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Vol. 17, No. 1, Winter 2006
Jesse J Garrett, Director User Experience Strategy, Adaptive Path
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It may seem obvious, but of all the customer touch-points that play a part in a successful user experience, the product itself is the one most likely to create a strong emotional reaction. Despite all the talk about the importance of creating a pleasant customer experience, many designers still tend to think in terms of creating a product rather than an emotion. Indeed, writes Jesse James Garrett, co-founder of San Francisco's Adaptive Path experience design consultancy, this requires a “deliberate way of thinking about design.” As Garrett sees it, these considerations can be imagined as a series of planes, layered one upon another, with more-abstract considerations toward the bottom and more concrete considerations toward the top. The most concrete level is the Surface plane, where the sensory elements of user experience-visual, audible, and tactile-come into play. The choices made on the Surface plane are rooted in a more abstract set of considerations that Garrett calls the Skeleton-the arrangement and selection of design elements. Garrett offers an example well known to people who rent cars frequently: tasks like adjusting mirrors or turning on the windshield wipers can be accomplished with a wide range of different configurations of controls. Under the Skeleton is the Structure plane, which deals with the interrelationships among functional and informational elements of the product. Working at this level requires attention to issues of interaction design-in other words, the flow of the user's movement through a task or from one task to the next. And below the Structure plane is the Scope, which describes the precise makeup and selection of these elements. If the product has both functional and informational aspects (increasingly common in the era of the Internet), both must be considered. The functional specifications represent the operations the product will enable the user to perform; the content requirements describe the information the product will need to communicate to the user. At the very bottom and most abstract level is the Strategy plane, which deals with the direction of the product, its place in the market, and the business objectives it hopes to achieve. To result in a successful experience, writes Garrett, “the strategy must balance the business's objectives for the product against the needs and expectations of the product's users.”
The savviest marketing strategies and the most efficient customer service processes won't deliver loyal customers, writes Garrett, if those customers don't have a positive experience with the product. Customers, he adds, “want to have positive experiences, and they want you to succeed in delivering them. The unhappy customers that send you disgruntled email… don't really want to see you fail. They turned against you because their experience with your product wasn't what they had hoped for.” Garrett's framework can help designers avoid those pitfalls.
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