Understanding User Experience
By Lucas Daniel
Large design firms have built so much hype around the term "user experience" lately that it's hard to figure out what the words mean and how they impact Web design clients. After visiting shops in Chicago that specialize in user experience, I was able to define the term as what a person does, thinks, and feels when operating or working with a product or service. Several Chicago-based research firms have embraced this concept and are providing user experience studies for Web-based businesses that want to understand their sites' visitors better. (To see how user experience is progressing, and for more information about shops mentioned in this article, visit the sites listed in "
Online").
One such company,
HannaHodge, took the idea of user experience research and expanded it into an approach to Web design, creating a user-centered process that brings together all the different disciplines. Unlike other companies that focus solely on user-experience research or Web-site design, HannaHodge fuses the two components into a system built around understanding the user and resulting in a finished product.
For founders Parrish Hanna and Challis Hodge, user experience isn't a department or a special skill set that they've acquired. It's the founding principle of the company and involves all disciplines, from research to strategy to technology to design, at every step of the process.
