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What it argues
The Elements of User Experience is Jesse James Garrett's attempt to give the field of web design a shared vocabulary and a structural framework at a moment — 2002 — when web design was still being understood as a single discipline rather than several interrelated ones. The book is best known for the "Elements" diagram, a visual model that separates the work of creating a web product into five planes: Strategy, Scope, Structure, Skeleton, and Surface. The diagram appeared first as a free download in 2000 and was downloaded hundreds of thousands of times before the book that explained it was published.
Garrett's argument is that user experience problems usually trace back to decisions made at the wrong level of abstraction. Teams spend weeks debating the visual surface of a product — color, typography, imagery — while the structural and strategic decisions that actually determine user success remain unmade or implicit. The five planes model is designed to make those decisions visible and to enforce a sequence: surface decisions should emerge from skeleton decisions, which should emerge from structural ones, which should emerge from scope, which should emerge from strategy.
What it gets right
- 1.
User experience can be divided into five planes — Strategy, Scope, Structure, Skeleton, Surface — and problems at higher planes cannot be solved by better decisions at lower ones.
- 2.
Strategy is the first plane because it asks the most fundamental questions: what does the product do, for whom, and why? Teams that skip strategy and go straight to features build the wrong things well.
- 3.
Information architecture — how content is organized and labeled — shapes user behavior as much as visual design does, and receives far less attention in most design processes.
What it covers
Who wrote it
Jesse James Garrett is an American designer and co-founder of Adaptive Path, one of the first user experience consultancies, which helped establish UX as a recognized discipline in the early 2000s. He coined the term "Ajax" in a 2005 essay that described the technique behind interactive web applications. The Elements of User Experience began as a free diagram downloaded by designers across the web before becoming the book that defined foundational UX vocabulary for a generation of practitioners. Garrett has consulted for a wide range of technology companies and remains an active voice in design education.
