User Experience Analysis

Understanding your users' or your client’s users' motivations, is the single most important thing you can do. If you don’t understand what motivates them what engages them or what and why they do what they do, you have no chance of making a system that works for them.

To do this it is important to understand two criteria:

1. Cognition intensive interactions (How users typically learn and problem solve within a system)
2. Cognitive Content Interactions (The actual structures and processes involved in interacting with a computer)

Or more precisely:

Perception

How is the system perceived, how does a user interact with other systems, how do they react to different stimuli? By finding out these questions you can start to get a good idea of how they will interact with the functionality and layout of your system.

Knowledge and Memory

How do user acquire new knowledge, how does it relate to what they already know how does it relate to what you want them to know and remember?

Thinking

It comes as shock to a lot of people that no two people think exactly alike, though why that should be would also make a great study. If you can understand how, not just why, your users typically think about the processes they are confronted with it will help you understand their needs.

Language

Although user interfaces have become increasingly graphical, reading still is the most common means by which users acquire information, but language is a complex tool and words can carry many different meanings depending on the viewers location, education and age and temperament. Determining which level of language to use in your system as it relates to a user will almost always create a better engagement between the two.

© Bob Powell