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Meet the Elements of Web User Experience

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It sounds impossible to take into account every possible action your website users are likely to take and understand their expectations at every step of the way, but Jesse James Garrett can show you how to start.
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The user experience development process is all about ensuring that no aspect of the user's experience with your site happens without your conscious, explicit intent. This means taking into account every possibility of every action the user is likely to take and understanding the user's expectations at every step of the way through that process. It sounds like a big job, and in some ways it is. But by breaking the job of crafting user experience down into its component elements, we can better understand the problem as a whole.

The Five Planes

Most people, at one time or another, have purchased a book over the Web. The experience is pretty much the same every time—you go to the site, you find the book you want (maybe by using a search engine or maybe by browsing a catalog), you give the site your credit card number and your address, and the site confirms that the book will be shipped to you.

That neat, tidy experience actually results from a whole set of decisions—some small, some large—about how the site looks, how it behaves, and what it allows you to do. These decisions build upon each other, informing and influencing all aspects of the user experience. If we peel away the layers of that experience, we can begin to understand how those decisions are made.

The Surface Plane

Figure 2.1

On the surface you see a series of Web pages, made up of images and text. Some of these images are things you can click on, performing some sort of function such as taking you to a shopping cart. Some of these images are just illustrations, such as a photograph of a book cover or the logo of the site itself.

The Skeleton Plane

Figure 2.2

Beneath that surface is the skeleton of the site: the placement of buttons, tabs, photos, and blocks of text. The skeleton is designed to optimize the arrangement of these elements for maximum effect and efficiency—so that you remember the logo and can find that shopping cart button when you need it.

The Structure Plane

Figure 2.3

The skeleton is a concrete expression of the more abstract structure of the site. The skeleton might define the placement of the interface elements on our checkout page; the structure would define how users got to that page and where they could go when they were finished there. The skeleton might define the arrangement of navigational items allowing the users to browse categories of books; the structure would define what those categories actually were.

The Scope Plane

Figure 2.4

The structure defines the way in which the various features and functions of the site fit together. Just what those features and functions are constitutes the scope of the site. Some sites that sell books offer a feature that enables users to save previously used addresses so they can be used again. The question of whether that feature—or any feature—is included on a site is a question of scope.

The Strategy Plane

Figure 2.5

The scope is fundamentally determined by the strategy of the site. This strategy incorporates not only what the people running the site want to get out of it but what the users want to get out of the site as well. In the case of our bookstore example, some of the strategic objectives are pretty obvious: Users want to buy books, and we want to sell them. Other objectives might not be so easy to articulate.

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