User Experience¶

In this Unit, you will come to understand User Experience (UX) as it relates to software engineering and agile practices. The Unit is a very high overview (there is no coding, maths, or other aspects you may feel comfortable with) intended to enable you as a Software Engineer to discuss development with UX professionals, or to help you create a bridge between the users and the engineering team. You never know, you may like it and decide to become a UX professional.

Units/Courses COMP33511 UX User Experience

Simon Harper

20 Dec 2022

5 min read

You should not confuse this high-level overview of the domain with the knowledge you would acquire in a full three-year degree programme. We will cover the tools, techniques, and mindset necessary to competently approach your first user testing and user experience job. Designed from a practical perspective the unit will enable you to take a junior role in a user experience department or usability company. It will also provide you with the overall knowledge to communicate with others and make sensible suggestions regarding UX work while serving as a basis for future self-study within the UX domain (Further Reading and SAQs). In this case, the unit is composed of discussions through (a) the principles, tools, and techniques required; (b) These unit notes to expand on those principles and techniques; (c) the discussion topics to teach and test your ability to summarise, and then form a view based on a complex UX topic; and finally, (d) the secondary text which will hopefully teach you something about the general science of the area while also enabling you to critique areas and understand how and why your view has been formed (including the ability for people to have different views which may coexist).

User experience (UX or UE) is often conflated with usability but some would say takes its lead from the emerging discipline of experience design (XD). In reality, this means that usability is often thought of as being within the technical domain. Often being responsible for engineering aspects of the interface or interactive behaviour by building usability paradigms directly into the system. On the other hand user experience is meant to convey a wider remit which does not just primarily focus on the interface but on other psychological aspects of the user behaviour. In some ways, its study is indivisible from that of the components which it helps to make usable, however, as we shall see, key scientific principles different from most other aspects of computer science, support and underlay the area, and by implication its practical application as UX. UX is tricky to pinpoint but ISO 9241–210 defines it as…

“a person’s perceptions and responses that result from the use or anticipated use of a product, system or service”

Wikipedia, says it is…

“is the process of manipulating user behaviour through usability, usefulness, and desirability provided in the interaction with a product.”

Therefore, while agile development includes UX; we don’t explicitly cover: front-end development, designing new interfaces, or graphic design.

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