The Elements of User Experience

Most people start out describing objectives for their products in very general terms. In the case of Web sites, they fundamentally serve one of two purposes: to make the company money or to save the company money. Sometimes it’s both. But exactly how these sites are supposed to do that is not always clear.

The most common reason for the failure of a Web site is not technology. It’s not user experience either. Web sites most often fail because—before the first line of code was written, the first pixel was pushed, or the first server was installed—nobody bothered to answer two very basic questions: . What do we want to get out of this product? . What do our users want to get out of it?

Users don’t visit Web sites to experience the joy of navigation.