By Bharat Baste
User experience (UX) is a term most closely associated with web or product design.
How a person interacts with a web page, app or product is, of course, of the utmost importance to those who create them. UX designers spend their entire careers working on behalf of the user to improve their experience with those products, whether digital or otherwise.
And buildings, just like websites, have users. So at BBCO, we’ve found user experience to have many applications within architectural design. In fact, it’s no exaggeration to say that UX leads our design approach.
It starts when we begin a project. As we research the building’s context and familiarize ourselves with the client’s needs, we’re uniquely thorough in how we gather and compile information up front. We want to understand exactly how the space can and should function, and we design for the people who will be using it, whether they’re apartment dwellers or children at a school.
One of the key ways we do that is by working from the inside out.
We focus on maximizing space, which eliminates unnecessary square footage. We’re a team of skilled planners, and we put that to use with a focus on quality, not quantity. (That’s why our tagline is, “Build less. Create more.”) This not only means a more sustainable building, but also a more logical and elegant one, too.
Aesthetically, we let a building’s context—from how it will be used to where it is located to what surrounds it—influence how it ends up looking, so the end result feels organic within its environment.
All of these elements were at work in our design for the Hilltop Early Learning Center, a two-story pre-K facility for families in Columbus’ Hilltop community. We approached this project largely from a child’s viewpoint.
Knowing this would likely be their first time in an educational building, we wanted them to feel energized from the moment they arrived. So we focused on play, designing a floating play space above the entry and making it viewable from the street, as well as an indoor playground that is visible as you walk through the entry.
The View on Pavey Square, in which we preserved six historic houses while incorporating two new residential buildings behind them, also brought user experience to the forefront.
We designed the buildings to be taller than the houses but did so in such a way that they appear to be of similar height from the street. They complement their historic context, too, with a wall of glass that doesn’t compete with the homes in the forefront. Large amenity spaces, a mechanized parking system and decks were also designed with the student clientele in mind.
In these ways—and many others—we continue to put the end user first, knowing their experience matters most.