Are you an architect or developer and do you think the user experience is not something you should care about? Well, you are wrong.
I was listening to an interesting series of podcasts from ARCast with Ron Jacobs on why an architect should care about the User Experience, and how to do it.
I think the reason why an architect should care about the end user experience is all in the title of this post. If you look at any enterprise application, split in tiers (usually 3 tiers), with interfaces between them, you have to think at the end user as 4th tier of your application, with the UI being the interface between the presentation layer and the user brain. So, an architect should put in that User Experience design the same effort he puts designing the structure of a database, or the business logic interface that exposes all the possible operation to the presentation layer.
He also brings some examples of what is a bad user experience, and how a poorly designed user interface can decide the success or the failure of the application: no matter if the application does what it is supposed to do, if the end user cannot find a way to use it, or takes a lot of time to perform an operation, it's unusable and will be a failure.
Unfortunately the shows are not grouped together, but spread along the schedule, so here is the collection of all of them. Simon Guest explains his ideas on UX and how he approaches that problem with his own framework:
- The Architecture of User Experience: Simon Guest discuss about his UX framework, made up by 3 points: Visualization, Foundation and Context. The following episodes dive deep into each point.
- User Experience - Visualization: users see our application through the eyes, so the UX is all about building data visualization that work
- User Experience - Foundation: which are the tools that an architect can use to build a great user experience
- User Experience - Context: words have different meanings depending on the context they are. The same with menu, icons and other UI objects
I also found interesting the interviews Ron Jacobs did at the SPARK UX summit this January:
- SPARK UX - Analyst Bola Rotibi and Thoughtworks Agile Architect Jeff Patton
- SPARK UX with Luke Kowalski and Louis Rosenfeld
- SPARK UX - David Platt
And a few more other interesting audio shows:
- Architecting the User Experience with Martin Grannel
- Seeking a Great User Experience with seek.com.au
- User Experience Interaction Design (and also available in video)