on interaction in the design, the key principle should be to make sure that when interaction happens it would feel natural. The tone of interaction should remind an interaction with a helpful, considerate and polite person. Digital products may sometimes give the impression of being

“rude”. For example, the common error messages and notifications that pop-up whenever the user does something “wrong”. The content of the message clearly shows that the user failed and is also blamed for a mistake that isn’t his or her fault in the first place or at least it shouldn’t be. The action

required from the user is to accept the blame by clicking OK and to confirm the mistake as we see in the example below.

Figure 2. Example of an error notification. Adapted from Cooper et al. (2004)

The real problem here is the poor product design behavior that wasn’t considered when design-ing the product. If the user needs weren’t well anticipated in the product design creation, in the end users may end up with unfriendly products (Cooper et al., 2004).

2.1.2 User-centered design

User-centered design (UCD) is a methodology that designers and developers use to make prod-ucts which will meet the needs of the users (Lowdermilk 2013, 13). If the goal is to put users’ needs and capabilities first and analyze their behaviors as a priority, then we are dealing with human-cen-tered design. The designing process should then match those needs and capabilities. The design will be considered as good if it goes along with understanding of both technology and psychology. Design can be considered as implemented successfully if it shows good communication, especially from ma-chine to person, specifying what features are possible, what can happen and what will happen (Nor-man 2013, 4-9). UX is the vital element of interaction design and one cannot design a UX, only design for a user experience (Rogers et al., 2007, 15). If a product is used by someone, it automatically has a UX, covering how it is being used by someone and identifies the product behavior (Garret 2003, 10). To understand how people certain products will be used, it’s crucial to have a clear understanding what is the objective of developing the product in the first place. Usability goals should meet specific usability criteria, which could be improving the speed, efficiency, increasing safety, introducing new features that were missing to improve effectiveness, simplifying the usability or any others. These goals could be identified by asking the questions regarding the interactive product and the UX itself.

The questions must be very detailed to help identify potential problems that weren’t considered before.

The design work progress should involve a constant UX process (Garret, 2010). When interacting with users, some of them may feel a bit intimidated by for example programmers or other technical experts. However, since users play a vital role in providing insights about possible flows and are the ones who give ideas for potential improvements, it is important to acknowledge that those potentially intimidating technical professionals are the ones needing help from users. It helps users to feel more at ease and gives them a sense of confidence knowing that they are the ones with the answers, as they are helping to create better products. Thus, when asking for help, it’s crucial to ask questions contin-uously and get to the point of what the users are asking for, even if they aren’t making themselves very clear in explaining what they need. Follow-up questions and guidance should help users to be-come more explicit about their struggles and needs (Lowdermilk 2013, 20; 25).

2.1.3 Ten usability heuristics by Nielsen

In 1995 Jakob Nielsen introduced 10 usability heuristics for user interface (UI) design, in which the name "heuristics" is used because these rules are based on practice rather than representing con-crete theoretical guiding principles (Nielsen, 1995). Initially the work started on heuristic evaluation together with Rolf Molich, where both researchers focused on interface design and improving human-computer dialogue. They concluded that due to complexity of heuristic evaluation one single persons’

overview and feedback isn’t enough and couldn’t be considered reliable (Nielsen & Molich, 1990;

Molich & Nielsen, 1990). Subsequently Nielsen continued the research and through analyzing 249 usability problems based on factor analysis he introduced nine heuristics for UI design (Nielsen, 1994).

1. Visibility of system status - the user should always be well-oriented and fully understand what is happening in the system, whereas interaction between the user and the system should be as logical and quick as possible.

2. Match between system and the real world - system should be interacting with the user by using the language that he or she understands. using words, phrases and terms that are com-mon for the user in his or her daily lives is preferable rather than using specific terms

3. User control and freedom - users often make mistakes, so the system should always provide an obvious chance for the client to “return, as it was,” with a minimum of effort, as well as give a chance to “redo”.

4. Consistency and standards - don’t confuse the users by defining the somethings with differ-ent words and terms. Be consistdiffer-ent and follow the standards

5. Error prevention - minimize the number of conditions in which errors can be made. Ideally design carefully to avoid possible error messages.

6. Recognition rather than recall - do not force the user to memorize a large number of objects, actions and options. The visitor should not keep in mind the information, moving from one part of the system to another.

7. Flexibility and efficiency of use - do not overload experienced users with unnecessary in-formation, give them an opportunity to perform frequently repeated actions as quickly and easily as possible.

8. Aesthetic and minimalist design - discussions should not be irrelevant or outdated. Each extra wording creates a more difficult perception of the environment and makes it impossi-ble for the visitor to find what he came to the site for in the first place.

9. Help users recognize, diagnose, and recover from errors - error messages should be ex-pressed in a language that is understandable to the user, describing the problem as accurately as possible and providing possible solutions to it.

10. Help and documentation - even if the system can be used without documentation, reference information may still be required in the process of working with it. Such documents should be drafted in such a way, so it will be easy to find them and the focus should remain on the user’s task, it should be brief and should list the steps that user needs to take.

Heuristic evaluation helps to identify the usability problems and as a result saves the money by avoiding those mistakes that can potentially cost companies a lot of money. In one of his own projects Nilsen provided a financial breakdown from heuristic evaluation that he conducted. The team spent

$6,400 for their heuristic evaluation which involved four evaluators and discovered usability prob-lems worth of $395,000 (Nielsen 1992, 8).