The Elements of User Experience
In her book The Elements of User Experience: User-Centered Design for the Web and Beyond, Jesse James Garrett introduces and explains five elements of user experience, known as planes: surface, skeleton, structure, scope, and strategy.
According to Garrett, each of these planes are elements that web authors must consider in order to make their websites intentionally usable by and for an audience. Though she explains these elements in great detail in her book, a basic summary of each element should be helpful for a beginner web author.
- The Surface Plane
- The Skeleton Plane
- The Structure Plane
- The Scope Plane
- The Strategy Plane
This represents the visible content of a website: images and text. Some images are clickable links, while others serve to decorate the page.
This plane represents the organization the information on a webpage and the placement of navigational links, content boxes, and images. When considering the skeleton plane, try to arrange your site so that it is as easy as possible for users to navigate and understand.
While the skeleton and surface planes concern visible aspects of a site, the structure plane deals with the abstract arrangement of a site. It includes how web pages link to one another on a website (for example, the structure plane considers which navigational links should be on every page), and may be thought of as a theoretical map of the website.
The structure deals with the abstract arrangement of features and functions across web pages; the scope plane decides what those features and functions are. The scope plane considers how the website should do what it is intended to do.
When you first ask yourself why you want to make a website and what you want it to accomplish, you are thinking in the strategy plane. The strategy should consider your desires as well as the desires of users visiting your website.
Although Garrett first lists these elements from the most concrete to the most abstract, she suggests beginning a website with the strategy plane first, developing the website from the most abstract points up to the most concrete. As the below visual representation implies, the most visible, concrete part of a website is founded on its abstract beginnings.
Think about these five elements of user experience when you conceptualize and eventually create your own website.
All information derived from The Elements of User Experience: User-Centered Design for the Web and Beyond by Jesse James Garrett. Graphic representation made by Bailey Lucero-Carter on GIMP.
