User experience: real life scenario
I was playing with my nephew the other day and I noticed one thing. User experience is real!
He’s eighteen months old now and using YouTube better than my mother. This is the only intro I can think of now.
First experience.
He was crying so badly for my mobile phone to watch Cocomelon and I needed to distract him. So there was this big jeep in his toy box.
I picked it up and pushed it toward him. While it is moving there was this heavy sound that gave us the feeling of a big jeep. When the jeep stopped, he picked it up and pushed back toward me. I repeated this several times and he liked it.
Sound design is very important while designing a big jeep toy. The sound is making that live experience.
Recreating
Days passed. One day while I was resting on the sofa, while he is playing near me, I noticed one thing. The same toy, but he is playing with it in a different style. He rolled over it and just played with its wheels. He is doing it for that sound. He didn’t care about the movement. I think his experience was recreated by his spinning toy.
That’s when three things hit me.
This toy is designed for 3 years or more aged children.
User experience is real.
The user mindset will be like, it worked there so it will work exactly like here.
What I learned
Sometimes we design an experience for a large community, and people of all kinds will be there. Each and everyone's experience is different. We need to understand our target audience’s behavior before designing an enterprise product. They may be expecting their last best experience. Here, read the end of this blog too.
While onboarding a user we might sometimes add tooltips to convey the way the product works. Sometimes people will get used to this, but in some scenarios, they might find a shortcut or any other way to recreate the same step.
For eg: see this meme on the design/product communities.
We have to look for this kind of insight to learn more about them. Insights like this may not genuinely come from user surveys. This is just my opinion. I’d love to hear your thoughts.