Introduction
This is not a how-to book. There are many, many books out there
that explain how Web sites get made. This is not one of them.
This is not a book about technology. There is not a single line of code
to be found between these covers.
This is not a book of answers. Instead, this book is about asking the
right questions.
This book will tell you what you need to know before you go read
those other books. If you need the big picture, if you need to under-
stand the context for the decisions that user experience practitioners
make, this book is for you.
This book is designed to be read easily in just a few hours. If you’re
a newcomer to the world of user experience—maybe you’re an
executive responsible for hiring a user experience team, or maybe
you’re a writer or designer just finding your way into this field—this
book will give you the foundation you need. If you’re already famil-
iar with the methods and concerns of the field of user experience,
this book will help you communicate them more effectively to the
people you work with.
2 INTRODUCTION
The Story Behind the Book
Because I get asked about it a lot, here is the story of how The
Elements of User Experience came to be.
In late 1999, I became the first information architect hired into a
long-established Web design consultancy. In many ways, I was
responsible for defining my position and educating people both
about what I did, and how it fit in with what they did. Initially, they
were perhaps cautious and a bit wary, but soon they came to recog-
nize that I was there to make their jobs easier, not harder, and that
my presence did not mean their authority was diminished.
Simultaneously, I was compiling a personal collection of online
material related to my work. (This would eventually find its way
onto the Web as my information architecture resources page at
www.jjg.net/ia/.) While I was doing this research, I was contin-
ually frustrated by the seemingly arbitrary and random use of differ-
ent terms for the basic concepts in the field. What one source called
“information design” appeared to be the same as what another
called “information architecture.” A third rolled everything together
under “interface design.”
Over the course of late 1999 and January 2000, I struggled to arrive
at a self-consistent set of definitions for these concerns and to find a
way to express the relationships between them. But I was busy with
actual paying work as well, and the model I was trying to formulate
wasn’t really working out anyway; so by the end of January I had
given up on the whole idea.
THE ELEMENTS OF USER EXPERIENCE 3
That March I traveled to Austin, Texas, for the annual South by
Southwest Interactive Festival. It was an engaging and thought-
provoking week during which I didn’t get much sleep—the confer-
ence’s schedule of day and night activities begins to resemble a
marathon after a couple of days.
At the end of that week, as I walked through the terminal of the air-
port in Austin preparing to board the plane back to San Francisco, it
abruptly popped into my head: a three-dimensional matrix that cap-
tured all of my ideas. I waited patiently until we boarded the plane.
As soon as I reached my seat, I pulled out a notebook and sketched
it all out.
Upon my return to San Francisco, I was almost immediately laid up
with an enervating head cold. I spent about a week sliding in and
out of a fevered delirium. When I felt particularly lucid, I worked on
turning my notebook sketch into a finished diagram that would fit
neatly onto a letter-size piece of paper. I called it “The Elements of
User Experience.” Later I would hear about how, for many people,
that title evoked memories of periodic tables and Strunk and White.
Unfortunately, none of these associations was in my mind when I
chose that title—I chose “elements” out of a thesaurus to replace the
more awkward and technical-sounding “components.”
On March 30, I posted the final product on the Web. (It’s still there;
you can find the original diagram at www.jjg.net/elements.pdf.)
The diagram started getting some attention, first from Peter Merholz
and Jeffrey Veen, who would later become my partners in Adaptive
Path. Soon after, I spoke with more people about it at the first
Information Architecture Summit. Eventually I started hearing from
people all over the world about how they had used the diagram to
educate their co-workers and to give their organizations a common
vocabulary for discussing these issues.
4 INTRODUCTION
In the year after it was first released, “The Elements of User
Experience” was downloaded from my site more than 20,000 times.
I began to hear about how it was being used in large organizations
and tiny Web development groups to help them work and commu-
nicate more effectively. By this time, I was beginning to formulate
the idea for a book that would address this need better than a single
sheet of paper could.
Another March rolled around, and again I found myself in Austin for
South by Southwest. There I met Michael Nolan of New Riders
Publishing and told him my idea. He was enthusiastic about it, and
fortunately, his bosses turned out to be as well.
Thus, as much by luck as by intent, this book found its way into your
hands. I hope that what you do with the ideas presented here is as
enlightening and rewarding for you as putting them together in this
book has been for me.
Jesse James Garrett
July 2002
www.jjg.net/elements/
