The Elements Of User Experience
THE ELEMENTS OF
USER EXPERIENCE
USER-CENTERED DESIGN FOR THE WEB
Jesse James Garrett
2
chapter
Meet the
Elements
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21
The user experience development process is all about ensuring that
no aspect of the user’s experience with your site happens without
your conscious, explicit intent. This means taking into account every
possibility of every action the user is likely to take and understand-
ing the user’s expectations at every step of the way through that
process. It sounds like a big job, and in some ways it is. But by break-
ing the job of crafting user experience down into its component ele-
ments, we can better understand the problem as a whole.
The Five Planes
Most people, at one time or another, have purchased a book over the
Web. The experience is pretty much the same every time—you go to
the site, you find the book you want (maybe by using a search
engine or maybe by browsing a catalog), you give the site your cred-
it card number and your address, and the site confirms that the book
will be shipped to you.
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That neat, tidy experience actually results from a whole set of
decisions—some small, some large—about how the site looks, how
it behaves, and what it allows you to do. These decisions build upon
each other, informing and influencing all aspects of the user experi-
ence. If we peel away the layers of that experience, we can begin to
understand how those decisions are made.
The Surface Plane
On the surface you see a series of Web pages, made up of images
and text. Some of these images are things you can click on, per-
forming some sort of function such as taking you to a shopping cart.
Some of these images are just illustrations, such as a photograph of
a book cover or the logo of the site itself.
The Skeleton Plane
Beneath that surface is the skeleton of the site: the placement of
buttons, tabs, photos, and blocks of text. The skeleton is designed to
optimize the arrangement of these elements for maximum effect and
efficiency—so that you remember the logo and can find that shop-
ping cart button when you need it.
The Structure Plane
The skeleton is a concrete expression of the more abstract structure
of the site. The skeleton might define the placement of the interface
elements on our checkout page; the structure would define how
users got to that page and where they could go when they were fin-
ished there. The skeleton might define the arrangement of naviga-
tional items allowing the users to browse categories of books; the
structure would define what those categories actually were.
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The Scope Plane
The structure defines the way in which the various features and
functions of the site fit together. Just what those features and func-
tions are constitutes the scope of the site. Some sites that sell books
offer a feature that enables users to save previously used addresses
so they can be used again. The question of whether that feature—or
any feature—is included on a site is a question of scope.
The Strategy Plane
The scope is fundamentally determined by the strategy of the site.
This strategy incorporates not only what the people running the site
want to get out of it but what the users want to get out of the site as
well. In the case of our bookstore example, some of the strategic
objectives are pretty obvious: Users want to buy books, and we want
to sell them. Other objectives might not be so easy to articulate.
Building from Bottom to Top
These five planes—strategy, scope, structure, skeleton, and surface—
provide a conceptual framework for talking about user experience
problems and the tools we use to solve them.
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On each plane, the issues we must deal with become a little less
abstract and a little more concrete. On the lowest plane, we are not
concerned with the final shape of the site at all—we only care about
how the site will fit into our strategy (while meeting the needs of our
users). On the highest plane, we are only concerned with the most
concrete details of the appearance of the site. Plane by plane, the
decisions we have to make become a little more specific and involve
finer levels of detail.
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Each plane is dependent on the planes below it. So, the surface
depends on the skeleton, which depends on the structure, which
depends on the scope, which depends on the strategy. When the
choices we make don't align with those above and below, projects
often derail, deadlines are missed, and costs begin to skyrocket as the
development team tries to piece together components that don't
naturally fit. Even worse, when the site finally does launch, the
users will hate it. This dependence means that decisions on the strat-
egy plane will have a sort of “ripple effect” all the way up the chain.
Conversely, the choices available to us on each plane are constrained
by the decisions we make about issues on the planes below it.
range of choices available on the next plane
The choices you make
on each plane affect
the choices available to
you on the next plane
above it.
the option you chose
range of possible choices
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This ripple effect
means that choosing an
“out of bounds” option
on an upper plane will
require rethinking deci-
sions on lower planes.
That does not mean, however, that every decision about the lower
plane must be made before the upper plane can be addressed.
