Why Attention to Detail Makes UX Design

In the upcoming post I am going to make many references to car design, and the reason for this is that I happened to be watching a television program about car design when I came up with the idea for this blog post. The same ideas translate to pretty much any design process.

UX design is based on the idea of creating an exceptional experience for the user, and I think that the best way to do this is to look at products that already provide these types of experiences to their users.

I have used the metaphor of buying a car with clients before when meeting about what they need and what they want in their web design. Most clients want a Bently, but can only really afford a Peugeot. With relation to UX design, this simply follows the paradigm of ‘you get what you pay for’, and provides a tangible and relational example to everyone.

Car Design

One of the things that most people associate with luxury cars is the visual experience, which is what most people get to experience because they do not get the opportunity to get the driving experience from these machines, but for the owners of these cars, the reason they buy them, not regarding that they look amazing outside their houses, is for the way that they make them feel when they are driving them. When an owner is driving these cars, they cant see them, so the car needs to stir emotions in the driver while they are inside the car. This can be achieved with the amount of power below the bonnet, but it must be augmented by being in comfortable and aesthetically pleasing environment to be seated in as well.

Web Design

The reason that people pay such large amounts of money for these automobiles is the entire experience that they provide to them. The people that buy these types of cars could easily buy a car for, in some cases, a tenth of the price, but they don’t, they pay a premium to have a better experience.

The reason behind this is that the makers of the luxury cars care a great deal about how their customers experience their machines, they care enough to spend a great deal of time crafting how the car door closes so that it sounds solid to the customer, this attention to detail provides a unique user experience and that is exactly what creating a quality user experience involves.

With this in mind, it is not an unfair comparison to say that user experience design is really based on the design of the details. User experience design is all about attention to detail. When creating the layout of a form for a user to fill in, are the labels aligned to the left of the input box, or above it? It may not seem like a detail to sweat over, but this is the kind of attention to details that turns a mediocre experience into a great experience.

Creating Great User Experiences

It is apparent then, that the creation of great user experiences cannot be rushed. As it is the details that enable the experience to be great, the designer must have to time to consider the possibilities available, try different ideas, fail often and sweat the details. Only when the time and thought are applied to the details can great experiences be crafted.

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