Crafting great user experiences

As a user of products and technology, one often experiences a wide range of emotions: happiness, frustration, gratitude, irritation, excitement, and apathy amongst others. Yet, as designers and deliverers of these tools and services, the human factor is often neglected with dire consequences. Deadlines and budgets become more important than analyzing the needs and behaviors of the user, unlinking the resource from its consumer. This degrades the perception of the offering and can be irreversible (and potentially fatal) to the reputation of software companies, IT departments, and hardware manufacturers. Despite the failings of many companies that have neglected the human element - companies that lacked empathy for their users - products continue to be delivered that are unintuitive, over designed, or inefficient. A great product or offering considers the user's experience (UX) when interacting with the service. The product is efficient and intuitive, while being transparent in presentation. UX is generally associated with software, but experiences are designed outside of computing as well. An often-polarizing example is customer service; customers remember great customer service experiences as much as they remember poor experiences. Technology often enhances the user experience, but the experience itself is not confined to interactions with specific tools. Training IT help desk staff on how to interact with customers may not be something traditionally thought of as a UX initiative, but this is one small part of the experience that is designed for individuals having issues with their devices. At Santa Clara Law, the Law Technology and Academic Computing (LTAC) group has improved efficiency, customer satisfaction, and saved time by considering UX principles early and often. Decisions once made with dangerous assumptions on the user's behalf are now considered with comprehensive data collected from a variety of different sources. Listening to what users are saying also helps LTAC adapt to the users' changing needs and continually enhance offerings