The user experience is how a user perceives or responds to using a product or service. At a high level, an excellent user experience is one that is:
Valuable
Clearly articulates the value proposition and the purpose of the product for the target audience, taking into account factors like right set of features, cost of ownership, context of use and ethnography.
Usable
Users can achieve their tasks with ease and efficiency, with the least amount of effort, without experiencing any frustration, wondering where something is located, or struggle to figure out how to do something.
Trustworthy
Work as expected, every time, without glitches. It lets the user achieve their goal without hitting any roadblocks.
Delightful
Elicits a positive response. Delight could be achieved by adding things that may not be required, but when added bring value.
This is a fairly vast topic and the above parameters just touch it at a very high level. Here are bunch of posts for further reading to delve down deeper:
- User Experience Design, Peter Morville
- Ten principles of good design, Dieter Rams
- Quality of Experience, Lauralee Alben
- The Meaning of User Experience, Tuomas Nurminen
- Definition of user experience, Niko Nyman
Updated 1st Nov
In General, the above points ['excellent user experience' parameters] holds good.
But, now a days the experience differs for each market segment and nature of the product
e.g.
1) Honestly speaking how many of the iPad users understand the complete features of that product?
2) Simple example, How many of us use the complete futures of the TV, alt east the buttons on remote control?
More over:
3) When an Indian consumer buys LED/LCD – all the above mentioned points may not be applicable.
4) When an Indian buy Low end Chinese phone Value for money takes over the trust worthy
“”If we want users to like our software, we should design it to behave like a likable person.”
– Alan Cooper
What parameters would you add to complete the definition Muru?
I like ‘Alben’ definition for UX & I too see some value in Forlizzi & Ford diagram for defining UX parameters.
Please share the links if you can. Also, I would still like to know what parameters you would like to add that address the concern you had raised.
Sorry Sachin, I am not sure about the link, I read long back.
I would like to add two more parameters
1) Context of Use
2) Social and Cultural influences / values
Muru, if the product doesn’t utilize the context properly or doesn’t take ethnography into account, designers would not have clearly articulated the value proposition. I believe the first point ‘Valuable’ addresses this, maybe I need to expand it’s definition to make it more clear.
Another great source for a high-level definition like this one is Peter Morville’s post entitled “User Experience Design” and in specific his User Experience Honeycomb diagram.
http://semanticstudios.com/publications/semantics/000029.php
Thanks for sharing the link Nick