User Experience

Creating a simple and effective experience for users is vital for any company or organization hoping to get their website off the ground. Simply put, if a user has a bad first experience with a website, it is unlikely that they will come back again. Lack of attention to the user experience is the kiss of death for a webpage. Good user experience means good business. Businesses strive to analyze their return on investment by looking at different conversion rates to measure how many browsers are turning into buyers.

There are 5 planes or elements that help create the user experience--the surface plane, the skeleton plane, the structure plane, the scope plane, the strategy plane. The strategy plane is vital because every other element stems from there. Each element of the website should be used to advance the strategy or purpose.

For example, the motivation behind the American Airlines website is to sell plane tickets. Every element of the webpage, from the aesthetics to the structure, is utilized to advance the strategy. It is an incredibly user friendly website, which always encourages me to use them when I fly.