A User Experience Language (UEL)
(NOTE: This was written after a series of workshops for an interdisciplinary product and IT team working on a consumer marketplace portal and enterprise applications for customers. This section describes the founding mission of a project to create a global user experience language to guide product design and development.)
A User Experience Language is a common language for teams who want to create a superior user experiences for their customers. The our organization’s User Experience Language (UEL) identifies agreed on and proven solutions for solving common design, software, content, and editorial problems. These solutions take the following forms, moving from abstract to very concrete:
Principles
- user experience design principles
- visual design principles
- interaction design principles
Practices
- style guidelines
- Web standards
- editorial style guidelines
- brand usage guidelines
- page speed and application response guidelines
- accessibility guidelines
Patterns
- design patterns
- design stencils
- style tiles
- templates
By codifying a User Experience Language for our teams, we alleviate uncertainty and make our products easier to design, develop, and deliver. We free up our team to move past the easy stuff so they can focus their talent on more challenging problems. This guide to our team’s User Experience Language will help designers, product managers, developers, analysts, and engineers maintain consistency on all our products. A consistent user experience is the foundation for all excellent user experiences, so the ultimate goal is to improve the bottom line with happier customers and consumers.
A User Experience Language isn’t set in stone. Rather, it is a living document, always incomplete. It will change and improve over time. We expect to build on and keep what we have learned is best for our customers and for us, and to discard what turns out to be unusable. The document is not rigidly prescriptive. Revisions and new contributions ensure continuous quality improvements.
Goals and Purposes
The ACME User Experience Language is a way to communicate with one another about the editorial, interactive, architectural, and visual elements of our products. As a common language, the ACME UEL will help our team:
- fashion a seamless interface that supports a customer experience where searching for a home to buy or rent is a moment of mastery rather than drudgery
- maintain consistent editorial, visual, and interactive styles to create a reliable and meaningful customer experience
- establish the principles, practices, and patterns that inform and guide design and development
Benefits
Aside from benefiting our customers, codifying our principles and patterns has benefits that redound to our organization. Among these, we will see:
- reduced testing times because we have outlined a set of principles and patterns against which to test implementation
- reduced costs by documenting Homes.com-specific principles, practices, and patterns that make it easier to train new staff and facilitate cross-training
- reduced development time with a guide that clarifies goals and resolves common problems, freeing up developers to focus on innovations that set us apart from the competition
Sounds like fun, right? Let us know what you think: thoughts, criticisms, suggestions? In the future, we’ll work through the principles in a workshop. Later, we’ll hold a contest to crowdsource our design patterns. Stay tuned!