Just what do UX designers design?

If experiences are evoked as a natural reaction to the world, then User-Experience design isn’t really about designing the experience so much as it is about designing the users’ “world” in such a way that it evokes a specific experience. We can’t force experiences, we can only encourage them.

How many times have you walked up to a door handle as you exit a building, grab the handle and pull, only to be surprised that the door doesn’t open. Then you see it, the little sign above the handle that says PUSH. You look around, hoping that no one saw your minor failure. Frustrated, you push the door handle and exit the building.

Did you happen to notice all of the emotions that were experienced? Surprise, hope, failure, and frustration. All because of a door handle. Now, imagine that instead of a handle, that door had a flat panel. As you walked up and pushed the panel, the door opened and you exited the building without so much as thought.

Which design evokes a desirable experience? Interestingly, the door panel evokes almost no experience, at all. When you think about it, though, something as simple as a door should be pretty much transparent. If something as simple as a door requires instructions, there’s something inherently wrong with the design.

Good design evokes either positive or transparent experiences, yet bad designs evoke negative experiences. Good design isn’t always about designing good experiences as much as it is just avoiding bad experiences. You shouldn’t have to experience a door, but, if you’ve ever experienced a negative feeling about something that you used, then it was poorly designed. Can you recall a bad experience with a product you recently used? Can you name a product that doesn’t evoke any bad experiences?

Animal trainers can’t and don’t train animals to do “tricks.” They find ways to encourage the animal to repeat a behavior they are naturally inclined to perform in the wild. The same holds true for user-experience designers. We find ways to encourage users to perform behaviors they are already inclined to perform, given the right stimuli and knowing what response is expected for that stimuli.

Good user-experience design applies stimuli, that evoke specific and desired behaviors. UX design is a combination of understanding the inclinations, predilections, expectations, and intuitive behaviors common to the intended user population and knowing how various artifacts in the world evoke specific emotions or experiences. We don’t design experiences. We design the world that evokes experiences.

Mediocrity in Design

For weeks now, I’ve been trying to write an article deriding agile developers for thinking that they can produce good designs while they develop, that it takes a UX expert to do good design. This argument has been met with vociferous contentions to the contrary and I had trouble trying to find a way to describe why UX deserves more respect, but even I had trouble convincing myself of that. Then, while reading a colleague’s blog about the definition of UX, it occurred to me that the UX expertise most developers have experienced has not supported my argument.

I know this will be perceived as either egotism or blasphemy, but the pragmatic truth is that most UX practitioners produce rather mediocre designs. Though many practitioners seem to follow accepted UCD processes, they still turn out lackluster designs that, other than make a design a bit more user-friendly, add little real value to the product. So, its no wonder that other folks, such as developers and product owners, think they can design as well as a UX practitioner.

So what is it about most UX results that I think are mediocre? Most designs I’ve seen are little more than lipstick on a pig. A really good design should add quite a bit more value than merely promoting mediocrity as an improvement. As another article I recently read on Fast Company’s website put it, so much of the UX contributions all tend to look the same. I agree with that. Few UX practitioners I’ve met know how to actually make a REAL difference.

But what kind of difference makes a valuable difference? This article wouldn’t have any teeth if I couldn’t give an example (or two). One client was mired in mediocrity with a product that they and all of the other competitors were designing for corporate IT departments. The client originally engaged us to make the UI more IT friendly. Our UCD efforts identified that the product really needed to be designed for HR departments, who were the actual end-users of the product’s outputs. We redesigned it for HR users and now that client owns their market. Another example: The Department of Energy asked us to design a knowledge management system for them, but our research identified that a KM system would NOT solve their problems, no matter how well it could be designed. We provided a very different solution and it has been exceeding all of their expectations.

I’m not try to pound my chest, but trying to point out that the real value of UX is in better defining the product, not just the UI. Every, and I mean every, product we’ve worked on has benefited from a redefinition. We’ve even taken over mediocre projects from other well-known UX teams and achieved dramatic results by redefining the products. So, if your products never seem to achieve any real progress, its likely that you have mediocre UX “experts” on your team. So, I can see why developers are apt to suggest that they, too, can design as well as the UX folks. They both seem equally capable of producing mediocre designs.

I’m sure to get some grief about this, but I am not afraid to get the ruler out. Bring it on.

