Valuing the User Experience in Human-Computer Interaction: the Respected User Manifesto

There is a no-man’s land between how the Graphical User Interfaces are typically conceived, designed and engineered in desktop applications and mobile apps, and what users actually expect: it’s where the users’ experience, expectations, training, habits, mental attitude come into play. New software versions add features, change the GUI layout, behavior and environment for innovation and marketing reasons, but in doing so they often disregard the value of the user experience: all the user can do is accept the new situation and trying to adapt. To make things worse, customization options are usually limited when it comes to restoring the previous environment, and downgrading restrictions in software licenses also apply. Background services may also start at the worst time, monopolizing the system against the user’s will, causing frustration and possibly more serious problems due to service unavailability.
In short, there’s a grey cross area in software design and deployment where the user is not fully respected as a person whose experience is intrinsically a value worth preserving.
In this paper we analyze and discuss some common situations from different scenarios, and exploit them to extract some golden rules for a more respected software user – the Respected User Manifesto.