By: Jesse James Garrett   An interesting article, clearly illustrating the importance of user experience in our everyday life. On the Internet, websites are similar to any tangible products, the need for ease of use and predictability should always be prioritised. Enjoy the article!   Everyone, every once in a while, has one of those days.   You know the kind of day I'm talking about: you wake up to sunlight streaming in your window and wonder why your alarm clock hasn't gone off yet. You look over to see that your clock thinks it's 3:43am. You stumble out of bed to find another clock, which tells you you can still make it to work on time - if you leave in 10 minutes.   You turn on the coffeemaker and hustle to get dressed, but when you go to retrieve your dose of life-sustaining caffeine, there's no coffee in the pot. No time to figure out why - you've got to get to work!   You get about a block from your house when you realize that the car needs gas. At the gas station, you try to use the pump that takes ATM cards, but this time it won't accept your card. So you have to go inside and pay the cashier, but first you have to wait in a line while the cashier very slowly helps everyone in front of you. Finally, you pump your gas and leave the station - to the sound of your gas cap tumbling off the roof of your car and bouncing out into the street.   You have to take a detour because of a traffic accident, so the drive to work takes longer than expected. It's official: despite all your efforts, you are now late for work. Finally, you make it to your desk. You're agitated, harried, weary, and irritable - and your day hasn't even really started yet. And you still haven't had any coffee.   Introducing User Experience   It seems like a string of bad luck - just one of those days. But let's look closer and see if, somehow, all that bad luck could have been avoided:   The accident: The accident on the road happened because the driver took his eyes off the road for a moment to turn the radio down. He had to look down because it was impossible to identify which was the volume control by touch alone.   The cap: You lost your gas cap because you set it down on the roof of the car when you started to pump, but then you forgot it because you were feeling rushed. If the cap didn't need to be set down somewhere at all - if it were simply tethered to the car in some way - you couldn't have lost it.   The register: The line at the register in the gas station moved so slowly because the cash register was complex and confusing, and unless the clerk paid extra close attention while ringing something up, he could make a mistake and have to start all over again. If the register had been simpler and the layout and colors of the buttons different, that line never would have formed.   The pump: You wouldn't have had to stand in that line at all if the pump had accepted your ATM card. It would have done so if you had turned the card around the other way, but nothing on the pump indicated which way the card should be turned and you in such a hurry that you didn't think to try every orientation.   The coffeemaker: The coffeemaker didn't make coffee because you didn't push down the On button all the way. The machine doesnt do anything to let you know that it has been turned on: no light, no sound, no little "click" when the button makes contact. You thought you had turned it on, but you were wrong. The problem could have been avoided altogether if you had set the coffeemaker to start brewing automatically first thing in the morning, but you never learned how to use that function - if you knew it existed at all.   The clock: And then, we come to the factor that started the whole chain of events - the alarm clock. The alarm didn't go off because the time was wrong. The time was wrong because your cat stepped on the clock in the middle of the night and reset it for you. (If this sounds implausible to you, don't laugh - it has happened to me. I have had to go to surprising lengths to find a clock that is impervious to cat meddling). A slightly different configuration of buttons would have prevented the cat from resetting the clock, and consequently you would have been out of bed with plenty of time - no need to rush at all.   In short, every one of the previous incidents of "bad luck" could have been avoided had someone taken more care in designing a product. These examples all demonstrate a lack of attention to the user experience: how the product behaves and is used in the real world. When a product is being developed, people pay a great deal of attention to what it does. User experience is the other, often overlooked side of the equation - how it works - that can often make the difference between a successful product and a failure.   User experience is not about how a product works on the inside (although that sometimes has a lot of influence). User experience is about how it works on the outside, where a person comes into contact with it and has to work with it. That interaction often inolves pushing a lot of buttons, as in the case of technology products such as alarm clocks, coffeemakers or cash registers. Sometimes, it's just a matter of a simple physical mechanism, such as the gas cap on your car. However, every product that is used by someone has a user experience, newspapers, ketchup bottles, reclining armchairs, cardigan sweaters.   No matter what kind of product is involved, it's the little things that count. Having a button click when you push it down doesn't seem like much, but when that click makes the difference between getting coffee and not getting coffee, it matters a great deal. Even if you never realised that the design of that button was causing you trouble, how would you feel about a coffeemaker that you were able to use successfully only part of the time? How would you feel about the manufacturer? Would you buy another product from that company in the future? Probably not. Thus, for the want of a button that clicks, a customer is lost.