Yellow Pages – A Century of Tradition Unmarred by Progress

Improving the Yellow Pages

Have you ever noticed how poorly designed the Yellow Pages really are? Interestingly, the on-line version is even worse than the print version. Have you also given any thought to how to improve the Yellow Pages, on-line or print versions? As a simple demonstration of the power of the Success PragmatiQ alignment audit, we’ll walk through a review of your average Yellow Pages to see how well it supports the objectives of the Yellow Page printer and it’s advertisers.

Our process identifies where a product design fails to align with or support a company’s business and marketing objectives. The first step must be to identify these success objectives. While that sounds trivial, in my 20 years of experience, I have never worked with a client that had a clearly defined and codified business objective. Most business objectives I’ve heard sound more like a mission statement –  completely vague and incapable of guiding design directions. This is the primary reason most products fail to achieve their intended objectives. “If you don’t know where you are going, any road will get you there.” – Lewis Carroll

The alignment audit process then defines the key users and their objectives. This activity has become popular and is often characterized by the development of personae and user stories. For the purpose of this brief audit, we’ll capture a few salient points to support this exercise. By the way, these user characteristics were derived using a minimal amount of user research and observation and were validated by the Yellow Pages publisher with whom I met.

We then review the tasks users perform in attempting to achieve their desired objective. This activity identifies where the design fails to support the business and user objectives.

Business and Marketing Objectives

Obviously, for most companies, the primary business and marketing objective of using the Yellow Pages is simply to increase revenue.

The most profitable ad revenue is generated from the larger, color ads. So, the objective might initially seem to be to sell more large, color ads.

A further complication is that there is a noticeable attrition in large color advertisers each year, eroding any economy of scale and requiring the sales force to resell the space, year after year. So, not only do sales reps need to sell the ad space, they need to make sure the advertiser is so happy with it that they don’t need to resell it next year, and the year after, etc.

So, the real objective is to sell recurring, large, color ad space.

Key User #1 – Advertisers

The majority of Yellow Page ads are for small professional and service companies, such as lawyers and plumbers. These advertisers typically have fewer than five employees and only one or two offices or trucks. These folks are NOT marketing geniuses and, therefore, are not likely to know how to create a compelling advertisement that attracts the type of business in which they specialize, especially in a small Yellow Page ad. They are more likely to follow a well-worn path of those who came before them, assuming that those folks actually knew what they were doing. These advertisers know their professions, but not much about business and marketing.

For purposes of this review, we will focus on a service provider – a plumber – as one of our target users.

Key User #2 – Consumers

Obviously, consumers represent another key user. These folks come at the problem from the opposite perspective of the advertiser. They don’t know what makes a good plumber or how to tell a good one from a bad one. They also don’t know what it will take to solve their problem. The knowledge gap between the consumer and the service provider is so great that it is nearly impossible for a consumer to identify the right solution from just a casual glance at an advertisement.

By the way, this is the user that MUST be satisfied in order to achieve the key business objectives. Interestingly, this is the user that the Yellow Pages publisher pays the least attention to. No wonder they are failing to achieve their business objectives.

Key Task

For purposes of this exercise, we’ll focus on a single scenario – a consumer walks down into his/her basement and finds an inch of water flooding the basement floor. Panic sets in and he/she immediately realizes that the problem cannot be solved without skilled help.

The most obvious resource is the Yellow Pages, so he/she immediately opens it, only to be confronted with an unmanageable array of plumbers. Unmanageable in that the user cannot expect to interview many or most of them to determine which one is the best choice to solve their problem. Moreover, given that he/she likely doesn’t know the difference between a good and a bad plumber, the consumer wouldn’t know what questions to ask or by what criteria to determine which plumber to hire.

About the only differentiating factors the consumer will be able to understand and use to select a plumber are time and money. Time – How soon can the plumber get there and Money – How much will it cost. Those, as you might guess, are NOT the most critical criteria. The consumer is just needs someone they can trust to fix their leaky basement.

Sometime ago, I met with one of the larger Yellow Page publishers and audited their Yellow Page book, much the same as I have done in this article. When I got to the point of describing the task – to find a plumber to fix a flooding basement – the woman sitting next to me said that she faced that very problem just the week before. I then opened the yellow pages to a particular ad and confidently exclaimed, “And you called this guy, right?” She was surprised and asked how I knew that she had, in fact, called that plumber. Because, I said, he was the only one who advertised that he fixed basement leaks.

All of the other ads focused on things that meant something to the service provider, but had no direct relationship to the consumers, such as years of service, 24-hour availability, memberships to various trade and service organizations, etc., but no others described what problems they solved like this one ad. This is a common approach that spans most industries – the solution provider describes their business from their own value system, not from their consumers’ perspective.

