Day 837, Quasi-Quarantine: Two Decades On, "Elements of User Experience" Remains The Definitive UX Playbook

"Designing the user experience is really little more than a very large collection of very small problems to be solved. The difference between a successful approach and one doomed to failure really comes down to two basic ideas:

- Understand what problem you're trying to solve.

- Understand the consequences of your solution to the problem."

"It is user experience that forms the customer's impression of a company's offerings; it is user experience that differentiates a company from its competitors; and it is user experience that determines whether your customer will ever come back."

Jesse James Garrett's "The Elements of User Experience: User-Centered Design for the Web and Beyond" is a relatively difficult-to-find UX textbook that's as relevant two decades later as it was upon release. 

"Although trying to hit a moving target can be a tremendous waste of time and resources (not to mention a huge source of internal frustration), strategies can and should evolve and be refined. When revised and refined systematically, strategy work can be a continuing source of inspiration throughout the user experience design process."

"Any time a person uses a product, a sort of dance goes on between the two of them. The user moves around, and the system responds. Then the user moves in response to the system, and so the dance goes on. But the typical way that software has been designed doesn't really acknowledge this dance."

Garrett's introduction of the five planes (strategy, scope, structure, skeleton, and surface) of user experience -- and their corresponding layers of abstraction -- continues to be a game-changer in web design and other disciplines. 

"If it involves providing users with the ability to do things, it's interface design.

"If it involves providing users with the ability to go places, it's navigation design.

"If it involves communicating ideas to the user, it's information design."

"Page layout is where information design, interface design, and navigation design come together to form a unified, cohesive skeleton."

Full of useful diagrams, the book covers everything from how to treat edge cases to incorporating eyetracking data to defining functional elements. This is a work I wish I would have read much earlier in my career in web publication, but I'm grateful to be building a common language based on Garrett's terms.

"The first question you should ask yourself (and the first question you should be able to answer) about any aspect of the user experience is: Why did you do it that way?"