User Experience

Dale Herigstad: That term user experience, that's what we are really designing is an experience, which means it's actually a quite broader thing. An example would be when we started looking at when we designed an enhanced TV application. Here is an hour-long show and here are some enhancements that works with that. But if you take the timeline of that show and you say okay, what are the customers doing before, the day before or the week before? There's promotional opportunities that steer people to the content, get them ready. When people experience the content in that show and through maybe a marking system or something, the experience of that show which is if it's based on cooking tips, and redos, the remakes, or whatever the show is about, that those things can actually transfer directly to mobile devices and help people a day later or a week later. So it's really looking at that continuity of an experience across different media. So it's a broader view on what is going on. Jason Brush: We design products and services and experiences that span across many different platforms in order to facilitate information architecture, right, which is an organization of content; interaction design, the behavior of interfaces; and usability, right, making sure that something is sensible and accessible and useful. We've put all of that under the umbrella of user experience. I often think about my department, my user experience here is being the advocate for the user, really putting themselves in the place of the person who is going to be operating in interface and trying to think about what that person wants out of a product and trying to consider all the different ways in which something is going to be used. When you talk about the web and you talk about mobile, well, those increasingly are becoming more stable, consistent platforms to work against in which we don't have to think about the limitations... we don't have to think about just designing something just for the web or just for mobile. We can begin to think about, well how does information flow seamlessly from the web to mobile, to your TV, to other things? So rather than think about platforms, we often think about systems. We want to create information systems and design systems that work really fluidly from one platform to another. That said, there are still limitations with individual platforms. And the most important limitation to consider is the context, right? So if you are designing something for mobile, you have to be thinking about mobility, you have to be thinking how somebody is going to using your interface when they are in a subway car and holding onto the rail with one hand and then operating with a single hand. When they are surrounded by other people. Very, very different than thesort of experiences which you might have from sitting at home on the couch with other people, right, and watching TV. It's a very social environment, which in turn is different from sitting all by yourself, at a computer, at a desk, right? So the platforms which we are given, the technology distinctions between the platforms is getting reduced, right? However, the context in which people use things definitely is not changing. Well, it's changing a little bit, but it's not changing as rapidly as the technology is becoming leveled. One other things that we try to do is to make sure that whenever we were adding these flourishes, these things that you might be able to -- that end up being the brand touch points as it were, that those things have meaning and purpose. And we really want to make sure that all of these things help people understand where they are or what they need to do next. We often talked about way finding, right? So how do you know where you are in an interface and where you were and where you can go next, right? If we can use things which are visually rich to do that, the richness of that interaction becomes the brand that we are trying to express.