- In a discussion on working with design, developing an understanding of the user experience is core. User experience design is about how we interact and engage with the product because building products is fundamentally about making a new experience or making an existing experience better.
- A good user experience is fundamental to a great product. This includes everything from the box that it comes in if there is one, to how a customer achieves their goals with their product, as well as what the product looks like and feels like.
- There are two basic approaches to design.
+ The first is that the customer should adapt to the product.
+ The second is that the product should work in a way that the user expects and understands.
- For a long time, user experience took a back seat in engineering because the engineers who built the product were also responsible for the design, the user experience directly represented how the product worked internally.
- In those cases, if there was a design team that was relegated to making icons for the interface that the engineering team created. This is why many people think design is just about making something look pretty. This is what most software look like when I started into my professional career.
- And this was not something that was built for technologists. This was something that was built for the average user. It required manuals. It required catalogs of manuals. It may have required training to even understand how to use the thing as an everyday user. This is what engineers built. What we have found since then is that there is a better way.
- And you see it time and time again in your daily interactions with consumer products, with your apps, with your software, with products you might be using for personal use or for business use.
- Things are much more intuitive. There are icons. There are illustrations. There are graphics and descriptors. And there's some level of an anticipation of how customers expect to use something and then designing for that.
- And that is central to a positive user experience. You see it in hardware. Here with the Nest Thermostat, a companion product as well as a companion app to go with that, so kind of a two-part system.
- Great, award-winning user experience and user design in both of these. And it can also exist in very basic products. This is actually a product that my family bought recently. That is a terrific product. It is a pot, it does what pots do. But what is a bit unique about it is the straining cover that allows you to take pasta, take vegetables, take whatever items that you might boil, pour the water out in a convenient and safe and quick manner while retaining all of the product in the pot itself.
- It also has fill lines interior to the pot so rather than trying to use measuring cups and finding the right cup with the right volume at the right time, it is simply embedded within the design of the product.In the upper right-hand graphic, you can see that in both liters and quarts.What you can also see are the pour spouts that are built in the very upper edge of the pot.
- So it doesn't restrict any of your conventional pot uses but it gives you again, added feature, an added functionality. Great user experience. Different than a conventional pot, anticipating what people's needs and wants are, event things that are unrealized.
- If you would have asked me as a customer what would I want out of my pot, I may not have imagined this.But now that I see it, I would not be interested in a pot without it.
