When designing a website, it is important to think through every possible way that users will be interacting with the website. The way they interact with the website is highly dependent on the way it is built. This might sound like a complicated process, but by breaking the process down into its core elements, we can understand it better. Thankfully, Jesse Garrett, an information architect, came up with a principle called Five Planes of User Experience.
Although this is the most abstract one of the five planes, a strategy should be decided at the very beginning because it represents the goals and objectives of the UX that we want to achieve. You must be able to articulate the problem you are trying to solve and the user’s needs.
In this plane, you identify the content, features, and functions that are going to be used in your product. This allows you to address potential issues right at the beginning.
In this plane, you focus on defining how the various features of your product fit together.It is important to define how users interact with your product’s functions and to focus on giving the right information to the user.
In this plane, you focus on the arrangement of buttons, text, images, etc. The purpose of this plane is to optimize the placement of these elements for maximum efficiency.
The surface plane is what we can see with our eyes at the first moment. You should focus on appearance and the visual design of the product.
5 Planes of User Experience in Web Design
At Brand & Mortar, our website design Toronto team apply this method when designing websites. Thinking about these five planes helps us focus on our website goals and creating a pleasant user experience.