User Experience is transitioning from it’s buzz word phase into an accepted and necessary industry term. However, asking around you may get various definitions and opinions on what user experience really is. Wikipedia states that user experience:

“is a term used to describe the overarching experience a person has as a result of their interactions with a particular product or service, its delivery, and related artifacts, according to their design.” and that “User experience addresses and integrates all user-facing aspects of a company, from email and web sites to off-site presence in print and on other sites.”

Okay, so you get it…but do you really get it? What helps me understand user experience is to think of real world (aka things you can touch, smell, taste) analogies. Say there are two identical apartments. The floor plan and square footage are exactly the same. The first apartment belongs to an old lady. Everything is white and flowery. The furniture is formal, the art is dated, and their are weird plates and ceramic cats on the antique furniture. Now imagine the second apartment perfectly suited to your tastes. Dark wood floors, big couches, good lighting, good smells. The two apartments serve the exact same purposes yet you would clearly choose your place over hers (and she would chose hers over yours). Your place just feels right. You feel comfortable there and enjoy just being present in the environment. It speaks to you.

Now take that same analogy and relate it to the web. Are there certain sites that you love being at, sites that make you happy and make you feel comfortable? Maybe it is a travel site where you plan your vacations, or maybe it is your favorite sports site or social network. Similarly, there are sites that you dislike being at, maybe it’s a site that you have to use while you’re at work. Maybe it is your email, or a site like Stumbleupon that you feel like you have to re-learn every time you use it. Sometimes you cannot even explain why you don’t like a certain site, you just don’t. It doesn’t speak to you.

There are tons of elements that are incorporated into UX. Psychology, information architecture, user interface and usability to name a few. It is also important to note that the user’s experience isn’t solely determined by a website. As experience designers (not UX designers, however very similar) have noted for decades, the experience is established at various touch points. For online business, these touch points can include your website, emails, phone calls, postcards, parties or anything that touches or affects your users.

Providing the best possible user experience is all about understanding your users. Why are they on your site? What do they want to accomplish? How old are they? What do they do in their free time? All of these questions can help you begin to design the experience, or using the previous analogy, design the apartment.

So why is this so important? There are millions of users out there, there are also tons of competitors that they can choose from. Users will choose the service that speaks to them. Maybe they like the design, maybe their friends use it, maybe they like how easy it is to use or maybe they simply trust the brand.

The guy across the hall from you has your same furniture, but just got a bigger tv and now all of your friends prefer his place. Can’t afford a bigger tv? I heard the old lady has a great cookie recipe

Related Posts

Look at it another way (a list apart)

How To Observe the User and Tap Into the Experience (usability post)

Top 10 UX Myths (ThinkVitamin)

Photo credits

http://www.flickr.com/photos/8230585@N06/3216500283/

http://www.flickr.com/photos/remodeleze/3576773102/

Impact Engine is a online ad optimization platform that measurably optimizes any display ad campaign or business operation.  Their innovative platform provides services for advertisers, agencies, ad networks and publishers.

Earlier this year, dt put the finishing touches on the user interface design and user experience for their robust web application. Since then, the team has been hard at work and the product has been gaining momentum.  Revenues are growing very quickly and they now support and serve over 5,000 clients!  They have a plethora of success stories and clients listed on their website.

The Impact Engine team recently completed a module to auto-optimize display ad variations in a campaign for a variety of metrics such as impressions, engagement, clickthroughs, etc. The algorithm is proprietary and has already proven to produce 2-5x improvement in display ad performance which is a huge gain for small and large size advertisers and publishers/networks.

They were recently featured on newmediahub.com and the following new features were detailed:

• Seasonally-themed ad template catalog. Designed to help clients planning online holiday promotions optimize campaign performance. Each ad template theme comes in a variety of IAB-compliant sizes, such as Medium Rectangle and Leaderboard.

• Exotic Format Ads: Allows clients to upload, publish and edit “exotic” ads—i.e., those outside the confines of normal page borders—in real time. Exotic ads typically float atop, or push down, page content (expanding and contracting based on the users’ interaction). Thanks to their eye-catching functionality, exotic ads often receive the highest brand awareness and click-through rates of any display ad formats on the Web. “Our simple configuration tool enables our clients to position the ad on the page in real time and adjust the ‘exotic’ ad playback settings after the ad has been deployed live – with just the click of a button,” says Bryan Depew, Impact Engine’s VP of Product Development.

• Analytics Module with 3D capability. Enables clients to instantly render graphical representations of   ad and campaign performance. Real-time visual feedback allows quick determination of which ads are performing best, providing vital information on where to increase or decrease ad spending.

• Reports Module. Generates customized campaign performance reports for both digital and print distribution; users can create downloadable reports over specific periods of time for detailed data trend analysis. Reports contain both daily and hourly performance metrics for each ad running within a given campaign.

You can read the whole newmediahub.com article here: Impact Engine: Advertising software gets better and better

If you are heading to ad:tech New York this year, make sure to drop by their exhibit at booth 1912.

There are web development firms that create websites like everyone else. Then there is digital-telepathy. dt is the partner you need when you need to create a serious SaaS offering or Web 2.0 corporate presence.