What’s Inside a Great User Experience?
There is a lot of stuff around our users’ life. All the way from the phone in their hands, culture, ideals, and up to the maximum values floating around in their surrounding world.
We as UX Designers focus really hard on creating delightful experiences for our users, and a lot of stuff must be done to achieve this goal. Research must be conducted, Personas and Journey maps created and Brainstorming, Prototypes, and Testing need to be performed too.
You can’t just pop your brilliant idea and stick it on the wall with a catchy phrase. If you aim to work the right way, you’ll have the need for all these data, which ultimately will allow you to get a better understanding and develop empathy for the users’ problems and their surrounding world. Then you may map this great experience and touchpoints that will make the difference, and then, maybe, write down some magic in that colorful note in your hand.
So, in order to create good experiences, we need to know who our users are, and most importantly, how they interact with the world. Only then can we figure out how to build the best experience for them.
This experience happens in a limited area, with a certain view of culture and even the world itself. With some training, recognizing your users is easy, and mapping experiences comes as no big deal. But there is a specific world view attached to that experience that is kind of tricky to figure out.
You yourself are a user every moment in your life, crafting experiences from your standpoint, building your own version of the world and how things function and will always do so. Empathy is pretty much an alignment with the users’ point of view that allows you to know how they see the world. According to this particular way of thinking, you craft with your design the nice experience that the user will be expecting.
Let’s focus for a moment on the ‘point of view’. In the center, a user. Around it, a world. The interaction of the user with the world creates a standpoint. With this standpoint we grasp with our sight and the power of our mind, certain aspects of reality out there, understanding a portion of the world which is presented to us, and from here, crafting our own judgment of how things work.
In other words, this standpoint is the outcome of the sum of all the user’s experiences that happen in a lifetime.
And let me ask, have you ever wondered what’s inside this great user experience? From your own point of view there is maybe a phone in your hand, a computer on your desk, maybe a nice smelling coffee and a lovely tiny plant somewhere there. Now look around.
We can go further and we’ll get to see some people walking down the street. Even if we don’t see them, we are constantly indirectly interacting with other human beings, such as the guy preparing a tasty meal you ordered minutes ago through some delivery app; the people managing this app in some random building so it runs smoothly all over the delivery area; the tech guys giving support to the physical servers which are God-knows-where in the world.
Then you can abstract a little and see some ‘similarities’ among different delivery apps. You can distinguish Pete from Ana, and also Ana from Rebeca, and find, between these two, the fact that they are ‘humans’’. You can even imagine or draw on some paper what you normally picture of the figure of a generic human. A head, torso, and maybe a pair of arms and legs.
And there is more. Among all these humans you’ll find that, according to their actions, some are ‘good’ and others are ‘bad’. You could have some piece of art in your house, maybe a painting hanging on your wall, and say that it is ‘beautiful’, or that it reminds you about ‘justice’, ‘liberty’, or ‘hope’. And at this point, you can’t picture any of these properties by itself. You may argue that something is beautiful, but you can’t point to the beauty itself, nor even imagining it alone.
We can say there is some gradation in reality, going from the objects around me, people interactions, to generalities and values. In order to understand this great user experience, we may dig deep into its fundamental properties and find 4 primary categories: Objects, Characters, Ideals and Values.
And before we break our neck analyzing each one. I must admit it, I’m no genius. I’m borrowing from Philosophy some principles of this weird thing called Ontology. Leaving aside all the weird metaphysics stuff, Ontology helps us understand how we human beings craft our own picture of our surrounding world through categories of the things out there and their relations between each other.
And there are as many ontologies as philosophers out there. For example, following Husserl’s phenomenological school [1] of the early twentieth century, there are at least the categories of existence, ideals, values, and metaphysics.
And yes, if you are into Big Data you will find this kind of familiar. Ontology in Data Sciences makes use of the categorical and relational principles to apply them into Databases so scientists can find patterns and insights on research. What if we designers also take some of these things into our field and see what happens?
Objects
The first category covers all the tangible and visible stuff around us. We could say there are primarily the things at hand and things at sight. [2]
This includes pretty much every physical object around you, even yourself. From the phone in your pocket all the way to the blue sky above your head, objects are everything we can perceive with our senses.
We could even cut the words from this explanation and point the things out there, feel, and handle them with our own hands. An object is not only the ball over the soccer field but the game you may play with your friends. The way you kick the ball, how your fellow teammates run and aim for a goal, the celebration when someone wins the game. You can speak a lot about it, even write a book, but the very use of words is a symbolical way to represent reality, a first abstraction of the actual event that took place. The most factual thing is the very first impression of the experience itself, objects.
Characters
But not everything out there are objects (even though some low-ethic people might think otherwise), sometimes, something becomes someone.
Picture yourself as if you were at your local coffee shop. You may have a coffee on the table. Focus your thoughts on that coffee and write down every possible connection to other objects out there: coffee beans, water, cup, sugar, spoon…at some point you may reach a waiter, the guy that prepared your coffee, even the people that sowed the coffee beans.
