Five Disciplines of User Experience Design
Jeff Lopez-Stuit mentioned these five User Experience (UX) disciplines in his talk at SD West:
- Information Architecture – the information elements and objects and business rules defining their relationships
- Interaction Design – layout, flow of information and feedback provided to users
- Usability Engineering – to ensure your software behaves as users will expect
- Visual Design – graphics, color, look, feel and visual quality and consistency
- Human-Computer Interaction – identifying the user interface elements available for use including new Web 2.0 features
I was curious about the details and found this recent article, The Five Competencies of User Experience Design online. It describes these five UX disciplines in more detail and renames discipline (5) Prototype Engineering. I like that name because it focuses on the front end of the software development process where a little bit of prototyping can help you try out UI ideas. These days it is easy to create confusing UI with Web 2.0 or Flash frameworks and some prototyping helps avoid confusing software coming back from offshore.
Use of these UX disciplines in creating your software should be considered. It is unwise to expect your programmers to successfully engineer your user’s experience as well as your software, especially if they are offshore.
On the other hand, you can usually apply these disciplines during each iteration of development and improve your user interface over time. And some of them can be handled by your offshore team. For example, many offshore firms have graphics designers with experience to handle the Visual Design discipline.
One Accelerance client recently used an offshore team to create UI screen mock-ups in Visual Studio. The client collaborated with the offshore team on all five disciplines. When the screens were completed the team started adding the code to deliver the functionality.
Improving the user experience provided by your application can mean the difference between success and failure. Don’t be shy about asking for help. Many offshore teams will be able to tackle some or all of these five UX disciplines.
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