Dependencies run in both directions, with decisions made on upper
planes sometimes forcing a reevaluation (or an evaluation made for
the first time!) of decisions on lower planes. At each level, we make
decisions according to what the competition is doing, industry best
practices, and plain old common sense. These decisions can have a
ripple effect in both directions.
If you consider your decisions on lower planes to be set in stone
before you take on your decisions on higher planes, you will almost
certainly be throwing your project schedule at the very least—and
possibly the success of your final product—into jeopardy.
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Instead, you should plan your project so that work on any plane
cannot finish before work on lower planes has finished. The impor-
tant consideration here is not to build the roof of the house before
we know the shape of its foundation.
Requiring work on each
plane to finish before
work on the next can
start leads to unsatis-
factory results for you
and your users.
A better approach is
to have work on each
plane finish before
work on the next can
finish.
A Basic Duality
Of course, there are more than just five elements of user experience,
and as with any specialized field, this one has evolved a vocabulary
all its own. To someone encountering the field for the first time, user
experience can appear to be a complicated business. All these seem-
ingly identical terms are thrown around: interaction design, infor-
mation design, information architecture. What do they mean?
Anything? Or are they just more meaningless industry buzzwords?
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To further complicate matters, people will use the same terms in dif-
ferent ways. One person might use “information design” to refer to
what another knows as “information architecture.” And what’s the
difference between “interface design” and “interaction design?” Is
there one?
Fortunately, the field of user experience seems to be moving out of
this Babel-like state. Consistency is gradually creeping into our dis-
cussions of these issues. To understand the terms themselves, how-
ever, we should look at where they came from.
When the Web started, it was just about hypertext. People could
create documents, and they could link them to other documents.
Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the Web, created it as a way for
researchers in the high-energy physics community, who were spread
out all over the world, to share and refer to each other’s findings. He
knew the Web had the potential to be much more than that, but few
others really understood how great its potential was.
People originally seized on the Web as a new publishing medium,
but as technology advanced and new features were added to Web
browsers and Web servers alike, the Web took on new capabilities.
After the Web began to catch on in the larger Internet community,
it developed a more complex and robust feature set that would
enable Web sites not only to distribute information but to collect and
manipulate it as well. With this, the Web became more interactive,
responding to the input of users in ways that were very much like
traditional desktop applications.
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With the advent of commercial interests on the Web, this application
functionality found a wide range of uses, such as electronic commerce,
community forums, and online banking, among others. Meanwhile,
the Web continued to flourish as a publishing medium, with count-
less newspaper and magazine sites augmenting the wave of Web-
only “e-zines” being published. Technology continued to advance on
both fronts as all kinds of sites made the transition from static
collections of information that changed infrequently to dynamic,
database-driven sites that were constantly evolving.
When the Web user experience community started to form, its
members spoke two different languages. One group saw every prob-
lem as an application design problem, and applied problem-solving
approaches from the traditional desktop and mainframe software
worlds. (These, in turn, were rooted in common practices applied to
creating all kinds of products, from cars to running shoes.) The other
group saw the Web in terms of information distribution and
retrieval, and applied problem-solving approaches from the tradi-
tional worlds of publishing, media, and information science.
This became quite a stumbling block. Very little progress could be
made when the community could not even agree on basic terminol-
ogy. The waters were further muddied by the fact that many Web
sites could not be neatly categorized as either applications or hyper-
text information spaces—a huge number seemed to be a sort of
hybrid, incorporating qualities from each world.
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To address this basic duality in the nature of the Web, let’s split our
five planes down the middle. On the left, we’ll put those elements
specific to using the Web as a software interface. On the right,
we’ll put the elements specific to hypertext information spaces.
On the software side, we are mainly concerned with tasks—the
steps involved in a process and how people think about completing
them. Here, we consider the site as a tool or set of tools that the user
employs to accomplish one or more tasks.
On the hypertext side, our concern is information—what informa-
tion the site offers and what it means to our users. Hypertext is about
creating an information space that users can move through.
The Elements of User Experience
Now we can map that whole confusing array of terms into the
model. By breaking each plane down into its component elements,
we'll be able to take a closer look at how all the pieces fit together to
create the whole user experience.
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The Strategy Plane
The same strategic concerns come into play for both software prod-
ucts and information spaces. User needs are the goals for the site
that come from outside our organization—specifically from the peo-
ple who will use our site. We must understand what our audience
wants from us and how that fits in with other goals it has.
