Scaling back to viable

I talk a fair bit about designing for the “best experience” and supporting fluffy concepts like “flow“, but only a lucky few of us live in a world where we can actually do that. For the rest of us, there are always limitations–both human (e.g. office politics, leadership mandates, etc.) and system (e.g. time or business constraints)–that prevent us from being able to actually create those experiences.

So that means you have to do one of two things:

  1. Design only what you can realistically build right now
  2. Design the best experience and then scale that back to something that viable

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What makes UX good?

Yes, UX stands for User Experience, but what is it? In another post on communicating hard truths, I said that the user experience is the culmination of every interaction a user has with a product or interface. Ok, so what makes an experience good or bad? I would posit that the difference between a good and bad UX is how obvious the interface is to the user.

A good user experience supports Flow.

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