Great user experience lies in details

We keep hearing a lot about the terms User Experience, Usability etc., being tossed around to talk about the products that are used in our daily life. These are increasingly related specifically to the technical products, devices, electronics,web sites and web applications.   To be honest and brutally frank about this, I was never taught all through my education about ‘usable’ and ‘usability’. Not only these, even my formal education did not dwell much upon ‘users’ and their needs. And I guess, this is true with most of you too.

Its true that we were taught about how to design great products and how to know our customers’ needs and satisfy them with our offerings. In this post, I wish to discuss some key aspects as to how we can deliver delightful user experiences, not just create products and services.

It lies in the details

Small things and details make up great user experience but  user experience is not a small thing.  Pay attention to the details and you are contributing to the delight of your users. It is often  the attention to the details or lack of it that makes a product a huge success or a super flop.

Take the case of Jabulani, the football used in the 2010 FIFA World cup held in South Africa.  Some players complained that the ball was not behaving in the way it should when hitting from afar and that they could not predict the path of the ball when in air.  Their contention was that perhaps it was not designed considering the altitude, pressure and the context of the stadiums in South Africa.  It could potentially be a  case of not getting into the details such as the usage context, which led to frustration among users.

A small exercise for you!

I don’t want to write too many details about this point 🙂 Instead, I want you to try it out yourself and experience the difference!

Follow the steps in the order I give below:

• Open a browser window of each of the following:
  • Internet Explorer
  • Apple Safari
  • Mozilla Firefox
  • Google Chrome
• Press CTRL+N keys or Go to File menu and select New
• Compare what you see with each of the results

Here is the key for those who don’t have the time to do the exercise…Microsoft, Apple, Mozilla and Google each have come up with different browsers and different browser versions updated to suit users’ needs. We are not trying to look at the pros and cons of these, but the essence is to understand how much they care for their users and how much attention they pay to details. These are not the only measure of user experience or  efficiency of any browser, nor can we assess them comprehensively with this particular feature alone. But this shows you how much importance they give to users and their needs.

Let us observe how opening a new browser window works across these different browsers:

Internet Explorer opens a new window with the current site opened by default. It is almost as good as Copy feature. Copy the same window is not what you needed, but you expected a new window to be opened. Also, add to this the time it takes to open it, because it needs to load all the elements of the current page. It opens the window with exactly the same size as the previous window and you cannot see that its opened in the first place.

Now compare this with what Google Chrome or Apple Safari does. These open new (literally) browser window and this is not the copy of the current window, but a new browser window. Also the new window is slightly different in size compared to the previous one and you can see very clearly that a new browser window is now opened. I have illustrated these different options with a few images, so you can see the difference clearly.

Microsoft Internet Explorer

Google Chrome

Apple Safari

Mozilla Firefox