User Experience Design

A title such as this sound quite related to either Jakob Nielsen or Jeffrey Zeldman. Both people if I’m not mistaken has spoken about the above topic. The user experience used to broken up to only 3 main parts, which is the context, content and users.

It was made even into the ‘3 circles of information architecture’ that I found back from Semantic Studios. And to believe that this article was written by Peter Morville actually in 2004. Gosh, website design and development was taking a huge turn now.

Come to think of it, what I was learning in Web Authoring class at RMIT might have been pretty back dated. Either that, or it was just covering the surface of what could be learnt nowadays.

Anyway, the three circles chart was the basic cycle in the process of creating a website. It used to start by thinking or asking what was the context of client’s website. After clearing up the client’s main purpose for the website, it was normally down to the content.

In the content area, it doesn’t just cover the articles that will be pasted online but the design for the website. Here, the designer needs to design for the content provided. Back then, it was a much simpler process of providing everything to the designer and they just make things pretty.

Once all that was setup, it was time to bring in the audience. The users of the audience would normally visit a great looking website and go “wow..” in their mind. They’d be impressed with the look of the website and only later realize the difficulties while venturing through the website.

Forwarding a year ahead. those circles have somehow splitted and straightened themselves to form a honeycomb! Instead of the basic 3 items to cater, the honeycomb reintroduces a number of 7 new items.

It actually might not be new but just that there was more to the 3 items waiting to be discovered. In the honeycomb, you’ll now find a list of items like:

• Useful
• Usable
• Desirable
• Findable
• Accessible
• Credible
• Valuable

Now do you understand why 37signals projects really work? It’s really aastounding now thinking that they’ve put that much effort to cater for all the these things.

For a rush project, I don’t think I’ll even fulfill half of the list.

Wow!