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Jesse James Garrett’s Elements of User Experience

Jesse James Garrett’s The Elements of User Experience: User Centered Design for the Web is certainly the piece de resistance of or the user experience design and Garrett’s something of the godfather of the discipline. You simply cannot do UXD and not have read the Elements. Together with ia/recon and the Visual Vocabulary (already drafted in the 2002 book), the Elements form a solid basis for understanding the discipline and for framing later works. Garrett established pillars for the self-definition web designers (to use the broadest possible term) that still hit the mark today.

User experience is not about how a product works on the inside [...]. User experience is about how it works on the outside, where a person comes into contact with it and has to work with it. (10)

[...] how would you feel about a coffeemaker that you were able to use successfully only part of the time? How would you feel about the manufacturer? Would you buy another product from that company in the future? Probably not. Thus, for the want of a button that clicks, a customer is lost. (11)

Here’s where I start disagreeing: The bulk of coffeemakers probably get bought because a) the price is right and b) the color matches the kitchen tiles. If the mixer from the same manufacturer has the better price point (or the sexy design), it will get bought. In fact, items with a lot of open shelf time will get bought if they (or their price tags) look good even if one can see they’ll be uncomfortable to use. Where’s that Philippe Starck juice squeezer again? So, so what? Once the sale’s been made, bad usability is no longer the vendor’s problem.

And here’s where the internet makes a world of a difference. If I hate my coffeemaker, I have to shell out again to get another one. If I hate your website, I’ll buy from someone else. Web usability directly, immediately and repeatedly influences your sales. But then I guess that in 2002, Garrett needed those “real world” parallels to get his point across. He knows: “On the Web, user experience becomes even more important than it is for other kinds of products.” (11)

In virtually every case, a Web site is a “self-sevice” product. There is no instruction manual to read beforehand, no training seminar to attend, no customer service representative to help guide the user through the site. There is only the user, facing the site alone with only her wits and experience to guide her. (11)

Web sites are complicated pieces of technoloy, and something funny happens when people have trouble using complicated pieces of technology: they blame themselves. [...] They feel stupid. [...] And if you intend to drive people away from your site, it’s hard to imagine a more effective approach than making them feel stupid when they use it. (17)

Check that. That’s an attitude I experienced first hand back when I taught evening classes in web design. When I can’t handle a web site, I usually blame the designer. Most of the time I can even point out the five most frequently made errors within the first couple of clicks. Not so infrequent users. They blames themselves. Almost every time. But their and my reactions are exactly the same: we turn elsewhere. On the web, an alternative is only a click away.

The foundation of successful user experience is a clearly articulated strategy. Knowing both what we want the site to accomplish for our organization and what we want the site to accomplish for our users helps inform all decisions we have to make about every aspect of the user experience. (39)

And here’s one to keep you going: “When things change during implementation, the answer is not to throw up your hands and declare the futility of writing specs. The answer is to be vigilant about keeping the spec in sync with development.” (72)

Yet, at times, what with the meta data or search engines or HTML contraints Garrett describes, one wonders about the complexity of the projects that underlie his insights. … And wishes he’d compose Visual Vocabulary 2.0 for web-based applications.

Jesse James Garrett, The Elements of User Experience. (Voices (New Riders)), New York: New Riders, 2003. 194 pages. ISBN 0-7357-1202-6.

P.S.: I heard Garrett speak about Adaptive Path’s Charmr project during last year’s World Usability Day event in Darmstadt and got to ask the overwhelming question (at least for someone with a background in project management): how many person days? Five people, Garrett said, nine weeks (inclusing the documentation).

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