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The user experience remains the single most important yet poorly understood component of interaction design. Traditional usability approaches rest heavily on tasks that have unambiguous outcomes or efficient procedures for completion, scenarios that are difficult to map onto many new information spaces.

Yet failing to ground the evaluation appropriately can lead to unreliable or invalid inferences about the user experience and a subsequent failure to make real improvements to the information architecture.

In this talk, Andrew will outline the important variables that affect users, moving beyond effectiveness and efficiency alone, to a consideration of such attributes as:

• aesthetics,
• initial perceptions,
• cognitive effort,
• information shapes, and
• the relationship between performance and preference.