The 5 Planes
The Five Planes of User Experience are named as follows: Surface, Skeleton, Structure, Scope, and Strategy. These five planes provide a conceptual framework to assist you in the process of designing a website. As you move from Surface to Strategy the content of each plane becomes less concrete and more abstract. The planes are your friends, they will help you determine what your objectives and goals are, how they will be met within the context of the site, how things will be implemented, and ultimately they will help you try to mee the needs of your users in an effective way.
THE SURFACE PLANE: This plane consists of what you see on the actual website. Some images could be functions the user interacts with, or they could be instructional or informational. This is where the most basic interaction occurs, when the user opens the site the things they see will be the elements of the surface plane.
THE SKELETON PLANE: Beneath the surface plane is the skeleton plane, the skeleton plane deals with the organization and arragnement of the surface elements. This is where functionality and visability meet.
THE STRUCTURE PLANE: The structure plane is a more abstract version of the information contained in the skeleton plane. Like how the skeleton plane deals with the arrangement of visuals on the surface plane, the strucutre plane deals with the arrangement of functions that may exist on teh skeleton plane. Consider the structure of this website, it is basic but you can see the nav bar to the left and the header and footer above and below the central content.
THE SCOPE PLANE: While the previous planes deal with the arrangement of the site and its functions, the scope plane deals with what those features will be. What does the site need to accomplish, what must be present in order to meet these needs. For example, if it is a webstore then a shopping functionality will be a part of the scope of the site. This planes helps you determine the features that will be integral to the site.
THE STRATEGY PLANE: Even more abstract than the scope plane, the strategy plane typically deals with what the owners and end users of a site want. What are long and short term goals? What will users want from the site? This is the stage where objectives are determined before implementation can even be considered. Alternatively you can return to the strategy plane in order to determine whether your site has actually met the objective you need it to.
You can view an exceprt from The Elements of User Experience as a PDF here! Thanks internet!
Sources and References:
Garrett, Jesse James. (2011) The Elements of User Experience. Berkeley, CA. New Riders.
