User engagement is key to improving user experience

The week beginning of 17th May was an educational week for me, full of fascinating user experience lectures and workshops. It began with a very interesting talk by Jeremi Karnell (One to One Interactive) and Dr Philip Rhodes (OTOinsights) about Neuromarketing and HCI/Interaction Design, in particular a brand new method called Quantemo which combines perceptual, pre-cognitive and cognitive measurements to determine levels of user engagement. One outcome I found particularly interesting from an experiment which compared different pharmaceutical products. It confirmed that images, especially with people in them are engaging, but what was particularly interesting was that when the people were in an outdoor environment, the level of engagement was much higher.

Later in the week I attended UX London, a UK-based conference focused entirely on user experience design. Day 1 was full of inspirational talks, the first by Jesse James Garrett where the message was that to design for a great user experience, you need to engage the user. Engagement was definitely the word of the week. Peter Morville, an expert in Library Information Science, confirmed that faceted navigation was definitely the way to go in searching by providing a simple next step for the user. Other topics covered metrics, designing for improvisation and how to engage users by using psychology to motivate them. There were a few experts from other fields. Scott McCloud a comic artist and Michael B. Johnson from Pixar who shared knowledge from their disciplines that would also be applicable to UX design. Days 2 and 3 were workshop days, where there was a variety of lecture-based (designing for the usage life-cycle) and hands-on courses available (user interview techniques). One of my favourites was Stephen P. Anderson’s workshop, How To Think With Pretty Pictures (Demystifying Concept Models).

Mariko Brittain