At some point, you may reach links on things that are more than something to be handled, and face the handler itself. These new beings at sight are different by the fact that they have the power to shape the world.
And they aren’t just the human beings around. Think about historical and even fictional characters that model our behavior and therefore shape things nowadays. Even things like brands or institutions have some kind of personality that influences our fashion and beliefs.
Following the example on your coffee, characters are: 1) People around, like the waiter, 2) Historical and fictional individuals, as the people that discovered these beloved beans and myths around them, and 3) Brands and institutions, like Starbucks.
Ideals
Let’s go further and think about ‘contrasts’ and ‘similarities’ among other ‘coffee shops’. Ideals are all these generalizations that define certain objects’ categories, properties, and their relations with each other. [3]
Imagine a dog. You may have in your mind some picture of a dog you’ve met somewhere, maybe there is a dog-related memory in your head, or maybe there is actually a dog near you. Whatever the case, you should come up with at least a handful of memories regarding ‘dogs’.
All of those memories are aligned with a universal concept of the so-called being ‘dog’. I could even define a dog as a domesticated canine, others might refer to them as little furry full of love, some more maybe call them as simple as Puppy, Max, or Bailey Bailey Bailey.
Whatever the case, this concept is an abstraction of every example you could possibly label with the word ‘dog’. The words themselves are symbols needed by language to represent and communicate this idea. Dog, Hund, Perro…we can even define this furry being in many languages.
But above all these labels there is a generalization that helps us define and distinguish dogs from cats or coffee pots. This generalization is an idea that we use all the time to shape our thoughts and communicate them to other people, making sense of words such as ‘dog’.
Ideals are also properties and relations. The furriness of the dog may apply to cats, bunnies, or some guy’s beard. We can even define the furriness as the hair layer density and measure it. With some mathematics, you could point that this dog is fluffier than the other, taller than this one, healthier among those others.
In short, leaving aside language and particular experiences on dogs, Ideals are all the generalities our users can possibly think about.
Values
Values aren’t something you could run into. They aren’t even beings out there that you could possibly point out and say ‘this is beauty’ or ‘this is justice’. Users will never face beauty nor justice by themselves but through other things that they value.
In other words, values are entities attached to other beings. [4] A painting might feel beautiful for me, but it’s not the beauty itself that I’m thinking about but more like the beautifulness that I perceive through the picture I’m watching right now.
I could feel this beauty by admiring The Starry Night, maybe through the perfection of Vincent Van Gogh’s composition, or by the mastery of the oils technique. Beauty could come to me by the story that comes up to my mind every time I remember that painting, maybe there is a nice memory of my parents attached to it. And even my knowledge could be limited and my language short to the point of not being able to describe it, but I would surely find beauty through that painting, or any other.
And if at the next moment the painting disappears, the beautifulness I was looking up might disappear as well, but the value of the beauty will remain as to be seen in many other objects. Maybe through another human being, such as the eyes of my beloved wife next to me.
Beauty could also be seen through a scientific discovery through the eyes of a scientist. Maybe in an act of kindness or by the cute little dress of Cinderella that someone’s daughter is wearing. Whatever the case, it’s a fact, values are there around in our world.
And we won’t debate whether values are something by themselves or mere tools created by humans. Let’s leave this matter to philosophers. We will just face the fact that values are something out there that our users think about and see through many objects out there, and therefore are something to be aware of when crafting designs with a user experience in mind.
I believe these principles could be particularly helpful to understand how experiences are constituted and therefore help us guide our understanding of a user’s point of view, now defined, with a little help from Ontology, as a great user experience.
With these categories, we could guide our seek of empathy in a more rational than an intuitive way. Objects, Characters, Ideals, and Values could be our compass to guide ideation and even design thinking itself.
But hey, that’s quite another matter and this essay is already too long. We will properly discuss it another day. See you next time.
[1] Edmund Husserl is one of the tough guys in Philosophy and you may need introductory articles and books for a direct understanding of his ideas. With that said, if you are curious on this subject, see Husserl, Edmund (1931) Ideas: General Introduction to Pure Phenomenology.
[2] Though my categories of Objects and Characters may feel based on ideas of the Existencialism movement from the early twentieth century, and more especially on Heidegger, Martin (1927) Being and Time, I think my ideas are pretty far from this weird methaphisical floor and go more along with a Cultural and Historial interpretative ground like on Gadamer’s Hermeneutics from Truth and Method (1960).
[3] Ideals’ Theories are found pretty much everywhere in Philosophy and Logic. As a nice introduction to the problem I recommend reading Plato’s Theory of forms.
[4] Values are a complex topic. On this article I’m following some of the ideas on Scheler, Max (1913–1916) Formalism in Ethics and Non-Formal Ethics of Values: A New Attempt Toward the Foundation of an Ethical Personalism.
