Introduction
This is not a how-to book. There are many, many books out therethat 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 theright questions.
This book will tell you what you need to know before you go readthose other books. If you need the big picture, if you need to understand 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’rea newcomer to the world of user experience—maybe you’re anexecutive responsible for hiring a user experience team, or maybe
you’re a writer or designer just ﬁnding your way into this ﬁeld—thisbook will give you the foundation you need. If you’re already familiar with the methods and concerns of the ﬁeld of user experience,
this book will help you communicate them more effectively to thepeople you work with.

2INTRODUCTION

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 along-established Web design consultancy. In many ways, I wasresponsible for deﬁning my position and educating people bothabout 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 recognize that I was there to make their jobs easier, not harder, and thatmy 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 atwww.jjg.net/ia/.) While I was doing this research, I was continually frustrated by the seemingly arbitrary and random use of different terms for the basic concepts in the ﬁeld. What one source called“information design” appeared to be the same as what anothercalled “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 away to express the relationships between them. But I was busy withactual 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

That March I traveled to Austin, Texas, for the annual South bySouthwest Interactive Festival. It was an engaging and thoughtprovoking week during which I didn’t get much sleep—the conference’s schedule of day and night activities begins to resemble amarathon after a couple of days.
At the end of that week, as I walked through the terminal of the airport in Austin preparing to board the plane back to San Francisco, it
abruptly popped into my head: a three-dimensional matrix that captured 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 andout of a fevered delirium. When I felt particularly lucid, I worked onturning my notebook sketch into a ﬁnished diagram that would ﬁt
neatly onto a letter-size piece of paper. I called it “The Elements ofUser 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 themore 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 frompeople all over the world about how they had used the diagram toeducate their co-workers and to give their organizations a common
vocabulary for discussing these issues.

34INTRODUCTION

In the year after it was ﬁrst released, “The Elements of UserExperience” 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 communicate 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 forSouth by Southwest. There I met Michael Nolan of New Riders
Publishing and told him my idea. He was enthusiastic about it, andfortunately, his bosses turned out to be as well.
Thus, as much by luck as by intent, this book found its way into yourhands. I hope that what you do with the ideas presented here is as
enlightening and rewarding for you as putting them together in thisbook has been for me.
Jesse James Garrett
July 2002
www.jjg.net/elements/