UX teams of one act as generalists, blending some or all of the above roles together. If you see the title user experience designer, it’s usually one of those catchall roles.
But there are other disciplines that certainly contribute to the resulting experience that a user has with a product, even if they may not fit as snugly into the job description of a user experience designer. These disciplines include visual design, content strategy, copywriting, business analysis, product management, project management, analytics, search engine marketing and optimization, brand marketing, and even engineering. In this field, there are lots of heated discussions about who gets to claim ownership of the user experience. Without fueling the flames, let’s just say that for the purposes of this book, if you do any of these things, you’re contributing to the user experience of your product, and this book is for you.
An Example
Personally, I think it’s easier to understand UX when you think about what it’s like to actually use a product. For example, right now I’m sitting in front of my computer, hopping around within the operating system and keying from my word processing program to my email program to my music program. My perception of each of those programs is impacted by how it looks, how it functions, and how well it serves its purpose in the personal need that it satisfies. (Helping me write a book; managing my personal and professional communications; and listening to some tunes that keep me tapping my feet as I work, respectively). In any of these programs, a thousand little decisions were made by someone—or more probably, many “someones”—to create what I experience as the flowing, seamless experience of working (see Figure 1.3).
And that’s just the software. My user experience is also impacted by the physical hardware of my computer: How big and bright the screen is, and whether it feels like “enough” to help me effectively use the hodgepodge of programs for which this laptop is intended. The tactile feel of the touchpad as I scroll down long Web pages. The satisfying clickety-clack of fingers tapping their way across the keys. These are all user experiences, too.
And what about the products and services that are connected to my laptop? Recently, I set up an in-home music system that integrates wirelessly with software that I run on my computer and my mobile phone. I can control the volume from an app on my phone and watch the volume level change on my computer while I hear the music get quieter or louder on the speakers in the other room. This is great execution on the part of the music system manufacturer. But it also casts a warm glow back on my laptop and my mobile phone, for being well designed to support such integration. Sometimes, a user’s perception of the product is beyond the control of any one manufacturer. It’s the cumulative effect of many (see Figure 1.4).
FIGURE 1.3 A user’s experience is the cumulative effect of many factors, some that you can control, and some that you can’t.
FIGURE 1.4 In the absence of better alternatives, users will try to hack together their own solutions, as this baseball fan has. But the companies who make the products that we love do a better-than-average job thinking about the complexities of the user experience.
Where UX Comes From
As a team of one, knowing the history of user experience helps you reassure people that it’s not just something that you dreamed up in your cubicle. If I were to sum up the history of UX in a few short sentences, it might go something like this: villains of industry seek to deprive us of our humanity. Scientists, scholars, and designers prevail, and a new profession flourishes, turning man’s submission to technology into technology’s submission to man (see Figure 1.5). Pretty exciting stuff.
FIGURE 1.5 UX has a long and storied history that intersects with other business, design, and technology developments that your colleagues may be familiar with.
Now here’s the longer version. User experience is a modern field, but it’s been in the making for about a century. To see its beginnings, you can look all the way back to the machine age of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. At that time, corporations were growing, skilled labor was declining, and advances in machine technology were inspiring industry to push the boundaries of what human labor could make possible. The machine age philosophy was best exemplified by people like Frederick Winslow Taylor and Henry Ford, who both pioneered ways to make human labor more efficient, productive, and routinized. But they were criticized for dehumanizing workers in the process and treating people like cogs in a machine. Still Taylor’s research into the efficiency of interactions between workers and their tools was an early precursor to much of what UX professionals think about today (see Figure 1.6).
FIGURE 1.6 Frederick Winslow Taylor, the father of Scientific Management, pejoratively known as Taylorism.
The first half of the 20th century also saw an emerging body of research into what later became the fields of human factors and ergonomics. Motivated by research into aeromedics in World War I and World War II, human factors focused on the design of equipment and devices to best align with human capabilities.
NOTE THE ORIGINS OF ERGONOMICS
In the late 1940s, research into pilot errors in the cockpit by Lieutenant Colonel Paul Fitts (who was also a psychologist) led to recommendations for the most effective organization of cockpit control knobs. Several years later, Fitts would coin Fitts’s Law, one of the basic laws of physics for user experience designers. Fitts’s Law states that the time required to move to a target is determined by the distance and size of the target.
By the mid 20th century, industrial efficiency and human ingenuity were striking a more harmonious relationship at places like Toyota, where the Toyota Production System continued to value efficiency, but treated workers as key contributors to a continually improving process. One of the core tenets of the Toyota philosophy was “respect for people,” and it resulted in involving workers in troubleshooting and optimizing the processes that they were a part of. As one example, workers at Toyota factories could pull a rope called the Andon Cord to stop the assembly line and give feedback if they saw a defect or a way to improve the process.
Around the same time, industrial designer Henry Dreyfuss wrote Designing for People, a classic design text that, like the Toyota system, put people first. In it, Dreyfuss described many of the methods that UX designers employ today to understand and design for user needs, as shown in Figure 1.7. In Designing for People, Henry Dreyfuss writes “when the point of contact between the product and the people becomes a point of friction, then the [designer] has failed. On the other hand, if people are made safer, more comfortable, more eager to purchase, more efficient—or just plain happier—by contact with the product, then the designer has succeeded.”
