The Five Planes of User Experience

When working with a user interface designer, or a ui designer is working with a client, there are 5 levels of looking at the ui design:

• 5: Surface Plane: web pages made up of images and text.
• 4: Skeleton Plane: the placement of buttons, tabs, images, and blocks of text.
• 3: Structure Plane: abstract structure of the site.
• 2: Scope Plane: features and functionality.
• 1: Strategy Plane: what the owners and users of the site want to achieve.

The five planes build from bottom to top.

The planes have slight nuances, depending on whether the (part of the) web site under design is task-
oriented or information-oriented.


Stagger Work on Planes
Do not wait for work on one plane to finish before starting on the next. There must be some degree of
iteration (feedback loop).
Work on a particular plane cannot finish before work on lower planes has finished.

Prof. Dr. Keith Andrews
http://courses.iicm.tugraz.at/iaweb/iaweb.pdf
Information Architecture and Web Usability
706.041 Information Architecture and Web Usability WS 2007/2008 3VU
Graz University of Technology
Inffeldgasse Austria