The Age of User Experience

Found via Jeff: Andreas Pfeiffer asserts that “features don’t matter anymore” and advises to concentrate on the user experience instead.

Here are his ten rules for the age of user experience technology:

1. More features isn’t better, it’s worse.
2. You can’t make things easier by adding to them.
3. Confusion is the ultimate deal-breaker.
4. Style matters.
5. Only features that provide a good user experience will be used.
6. Any feature that requires learning will only be adopted by a small fraction of users.
7. Unused features are not only useless, they can slow you down and diminish ease of use
8. Users do not want to think about technology: what really counts is what it does for them.
9. Forget about the killer feature. Welcome to the age of the killer user-experience.
10. Less is difficult, that’s why less is more.

It’s a good read, even if slightly redundant.

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about improving user experience on the sites I develop. One important area has been URLs. I’ve made good use of Apache’s mod_rewrite module to simplify URLs and make them more permanent. I’ve also learned a thing or two from WordPress – “post slugs” for example are a great way to make an URL more intuitive. (A post slug is a shorthand version of a post’s title with certain characters escaped or dropped.) I used this to improve the way my news system works.

By the way, “user experience” is one of the most difficult words to translate into German I’ve come across in my work. “Benutzererfahrung” sounds plain awful…