Tuesday, April 17, 2007

The User Experience Wheel

I have used this model for some time now, time to reveal it to the critical eyes of fellow practitioners. It is a model that tries to explain “what is user experience?”


PDF Version

The Model should be explained from the inside. It starts in the middle.
  1. Value is what we want to accomplish
  2. For customers and providers, positive user experience is a win-win situation
  3. We want to accomplish value through positive user experience
  4. The user experience is a series of phases, we have to focus on positivity in findability, accessibility, desirability, usability, credibility and usefulness
  5. Numerous factors contribute to the phases of user experience, the model shows 30 factors carefully placed
  6. To achieve this we work backwards, starting and ending with search engine strategy, and going through and making a choice about each of the factors

I feel the model still is a work in progress. Comments on how it can be improved, is it completely wrong (?), is it useful is welcome. Let the discussion begin.

18 comments:

Laurent said...

Very nice proposal... the cycle approach is quite interesting even if i think the value is more the intersection of all rather than a cycle.

Gaetano said...

Waow... Great diagram. Thank you for this contribution.
This will be on the wall of my office within 2 minutes!

Conny said...

This model is both visually attractive and the content seems intuitively correct.
I'm already using your model in our course: Multimedia and design (see: http://beta.hifm.no/~mm2006/findability.html).
Keep up the good work.

Pierre said...

Great! Very useful to explain to my client and partners the complexity and the palette of concepts behind a website. Sharing this knowledge is essential in a modern approch of our business to cultivate our client. Don't forget internet is 90% cultural.
Pierre - WebDesigner - Geneva

Mart. said...

Hi thanks for taking the time to put the diagram up.
This diagram contrasts nicely with the modified honeycomb diagram (your first post). That diagram had the six elements in the following order:
Findable>accessible>desirable> credible>useful
Whereas this diagram has them in the (approximate as we can't be 100% on the starting point!)order:
Findable>useful>credible>usable> desirable>accessible
This I think, reflects the conflict that many have in their mind when they consider UX development: whether to think about it as a production process or a thing the user experiences.
What's also interesting is that according to these two models, aside from Findability, the two processes are the reverse of each other.
Thus if we follow this diagram as a linear process, in building a user experience, you consider FIRST the element that the user leaves with (was that a useful experience?), and consider the first issue (this site/tool (is/is not) accessible and presents (no/a) barrier to use) LAST...sort of. Sort of reverse engineering the experience.
This makes a certain degree of sense to me. From prior experience in video production, a useful rule was to think what would you like the viewer to do, think or feel having seen the programme. in essence, UX is much the same, since the bit the user is going to experience the longest is the time AFTER they've used your site/tool, so think about that first!

Jeremy Horn said...

When I need to perform a rapid evaluation of user experience (product experience) I use a methodology I have (over time) devised that I call Quick-UX...

Check it out...
http://tpgblog.com/2008/03/24/quick-ux-quick-heuristics-for-user-experience/

And let me know what you think. What approaches work for you when you are light on time?

Enjoy!

Jeremy Horn
The Product Guy
http://tpgblog.com

Maranda said...

I would like to build a similar diagram with a different application. What program did you use to build this?

James said...

Thank you for the time, effort, and long experience you've put into creating something attractive and useful - what we all aim for!

TheBit said...

Hi Magnus!

Thanx for interesting diagram!
Can you share the PDF version of the UX Wheel? It is offline now. I thought to print-it...

privacydenied said...

Congrats, very cool idea!

There's a typo though in the red area: "accessability" should be accessibility.

Cheers.

marr said...

If you have to state how to use the wheel, it is unusable. If you have to rotate the wheel, it is unusable. That said, the wheel is awesome! And useful...

mographtv said...

This is so awesome, I love this digram and find that's it's really essential to understanding the role of product development.

I've printed this out and I'll probably throw it on my wall :).

Thanks for this!

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Philippe van Gammeren said...

At the age of 4 and a bit, I think it's still a great graphic. Currently doing research in UX and this gives me some nice insights.

Jasmine Wilkinson said...

I think this is great. Over and above being a great outline of the elements of user experience, this is also a great guide to building a decent website generally.

This will become a staple part of my arsenal in demonstrating to non-digital people exactly what is involved in making a decent website - and all the things that need to be thought about, as well as training digital team members to consider all these things always in their work.

Nice one!

Incognito ergo sum said...

Many thanks for this wheel. To me is sums up perfectly what the process is/should be.

I want to use it in my personal portfolio if you don't mind.

I found some words to be not-so-readable so I changed the size and color. I also saved it as a .gif to reduce the size.

Feel free to use this slightly modified version.

Of course ALL credit goes to Magnus! Thanks for the great work man!

Modified version
http://postimage.org/image/mi0ns3gab/

Mary Sears said...

This is great. Thank you for sharing. User Experience Design is hard.

Amber Salm said...

Great ! The concept is very interesting and you have described it in a very good way. I feel the model is designed in an impressive way but needs slight improvement.
measuring the user experience