How do we Provide a Good User Experience?

When thinking about providing a good user experience there are many, MANY obstacles to cross. However, what is a "user experience," leaving aside the "good" part for the moment. According to Eric Weiss, a user experience is "the sum of a series of interactions." I feel this is an apt description. Yet there is one caveat: how these interactions are viewed is entirely open to personal subjectivity. Now we start getting into rather tricky waters. For example: how do we know what another (let alone an Other) will find good? Can we ever really know anything about someone other than ourselves? And thus we, quite quickly, spiral into a sea of relativistic ennui. Yet, we can heal this situation with a perversion of the basic tenet of Utilitarianism: the greatest amount of pleasure for the greatest number. What this means is that we can think of ways a site is likely to provide a positive user experience for the largest amount of people and work from this starting point.


Case Study: WOMF
I really like this site. It's layout is clean, uncluttered, and it is easy to use. I will break the site down into sections.

Home
This site is so easy to navigate! Although it seems, at first glance, that there is very little information provided - most of the juicy bits are hidden away until you need them. You land on a page that has the main content on the left - good for Anglo-American cultures. The three main tabs (home, log-in, help) are all brightly coloured so you can't miss them. Notice in the pic on the right that the log-in tab changes to "profile" once you are logged in. If you don't want to search via the tag cloud, you can either search by entering in the box conveniently located in prime-viewing area or click the browse button which drops-down this menu:

Having the menu hidden away until you need it provides a much cleaner layout and it still provides added functionality to the site but only when the user requires it; if a user doesn't want to use search or tags they can always browse.

Forum Entries
There is similar pop-down behaviour for entries within the forum as well. You still get all messages in a long list but there is a small link at the bottom right of an entry if there has been a response to it (see pic below). This way a user can decide if they wish to read the response before it is displayed for them. In short: this is another feature that allows the user to control what they wish to view and to provide a much cleaner interface.

Summation
All in all, the website is incredibly easy to use, looks appealing, and I just wish I could make something similar.