User Experience Design
I’m at GUADEC in Istanbul. I just listened to Leisa Reichelt talk about User Experience Design. Very nice presentation about something way too few open source developers really and truly focus on.
User experience design is very different from focusing on usability (and even that often isn’t done enough). User experience includes how people feel about using a product. So suddenly being cool can be a plus. The usability of the iPhone virtual keyboard is rather bad if you have larger hands. But the iPhone is considered way cool, so in the end the user experience might be good. On the other hand you can design a very usable piece of software, but if its underlying design is flawed and doesn’t reflect what the user really wants or needs to do, then the best user interface in the world is not going to fix it.
The open source community certainly is a good example for how things can go wrong with user experience. I brought a Linux laptop to the conference and after having used a Mac as my main system for so long it is really eye opening to me how many things just don’t work smoothly on a Linux system - and how the experience for me as the user is quite frustrating. From connecting to a wireless network to inserting an SD card from my camera - almost every application as a different design for its user interface and often they appear to be in the way of what I actually want to do.
Part of this is caused by the way open source software is written - a lose collection of mostly volunteers interested in creating good software. Upfront design is often considered in the way of creativity. But it also is an indication that this is a very hard problem. It takes a lot of research and hard work to truly understand what a user really wants. Let’s hope that some of the people in the audience are considering this as something worth focusing on.
Thanks for visiting!
I hope this was helpful - if not, please leave a comment and let me know why! Were you searching for something else? Did I miss an important aspect?
