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A Quantum Leap in Explaining User Experience:
A review of The Elements of User Experience by
Jesse James Garrett

by Louise Ferguson, 2002

The Elements of User Experience from Jesse James Garrett makes a quantum leap in explaining user experience.

Subtitled 'User-Centred Design for the Web', this new book is designed to give the big picture, addressing ideas rather than techniques. At less than 200 pages and with many graphics, it's a book you can read in an afternoon, but at the same time it manages to cover a remarkable number of ideas. Strategy, controlled vocabularies, business goals, wireframes, ROI, typography - these and many more issues are threaded together to provide a complete but succinct account of the whys and hows of user experience development.

But the most powerful idea in the book is the Garrett's 'elements' referred to in the title, which he defines as five planes or layers of experience - surface, skeleton, structure, scope and strategy. Garrett explains clearly and elegantly how user needs, content requirements, navigation design, visual design and other components fit into this 5-plane scheme. He makes it look so simple, you wonder how nobody had thought of this before.

Why is this important? Traditionally, information architecture (IA) and user experience (UX) people have had a hard time explaining to others what exactly it is they do, why it's important and - maybe most important - why they should be paid good money for doing it. And why it's not marketing and why you can't do it with focus groups. Now even marketeers are passing themselves off as UX experts, leading to further erosion of the profession.

I can see Garrett's graphics become standard tools for UX professionals needing to explain to clients what they do, why it's important, and how it fits in with what others do. In terms of this material alone, Garrett has made a contribution to equipping UX professionals with some simple but powerful tools for promoting the fundamentals of UX. Time to start working on those PowerPoint slides.

If you already know about UX, should you read this book? Probably yes. You'll be surprised how simple and yet powerful Garrett's map of the user experience world is.

But this is a good book to put into the hands of senior and middle managers who know little about Web development, and specialists in other disciplines - such as graphic designers - who need an appreciation of how all the elements from different professionals slot together. Let's hope they get some copies in their Xmas stockings.

You can find several book extracts - Table of Contents, the Introduction and Chapter 2 - as well as the original poster and links to other resources, on Garrett's website.

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