UX - State of Art? Rather State of Mind!

UX or User eXperience is a phrase used perceptively and differently by the different individuals in the industry. It's the majority of similar perceptions (and uniform agreement of perceptions) of individuals in an organisation towards UX is what leads to the Organisational Perspective towards UX as a practice and profession.

If we recall the parable of "The Blind Men and the Elephant", we can clearly understand the perception towards UX in the industry. Just like the parable where the blind men when encountered an elephant, touched it's different parts and perceived that the elephant is either like a snake, or a snake, or a fan, or a tree trunk or a pillar. As each one touched the parts of the elephant, their perception made them believe that the elephant is either one of these.

Same situation is true with UX. Its believed to be what a perception of individuals are towards it just like the belief that the blind men had towards the elephant through their touch.

Perception 1 - UX is all about Looks

I won't comment on any perception if it's right or wrong, but leaving on you to judge based on the rest of the article when I briefly reveal what UX is in it's entirety like the elephant. This perception is based on the first hand experience derived when people tend to use a good looking and eye catchy product more than that which has plenty of features.

Reason behind this perception

We humans are by mind Hygiene conscious, which means if given two similar options we always select a more cleaner or a perceptually cleaner looking option. This also means if one product has an intact colour coat and other, though new, clean and functional, but has a blistered colour coat, then majority of chance exists that the mind would force us to select the non-blistered one just out of the perception that the one with blisters would be defective or just a used piece having smaller life than the one which has smooth and fresh looking colour coat. It may be true that the one that has an intact colour coat may be defective, or used or even older than the blistered one. But our mind still forces us to select the non-blistered one. This is something derived from our eXperience with external appearance. Somewhere in our mind we have experienced that the good looking external appearance indicate good state of product while the blisters, dirt, dust, etc. indicate "Bad" state.

Perception 2 - UX is Component of a product what Customers see

Similar to Perception 1, this perception misplaces UI (User Interface) with the term UX (User eXperience). In the software development industry, where features and back-stage functionalities play a vital role, it's obvious for the stakeholders to assume that the interfaces through which those features are to be accessed are just a trivial elements which can be built any time. As per this perception, UI elements are something which Users use and so constitutes the UX when the graphic designer just adds some colours or flashy graphics to them, just to make the interface look a bit fancy or eye catchy.

Reason behind this perception

This perception is related to the first perception. Here the individuals assume that their work is done once the interfaces or the access points to the features they want to provide to the users are in place and beautified to attract the users to use them. What they fail to understand is that mere UI doesn't drive the entire UX. Like for example the feature for “Sign in” is built and offered for the users, but the button to access this feature is placed in a most insignificant corner of the screen, just for the sake of showing a catchy graphic or promotional content to the users. To add the frusttration, there would be a small text something like “To know more sign up”.

The user here is not interested in your offer, but a quick way to sign in and get the work done. Now in this case although a very Beautiful “User Interface” exists, the “User eXperience” is “Bitter”. Now “Sign in” button is just a tiny example, we would have come across more massive inerface blunders in our day to day life with applications we use.

Perception 3 - UX is like Market Research to deep dive in your customer’s preferences

This perception revolves around market competition and what other products provide to their customers. To satisfy this perception it’s a common practice trying to Mock a competitive application and just re-brand the look and feel. A classic examples are the antivirus applications, Live Media Streaming Apps, Banking apps, etc. This perception is somewhat closer to what actually UX is, but still is not a complete part of UX as a practice.

Reason behind this perception

Basis of this perception lies to the fact that customers have a memory and learnings towards actons. Like no matter what shape of a switch would be, the users always know that flipping the swich up leads to “Off” action and flipping down leads to “On” action. Based on this simple psychological principle the market research is done around all the similar applications and the user feedback over usge of those applications. This provides an insight towards what users like and what they hate in many of such applications, which turns beneficial to avoid the same mistakes and even improve the product to be built. But over usage of this leads to privacy concerns for users, such as tracking a user’s daily routine, their contacts and relations, purchase habits, etc. Although most of the service providers seek concent from the users before tracking these details. Again I am not commenting whether these practices are right or wrong

What UX actually is?

The space here wold be too small to explain what UX is in its entirety, but let me summarize. The Perceptions when put together leads to different stages in UX. The UX practice is not a one man show. It constitutes of people of different skills and levels working together like a consortium. You cannot expect a single person performing Research, Design, Development and Testing. Just like the Software Development Life Cycle, UX too has it's own life cycle. It coincides with both Product Management as well as Service Management.

• It starts with Research, Requirement Refining, User Segmentation (Persona), Building Information Architecture, Information Flows, etc.
• And then moving towards skeletal activities such as building Blue Prints (Wireframes), brainstorming over ideas and interface logic, inviting sample users for testing the wireframes and interface flow
• Finally adding the Wow factor to the look and feel (which again includes research towards accessibility features, colour psychology, cross cultural awareness, etc.)
• Once it's done the code level development activities begin for building the components of the User Interfaces based on the above work. That is why it is also mocking said "UX is not UI"
• There are lots articles and reference materials out there to learn about UX. One such knowledge house is "The Interaction Design Foundation"(Tough I am not endorsing any organisation, you can find some useful articles and even courses around UX there). Also to get more elaboration insights on difference between the Visual Designer Role and a UX Professional role do read my article https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/hiring-ux-engineer-visual-designer-pravin-dhayfule/