I’ve been reading a thought provoking article by Helge Fredheim over at Smashing Magazine on “Why User Experience Can’t Be Designed“. It provides an interesting summary on Hassenzahl’s model of UX noting that UX can only be designed for, particularly given that designers can only focus on requirements for “task solution, final goals and achievements” and that UX goes beyond these to include and encompass “other aspects into consideration as well, such as emotional, hedonic, aesthetic, affective and experiential variables”. These, of course, are all psychological factors — something close to my own heart and that I am all too aware of that few people who call themselves User Experience Designers really have any great knowledge of, let alone any strong capability to turn these into requirements in order for developers to build.
I thought I would add fuel to this fire and add in a model based on the transtheoretical model of behavioural change that reinforces the psychological complexity of what we’re now calling UX. It goes beyond Peter Morville’s Honeycomb model for UX and places it firmly in the context of use, action and reinforcement of that action to either negatively or positively impact on the likelihood of futue actions.
UX in the context of use as articulated by the transtheoretical model of behavioural change
This perspective reinforces that a user’s experience isn’t just about content, or visual design, or a subjective experience based on usefulness or desire, but a reinforcing loop that goes beyond just creating a desire to use a product or service and whose outcome predicts whether someone is likely to re-engage with your design again, or whether they will tell everyone in their social circles powered by Twitter, Google+ and Facebook, that it’s crap and not to bother. It means, moreover, that unless you have a multi-disciplinary perspective in your Teams’ skill set (likely powered by Agile methods) you’re going to be unlikely to adequately produce the base requirements expected by modern users of their experience.
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