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

Definition of User Experience (UX)

User experience (UX) is about how a person feels, appropriates, attributes and the emotions engendered when thinking about using a product, system or service.

User experience highlights the experiential, affective, meaningful and valuable aspects of human interaction and ownership. It also includes a person’s perceptions (driven from a subject expert/specific experience, people know their life and experience intimately) of the practical aspects such as utility, ease of use and efficiency of the system.

User experience is both subjective and dynamic.

Subjective - Personal drivers can and often do outweigh practical considerations as users will walk through fire to get what they want from technology. However by the same turn poor or bad technology causes end users to find alternative routes to completing their tasks, objectives and the acquisition of whatever they require.

Dynamic - As users gain experience over time their expectations of use (and more stringently of technology) and the way they assess their experience becomes more critical, as they develop the expectation that technology is there to help them. In the same way user experience needs to evolve and encompass measurement (analytics, KPI's), visual design (colour contrast, colour relationships, visual structures, implied values), brand identity (notions of value, success, capability), usability (standards, behaviours, ownership), accessibility (platforms, entry, usage).

Perhaps we should start again and say user experience is not, the problem is that 'user experience' as an expression no longer encompasses what we do, but talks lightly to what we used to do. I have heard the term experience managers and others (you know who you are) the thing is 'Experience' is not yet formed, understood and certainly not fully accepted for what it really is. Experience can be defined as a framework of recognisable and interlinked elements that are responsive to our individual drivers (reason to interact), bio graphical templates (our past inputs and results) and expected outcome (based upon the pathway elements; title, content, visuals, search) this can all be planned, designed and built.

In my opinion, I stand apart, User Experience Architect, I speak for the users, the consumers, the target market and say 'Listen or well go elsewhere', because we can and will seek our own needs before your business or purpose. It does not matter if it's a person to person service, software or the web we can still make our own lives better with a work around and you will not know because we can still do our jobs or live our lives.