it struck me that there was overlap between communication (as social interaction) and a good user experience.

what’s different of course is that in social interaction this question is applied to one or more users simultaneously, at which point it becomes clear that there’s a different interaction dynamic involved in communication.

Please check out this post about defining UX where I drew a staircase to describe the process of building a product, and what UX steps there were involved. As I now work agency side, we are more product focused, than my previous publishing job.

http://userpathways.com/2008/11/14/defining-ux/

I think your model works well in combination and I have also written a part about how to make it visible in any organisation (from bitter experience!).

As I say in my post useful, desirable and usable are basic requirements of design, so they should be implicit – see Maslow’s hierarchy of needs – any design of anything can be aligned to it…

Which brings me to a language of critique – we can use established design principles as a framework for this. I really think it should be the basis of what we do as so many other disciplines (Marketing included) know of these already.

http://semanticstudios.com/publications/semantics/000029.php

The same concept can be applied to critiquing the user experience at large.

Furthermore, you state that Useful, Usable and Desirable are too generic and abstract. On the contrary I do feel they are very valid for identifying a good user experience.

Please do not undervalue them simply because they are challenging to qualify. The very nature of critiquing should be challenging and not just a snap judgment.

- Nick

The fact is, no matter how you try dicing all this, there’s no way to come up with mutually exclusive, pure categories. So the way to go, it seems to me, is what you’re doing: what model will help us think more clearly about design, and better evaluate the work we’re doing? For example: Lumping so much under “desirable” allows too much room to weasel out of some major elements that lend themselves to desirability. It allows a market test to declare “75% of customers liked it!” without breaking that down with more rigor. So I’m liking the break-down more as I think about it.

Also, I take it this is a practitioner-focused model, not an academic exercise. In which case, the workability of it in the field, by designers, is more important than its theoretical soundness. (And making a theoretically sound, pure model for design is probably impossible, which is why we don’t have one.)

I do think it could use more clarity around why it’s stacked the way it is … how the foundational elements are, indeed, foundational. And I can imagine a lot of old-school designers wondering why “connectedness” is considered essential, rather than an add-on feature. (“My toaster isn’t connected, but does everything else well — does that mean it’s not a good design?”)

Some of the comments above take the “it’s all subjective” stance, but I don’t think that gets us anywhere. I’m all for having some rigor (while managing to avoid dogma) and this feels like a good start!

– Richard

Comments on a, b, and c, or why I still think that aesthetics is the doorway into the interface. When the right aesthetic is developed the user is naturally attracted to the screen and engaged to use it. It is in the actions of a & b that the user is ready to give the site their acceptance of its relevance and understandability. The visual presence when down right sets us up to intuitively understand how we will interact with the screens. A wrinkle in the a & b is the feed back we do or don’t get fits our expectation of how it should operate.It is through the engagement the user will find out if it is a. relevant or b.”I don’t care” if they do not perceive the relevance to them. So it will little matter if they understand it.