Karl Smith User Experience Architect (UEA) It's all about making other peoples experiences good ones

Subsistence, Resolution, Gain or Advantage result levels of user experience (UX)

 Subsistence, Resolution, Gain or Advantage UX?

What do clients require, what are clients getting and can they tell the difference in the level of ux or do they just not call again?

There is a major problem with user experience as it evolves, many practitioners are not underwriting their output with recent ux research but are relying on past patterns. In turn this has caused the creation of streams or levels of UX capability and delivery; Subsistence, Resolution, Gain or Advantage UX. The notion of pattern based UX is being added to by major software companies building static interaction libraries for front end development tools as if everything in user experience and interactive systems can be or should be limited to the same interactive behaviours as every other system! If I was commissioning some digital system I would want to know who else the same thing has been done for already.

Subsistence level UX

Pattern based user experience, where the UX person (interaction designer, UX developer) or whoever providing the service has not conducted UX requirements gathering and UX research is subsistence level UX. The result of this type of UX is survival but it does not support growth as it was not conceived by understanding targeted users.

Resolution based UX

Fixing basic problems with a user experience would at first glance appear easy, but in fact it's more difficult from a green field project, because no matter how bad the experience is, people have become use to it. With users involved it's not a fix problem, it's a migration problem. UX people should be asking themselves 'how do I in UX facilitate users moving from one experience to another?' This requires a mixture of analytics and user workshops (group work) to rapidly find a common interactive language for the systems target audience.

Gain based UX

Understanding the motivation, desires and needs of targeted users in defining ux requirements (changing the project/business requirements) enable gain type UX. This type of UX is front loaded on to projects to establish clarity of focus that enables the adoption and rapid integration of complex interactive systems.

Advantage based UX

Advantage based UX, is like gain in that the focus is the user, but at a strategic and architectural level. Almost everyone you ask at the strategic level will say 'yes we focus on the user' but they don't think like the user, they think like someone selling or engaging with the user and are not objective. Advantage based UX has the rights the question the reason for projects asking 'what benefit does the user get from this? does this reduce our trusted brand status? etc.' Advantage is always set by being where there market is often before they know that where they are themselves. How? By modelling user logic, user behaviours, user interaction, external factors upon personas and target markets it's really complex, that's why so few people and companies do it.