The web development has changed a lot over the past few years and has been changing. After the dot com boom, came a period which we may term it as E-Commerce age. Lots of sites focusing on selling products appeared in cyber world. Social networking can be termed as the current trend. But in this entire period one thing was definitely overlooked, which is user experience.
As written in wikipedia
User experience, often abbreviated UX, is a term used to describe the overall experience and satisfaction a user has when using a product or system. It most commonly refers to a combination of software and business topics, such as selling over the web, but it applies to any result of interaction design. Voice User Interface (VUI) systems, for instance, are a frequently mentioned design that can lead to a poor user experience.
What is user experience? Well, to put it in straight way, it is nothing but a feeling which you experience when you visit a website. A website may be rich in content, high in graphics and great in terms of service, but if your experience is not so good there, you might feel a little shaky before revisiting it. User experience is not purely the user friendliness of the site, nor it is the GUI, but simply it is a combination of overall effect which gives you a comfortable feeling while surfing the website. As an example, the popularity of word press blog is not only for the reason that, it is a great blog software or it can have a pretty cool design, but I would say, it is for how it works. The ease of admin panel, clear understanding of everything without reading a single book on wordpress, makes it not only convenient to use, but imparts a good feeling too.
If you are an active follower of web trends, then you’ve definitely observed, that the use of flash and Ajax in web application have rapidly increased in recent months. Why so? Flash and Ajax both have the capabilities to present you dynamic data while keeping you in the same page. I think you now understand that how much you detest nagging page refreshing in the early years of internet. We didn’t realize its importance until we got the experience. If creating a business idea is a key to success, I believe inventing a new user experience is the road to success.
In the beginning, I pointed out that user friendliness is not always user experience. User friendliness often refers how less confusing and unambiguous is the usage of the web site. Think of a website which is very complicated in following it. But if you get clear instructions in every page, then how good you feel? Similarly good design not always means great colors, graphics; the font and position of graphics also count. In my opinion, below given are some of the factors which govern user experience.
- Font ( I prioritize it most )
- Color ( White font on black background may look great but not a good user experience)
- Easy navigation
- Clear help instruction in every page
- Display of proper error message in a language understandable to user
- Good GUI
- Keeping out unnecessary things out of main focus area
- Keeping out advertisement from main focus area
- Minimal use of form refresh
- Minimal use of form validation
- Keeping validated data in a form in case of errors, so that the user need not to type it again
- Using color to point out error while feeling up a form.
- And finally to avoid downtime for your website
In his website Peter Morville rightly pointed out what basically is user experience. In his dictionary; Useful, Usable, Desirable, Findable, Accessible, Credible, Valuable are the terms one can associate with user experience. Whatever the thing is, it ultimately matters if you feel good or bad after experiencing a website. If you feel good, then the website has done a great job and if you feel bad, then its not up to the mark.
I personally feel in the coming years more stress will be given on user experience than on design and anything else. As a cyber world subscriber I can only hope for the best and can look forward to a great surfing.