Balanced against user needs are our own objectives for the site.
These site objectives can be business goals (“Make $1 million in
sales over the Web this year”) or other kinds of goals (“Inform voters
about the candidates in the next election”). In Chapter 3 we’ll go
into more detail about these elements.
The Scope Plane
On the software side, the strategy is translated into scope through
the creation of functional specifications: a detailed description of
the “feature set” of the product. On the information space side, scope
takes the form of content requirements: a description of the vari-
ous content elements that will be required. Chapter 4 will cover the
scope elements.
The Structure Plane
The scope is given structure on the software side through
interaction design, in which we define how the system behaves in
response to the user. For information spaces, the structure is the
information architecture: the arrangement of content elements
within the information space. You’ll find more details on these in
Chapter 5.
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The Skeleton Plane
The skeleton plane breaks down into three components. On both
sides, we must address information design: the presentation of
information in a way that facilitates understanding. For software
products, the skeleton also includes interface design, or arranging
interface elements to enable users to interact with the functionality
of the system. The interface for an information space is its naviga-
tion design: the set of screen elements that allow the user to move
through the information architecture. There’s more about the skele-
ton plane in Chapter 6.
The Surface Plane
Finally, we have the surface. Regardless of whether we are dealing
with a software product or an information space, our concern here
is the same: the visual design, or the look of the finished product.
It’s trickier than it sounds; you can find out all about it in Chapter 7.
Using the Elements
Few sites fall exclusively on one side of this model or the other.
Within each plane, the elements must work together to accomplish
that plane’s goals. For example, information design, navigation
design, and interface design jointly define the skeleton of a site. The
effects of decisions you make about one element from all other
elements on the plane is very difficult. All the elements on every
plane have a common function—in this example, defining the site’s
skeleton—even if they perform that function in different ways.
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This model, divided up into neat boxes and planes, is a convenient
way to think about user experience problems. In reality, however,
the lines between these areas are not so clearly drawn. Frequently,
it can be difficult to identify whether a particular user experience
problem is best solved through attention to one element instead of
another. Can a change to the visual design do the trick, or will the
underlying navigation design have to be reworked? Some problems
require attention in several areas at once, and some seem to straddle
the borders identified in this model.
The way organizations often delegate responsibility for user experi-
ence issues only complicates matters further. In some organizations,
you will encounter people with job titles like information architect
or interface designer. Don’t be confused by this. These people gener-
ally have expertise spanning many of the elements of user experi-
ence, not just the specialty indicated by their title. It’s not necessary
to have a member of your team who is a specialist in each of these
areas; instead, you only have to ensure that someone is responsible
for thinking about each of these issues.
A couple of additional factors go into shaping the final user experi-
ence that you won’t find covered in detail here. The first of these is
content. The old saying (well, old in Web years) is that “content is
king” on the Web. This is absolutely true—the single most important
thing most Web sites can offer to their users is content that those
users will find valuable.
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Users don’t visit Web sites to experience the joy of navigation. The
content that is available to you (or that you have resources to obtain
and manage) will play a huge role in shaping your site. In the case
of our bookstore site example, we might decide that we want the
users to be able to see cover images of all the books we sell. If we can
get them, will we have a way to catalog them, keep track of them,
and keep them up to date? And what if we can’t get photos of the
book covers at all? These content questions are essential to the ulti-
mate user experience of the site.
Second, technology can be just as important as content in creating
a successful user experience. In many cases, the nature of the expe-
rience you can provide your users is largely determined by technol-
ogy. In the early days of the Web, the tools to connect Web sites to
databases were fairly primitive and limited. As the technology has
advanced, however, databases have become more widely used to
drive Web sites. This in turn has enabled more and more sophisti-
cated user experience approaches, such as dynamic navigation sys-
tems that change in response to the way users move through the
site. Technology is always changing, and the field of user experience
always has to adapt to it. Nevertheless, the fundamental elements of
user experience remain the same.
The rest of this book looks at the elements, plane by plane, in greater
detail. We’ll take a closer look at some of the tools and techniques
commonly used to address each element. We’ll see what the elements
on each plane have in common, what makes each one different, and
how they affect each other to create the total user experience.
