There’s More to User Experience Than Pretty Pixels
The presenter portrayed in Pete Whalen's blog post, Considering the Past, of Testing and User Experience II seems to perpetuate a common misconception about user experience (UX) design. Namely, the post makes it sound as though UX is solely about layout, colour themes, and other such visuals; conversely, if a product looks good, the post makes it seem as if it will be easy for people to use.
Reducing UX design to such rudiments is akin to saying that all a violinist does is pull a horsehair across some strings.
What is it, then, that UX designers do? While the phrase user experience sounds arbitrary, overbroad, and amorphous, the answer is unequivocally concrete: They make your product work well for your users. UX designers attempt to narrow the gap between what people expect your product to do and what it actually does. While their work may be most visibly manifested in wireframes, layouts, UI widgets, and other visual aspects of a product, user experience design goes far beyond user interface design.
UX designers look at a product in several different dimensions. They organize how information is displayed and how navigation tools are presented so people can easily find what they need to orient themselves in the app. They try to ensure that the system's behavior is consistent so that it doesn't do something that the user doesn't expect. UX designers figure out workflows and use cases, then structure the product's functionality so that users can efficiently accomplish what they want to do.
The first UX professional with whom I had the good fortune to work uttered a quip I'll always remember: "Guys, every time I see 'confirm' instead of 'undo', I die a little inside." It's a well-known UX idiom that asking a user to confirm an action with Are You Sure? is a downright rude thing to do when you could implement an Undo function instead. For example, requiring confirmation for an irreversible change like deleting a document sounds like a good idea at first.
However, if a user mistakenly hits OK when they should have hit Cancel, they have now permanently destroyed their own work. It’s far better to make deletion a reversible change via Undo. Your product should be forgiving when a user makes a mistake and not use the mistake as a license to punish him. This, to me, exemplifies the spirit of UX design.
Having a broad base of generalist skills helps testers perform their jobs more effectively. If we're testing a web application, we hope to have enough security knowledge to catch obvious holes and enough familiarity with the database to know when things have gone awry. The same holds true for user experience design; it's a skill set that applies to any type of product.
As testers, we are uniquely positioned to offer feedback on all aspects of a product. We may not have a well-equipped usability lab at our beck and call, but we can still point out workflows that are awkward, controls that are confusing, or an interface where a simple misstep means dire consequences for a user's data. Whether you work with a user experience designer or not, learning about what really constitutes UX design will be a worthwhile investment.
