User experience, a psychological process.

What is meant by the term “experience”?

The dictionary defines experience as “the fact of feeling something”. As a designer, it is in this sense that we work to achieve this reality of user experience: the perception of things and the emotional feelings of the user in order to correlate human interaction with the machine.

As difficult as it is to define an experience, it is certain that it is necessarily subjective, what seems easy and obvious to one may be difficult for others. The content, the graphical approach, the interface, the manipulation of the tool or the system are not executed, felt or mastered uniformly by the users. The perceptions are different, which makes it all the more difficult to approach the user experience.

User experience is something deeply linked to the psychology of human beings and also often so subjective because it still seems difficult to me to measure the emotional anticipation of human beings.
According to Donald Norman one of the leaders in user experience coming from the field neurocognitive sciences and psychology – the experience is memorized in the form of memories and tends to move away from immediate perception to build a set of history, uses and interactions.

User experience aims to make software, applications more "user-friendly” 


Capture05This philosophy of user experience reverses the previously dominant perspective: user-centered design tends to define the product or service from the expectations, needs (formulated or not) and capacities of users, and not to force them to learn and change behavior to adapt to the product, service. Experience design is a process of research, imagination, design, creation, testing and optimization.

The difficulty in this method that is the user experience consists in bringing together the strategy of some: the sponsor of the project – with the reality of the others: the user.

These two forces are not always converging, but to do so, the user experience designer must distinguish between the contact points of the channel, the terminal and the interaction in order to define the best use proposals.

The user experience is an approach that allows you to think coherently and more broadly about a product activity or a brand image communication. This methodology, which combines a technical approach and digital psychology, is becoming essential in this hyperconnected society. It is now acquiring a broader dimension, offering the user devices linked to real life.

Will user experience shape thinking tomorrow? Or will the user remain free to choose without being influenced by a scenario dictated by the brands?

 

Carine Renaud, UX-Evangelist @CarineWhatElse -  UXLab Foundation @UX-Republic