Everyone who works in a product team should be aware of the forces that ultimately create user experience. Those forces arise from a basic structure we’ll illustrate here, and help us anticipate and answer the key questions and needs that arise throughout the product development process.

Last week, we looked at different perspectives on the product team that may need to work with to understand organizational tradeoffs. Today, our view is structural: showing concrete aspects of a user-experience situation, critical forces that drive product development, and how they’re related and organized into a larger system.

We’ll assume a B2B product team in this example, but the structure shown and the key questions it implies, holds for every product team we may work with.

I see user experience as an ephemeral matching of aligned intentions and action between two sides: an “us-who-make-a-thing” and a “them-who-use-the-thing.”

We can see these experiences and we can measure things about them, but under healthy circumstances, most of what actually happens is out of our control. (What we do control is often more human, messy, logistically-constrained, and personality-driven than we or our organizations care to admit.)