Fundamentals of user expectation

Persistence of Navigation:  Principal tool for user wayfinding.  Where am I?  How did I get here?
User Habituation:  If a consistent industry standard exists for a form of user interaction, leveraging that prior experience can facilitate new interactions.

• Gesture Standardization:  Consistent gestural language to facilitate uptake of desired user interactions without placing additional cognitive load on our users.

Scent of Information:  Users will accept and even embrace a navigational route that is longer but provides a satisfying experience at each step.
Progressive Disclosure:  Screen real estate is always at a premium.  Showing information only when needed, when users have signaled their interest, facilitates clarity and avoids visual clutter.

• On-Object Navigation:  A family of methods of providing navigation only when users have, through their actions, signaled their interest.

• Information Architectural Framework:  Internally consistent hierarchies of like information, for both navigation and content.

Built-In Accessibility:  Beyond expanding available customer base, accessibility consistently leads to more streamlined smoother interactions and unanticipated expanded interactions.
Delight in the Mundane:  Wherever possible, making repetitive tasks more pleasant and endearing.  

• Positive example:  animations attached to iPhone texts; unnecessary and invisible, but delightful upon discovery.

• Negative example:  Clippy.  Designed to be delightful but intrusive in implementation, adding friction to expected interactions, sadly offsetting the feature's admirable intent.

Performance is Experience:  Poor performance can defeat the best-intended user experience.  UX should provide clear performance expectations and should also restrain itself from designs that cannot perform as intended in targeted contexts.

Desire is not Persona:  Personas can help identify user needs but can be misleading in determining state of mind and user emotional state and desires. 
 

“You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view…until you climb into his skin and walk around in it.”

Harper Lee, To Kill A Mockingbird, 1960

Empathic UX

Empathic UX leverages and enhances existing methodologies in a focused, systematic empowerment of those practices to promote empathy-focused design, resulting in:

• a hiring philosophy to engage user-connected, empathetic designers
• a framework of storytelling to validate-to and engage-with associated disciplines
• a shared prioritizing of empathic insights, thereby creating magical-seeming delightful experiences for our users
• and ultimately, more consistent, measurably effective UX.

Over the years since the UX discipline formed out of an undifferentiated soup of partially applicable disciplines (graphic design, software architecture, information architecture, animation, etc.) many UX methodologies have developed to lend some rigor and consistency to its application in the scientific surround of software development in which the discipline evolved.  This is altogether to the good, as measurable, verifiable results are essential to running, and advancing the interests of, commercial software development.

Many of these practices concern metrics gathering and reporting (Customer Satisfaction surveys [CSAT, PSAT, NSAT], Telemetry [time on task, task success, engagement, usage, return visits, retention], A/B testing [determining user preferences], etc.), many concern repeatability of results (File/artifact organizational systems, centralized graphic production systems, design guides, color models, symbol libraries, etc.).

A preponderance of UX methods, the creation of which is principally the province of User Research, are designed to engender what is referred to as “user empathy” and foster greater understanding of the target users and inter-team communication around goals.  Among these methodologies are User Stories (descriptions of what a user is likely to want to accomplish with the product), User Journeys (clarifying logical routes the user might expect to engage in to achieve their goals), Personas (descriptions of an idealized user representing a generalized picture of who the intended user is, how they live and work, etc.), Ethnographic studies (on-site observations, interviews, surveys, etc., of example users affronting the tasks which the developing software is intended to facilitate, and enhance), etc.

All of these methodologies and more are employed to give the development teams building such products greater insight into their potential users, to keep their users’ needs in mind as software design decisions are made, to prioritize adds and cuts to initially create the Minimum Viable Product (MVP), with emphasis on the term Viable, i.e., to fulfill the user’s needs in the most cost-effective way.  As Dan Pink describes in A Whole New Mind *, all this leads very effectively to the creation of an effective can opener but it does not lead to anything quite like an Oxo can opener, a tool which doesn’t particularly improve the mechanics of can opening, but does improve the user’s “delight” in and enjoyment of something quite so utilitarian as a can opener.

This array of methodologies, all intent upon creating user empathy, frequently does contribute to a resulting delightful product.  However, lacking a systemic approach, I will posit that this is more frequently accomplished because a more or less “empathetic” personality is drawn to the design field, and occasionally is sufficiently empowered that their inherent, and largely methodology-free, empathy for the user is translated into that final product, leading to the lingering general impression of UX Design as a “soft” discipline. My goal is to bring some rigor to the application of empathic "tools" to the UX Design process. 

For further detail on the practical applications of Empathic UX, interaction design, and whatever good, bad, and ugly of UX Design demands analysis, please refer to my UX Blog.