{"id":1066,"date":"2012-02-22T11:21:21","date_gmt":"2012-02-22T19:21:21","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.robinstewart.com\/blog\/?p=1066"},"modified":"2012-02-22T11:21:21","modified_gmt":"2012-02-22T19:21:21","slug":"user-friendly","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.robinstewart.com\/blog\/2012\/02\/user-friendly\/","title":{"rendered":"User Friendly"},"content":{"rendered":"

A recent thread<\/a> on LinkedIn discusses how user experience professionals can answer the question “What do you do for a living?” One contributor wrote:<\/p>\n

“I help companies make their products more user friendly.” That’s a term most people understand. If they ask follow up questions I will go into more detail.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The term “user friendly” makes me think of the nineties, as in “Mac is more user friendly than Windows.” I hesitate before using it, because as a software designer, I want to go beyond “friendly” and make interfaces that are also more powerful, more fun, more educational.<\/p>\n

But I too have found that “user friendly” is the term that normal (non-UX) people understand. We naturally anthropomorphize computers, and want to know whether they are friendly, like a person we would choose to spend time with.<\/p>\n

Designers create this “user experience” via methods such as “human-centered design”, “user research”, “advocating” and “interaction design”… but these are all technical terms that don’t mean much to people outside the field.<\/p>\n

What people really want to know is whether the end product will feel like a friend.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A recent thread on LinkedIn discusses how user experience professionals can answer the question “What do you do for a living?” One contributor wrote: “I help companies make their products more user friendly.” That’s a term most people understand. If they ask follow up questions I will go into more detail. The term “user friendly” … <\/p>\n

Continue reading “User Friendly”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.robinstewart.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1066"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.robinstewart.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.robinstewart.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.robinstewart.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.robinstewart.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1066"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.robinstewart.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1066\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.robinstewart.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1066"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.robinstewart.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1066"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.robinstewart.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1066"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}