Practitioners-Guide-User-Experience-Design

Chapter 1
SEEING THROUGH USERS’ EYES
I made my way into user experience design through an unexpected route. My interest
dates back to an undergraduate English class I took on the master of suspense, Alfred
Hitchcock. I thought it would be fun and easy; after all, the required reading included
textbooks with titles like Men, Women, and Chainsaws. As a prepharmacy major at the
time, I needed at least one class that would be a breeze. Little did I know how fascinating I
would find learning the details of how storytellers created such thrilling experiences for
viewers.
I ended up loving Hitchcock. We studied how he composed his shots and the
narrative tricks he used to steer viewers’ eyes to exactly what he wanted them to pay
attention to and increase the mystery and tension of scenes. In Rear Window, he limits the
audience’s view to that from the apartment of Jimmy Stewart’s character, L. B. Jefferies.
We watch through the binoculars of the wheelchair-bound Mr. Jefferies as a murder
mystery unfolds in the apartment across the courtyard, catching only suggestive glimpses
of the grisly deeds his neighbor may be perpetrating. What’s the man done with that large
knife and the handsaw he’s cleaning? Is Jefferies merely falling prey to an overwrought
imagination? The voyeuristic viewpoint puts us right in the mystery. And, of course, who
could ever forget the tension of the scene in Psycho where Hitchcock places us in the
shower with Janet Leigh? As we look out through the shower curtain, we see only a
shadowy silhouette of the bathroom door opening and the murderer approaching. It’s one
of the scariest shots in all of film. The full scene was so complex that it required seventyeight
different shot setups, and the effect was so compelling that it’s said to have caused a
new phobia of taking showers. For me, the experience of the class was so transformative
that I changed my major to English.
Hitchcock’s achievement became all the more impressive to me when I learned in
later classes about how different people’s readings are of any given “text,” whether a
novel, a movie scene, or, as I was to find years later when I got into UX design, a website
or app. We studied different methods of reading a text, which the literary theorist Stanley
Fish called interpretive strategies. I loved discovering how various schools of thought read
a novel or play, learning to appreciate the multitude of ways people perceive.
Fish emphasized that an individual’s approach to any text is very much a matter of
her life experiences and perspectives. He stressed that it’s important not to insist on the
correctness of one person’s interpretation over another’s. That contention earned him
notoriety and a good deal of derision by those who thought his argument was extreme.
The literary critic David Hirsch described Fish as “hopelessly alienated from art, from
truth, and from humanity.” 1 But I appreciated how he helped me see through others’ eyes
and to enjoy that feeling of ambivalence I get when my own interpretation is met with a
well-marshaled set of opposing facts. I learned to empathize and see someone else’s
perspective, which has been invaluable in my becoming a good UX practitioner. Different
people experience apps and sites differently, and the more we are able to appreciate those
differences and adapt our designs to them, the better user experiences we’ll create.