In the Journey of User Center Design for the Virtual Environment

Research of interactions in virtual systems, including the value for customers considering engagements, usability testing experiences, and the work processed in virtual environments (including in academic environments and transactional workflows) build up the motivation for this research. With digitization rising, our dependency on virtual or on-line interactions continues expanding. According to Internet World State (2017), there are over 3.4 billion worldwide web users, and English is the most common language (26%), followed by Chinese (21%), and then by Spanish (7.7%). More and more parts of our daily life experiences are becoming digital, and promising integration of virtual environments are motivating further growth. Such context is driving significant changes in our human life ecosystems. The International Ergonomics Association (2017) and ISO 6385:2016 (2016) characterize Ergonomics as a discipline committed to understand the human interactions in a system. With application of principles, theory, design methods, and data analyses a vision with primary focus on the human experiences and well-being should be further embraced, considering alternatives to optimize performance of the hosting digital system as well. The insights from software developers on practices and challenges addressing customer experience (including scenarios when customer may not explicitly communicate his/her expectations), coupled with experience using on line education systems and other virtual services are analyzed. In support of this study, over 500 web sites representing variety of organizations are explored with the goal of finding opportunities to improve the overall user’s experience. Through the study we identify factors driving web site performance from the users’ perspective; web designers and architectures should consider these factors to drive excellence in the experience of the virtual journey.