Product Design & User Experience

We have a double-edged relationship with the products and services we use.

We have a double-edged relationship with the products and services we use. They empower us and frustrate us; they simplify and complicate our lives; they separate us and bring us closer together. But even though we interact with countless products and services every day, we easily forget that they are made by people, and that someone, somewhere should get the credit when they work well for us—or get the blame when they don’t.

When most people think about product design (if they think about product design at all), they often think of it in terms of aesthetic appeal: a well-designed product is one that looks good to the eye and feels good to the touch. (The senses of smell and taste don’t come into play for most products. Sound is often overlooked but can be an important part of the aesthetic appeal of a product.) Whether it’s the curve of a sports car’s body or the texture of a power drill’s grip, the aesthetic dimension of product design is a sure attention-getter.

Another common way people think about product design is in functional terms: A well-designed product is one that does what it promises to do. And a badly designed product is one that somehow doesn’t: scissors that don’t cut even though the blades are sharp, a pen that doesn’t write even though it’s full of ink, a printer that constantly jams.

All of these can certainly be failures of design. These products might look great and work well functionally, but designing products with the user experience as an explicit outcome means looking beyond the functional or aesthetic.

User experience design often deals with questions of context. Aesthetic design makes sure the button on the coffeemaker is an appealing shape and texture. Functional design makes sure it triggers the appropriate action on the device. User experience design makes sure the aesthetic and functional aspects of the button work in the context of the rest of the product, asking questions like, “Is the button too small for such an important function?” User experience design also makes sure the button works in the context of what the user is trying to accomplish, asking questions like, “Is the button in the right place relative to the other controls the user would be using at the same time?”

What’s the difference between designing a product and designing a user experience? After all, every product intended for humans has a user, and every time a product is used, it delivers an experience. Consider a simple product such as a chair or a table. To use the chair you sit on it; to use the table you place other objects on it. In both cases, the product can fail to deliver a satisfactory experience: if the chair won’t support the weight of a person, for example, or the table is unsteady.

But the manufacturers of chairs and tables tend not to employ user experience designers. In these simple cases, the requirements to deliver a successful user experience are built into the definition of the product itself: In some sense, a chair you can’t sit on isn’t a chair at all.

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