Solution Approach

Given the obvious knowledge gap between the consumer and the service provider, the best solution would involve the service provider indicating what typical problems they solve, presented from the consumers’ perspective.

The difficulty with this approach is that it requires that the service providers understand the consumer’s perspective. Reviewing the user description for the service provider suggests that these folks are NOT savvy marketers and are not likely to be able to think in terms their average consumers’ perspective. What, then, can be done to bridge that knowledge gap, the gap between how the consumers think of their problem and what the service providers know about the appropriate solutions?

New Strategy

The best solution is for the Yellow Page publishers to re-orient themselves from serving as an advertising medium to acting as a marketing consultant that serves the interest of the advertiser. This requires a notable shift in thinking by the publisher. Instead of merely selling ad space, the publishers should reinvent themselves as knowledge providers.

The publisher is far more knowledgeable than the advertiser about how to attract consumers, yet does nothing to share or leverage that knowledge. By thinking of themselves as marketing consultants, the publisher could present templates for each of the various advertiser types (lawyer, dentist, roofer, plumber, etc.) to select specific problem types that they address for the consumers. Each ad would then resonate with a consumer’s perspective of their problem and help them better identify which “solution” (service provider) is more appropriate for their specific needs.

This is just one example of how a good user-experience perspective can change a product or even the business. Ask for your free analysis, today.

When Lemmings Design

Just because everyone else does it one way, doesn’t mean it’s the right way.  Conforming to mediocrity does not lead to success, just mediocrity. Consider the iPod. Apple entered a market saturated with almost 100 different MP3 players with ever flattening sales curves. Many thought little of the Apple’s paradigm beyond it’s elegant packaging, but 10 years later, can you remember any of the 100 other MP3 players? Ummm, I thought not.

A true measure of success is found in Apple’s ability to repeat its market dominating successes. The iPhone completely changed the somewhat mature smartphone market it entered into. Only Apple’s shortsighted alliance with an unpopular service provider (decorum suggests that I refrain from mentioning AT&T in this blog) limited its dominance of that market. The jury is still out on the iPad, but my money is on Apple. This kind of repeat success lies in their ability to successfully challenge commonly held assumptions, and avoiding conforming to mediocre paradigms. But not everyone is so inclined to keep an open mind.

As a consultant, with every new project comes the same old challenge, convincing the client’s developers that there are other ways to solve a design problem. When presented with a “novel” design approach, the same tired argument inevitably arises “but nobody else does it that way.”

Developers with a decade or so of experience are often the most likely purveyors of this lemming perspective. They have become so ingrained with the typical mediocrity that they assume it’s the gold standard, so when presented with a novel approach, the immediate reaction is aversion. Never mind the fact that two decades of highly successful design experience across many different domains is responsible for the “novel” approach. After years of designing software, developers tend to developed canned solutions to common design issues and are unprepared to face a challenge to such “trivial” matters.

I believe, the solution is to remove “design” from the developers’ responsibilities and let designers design the products. Developers are not designers. They are developers. Leave them to developing and great things will happen. Relying on their design skills leads to mediocrity. Don’t mistake this as a rant against developers. It’s actually an indictment on typical (mis)management perspectives that allows developers to design. Do you think Apple relies on developers to design their products?

Do I think Apple has the perfect design team? No, of course not, but they do a VERY good job. Do you think your “designers” could compete with Apple? If not, then maybe you need to try a different perspective. Find someone other than your developers to design your products. If you don’t, your competitors will, and you will henceforth struggle to catch up or you’ll just fall off the cliff following the other lemmings.

Which User Experience Does Your Product Evoke?

When Apple announces a new release, it is met with anticipation. When Microsoft announces one, it is met with dread. User experience happens, whether you design for it or not. You have the choice of committing a concerted effort to achieve a desired experience, or you can let an undesired experience “happen.”

So just how do you design for a specific user experience? This is not as easy as it might seem, but it’s not overly difficult, either. The main difficulty arises from the dependency on establishing clear and concise business and marketing objectives. In literally every project we’ve worked on, there lacked a cohesive, agreed upon, and articulated set of Business, Marketing, and Product objectives to drive the product design. Defining the objectives, first, drives the subsequent user experience definition and ultimately the design of the product or service. Once everyone has clear objectives, they can guide their work and decisions in an effort to achieve those objectives.

During the 60’s, you could ask anyone at NASA – an astronaut, an engineer, a flight surgeon, even the janitor pushing a broom down the hall at 3 o’clock in the morning – “what are you doing here?” and they all had the same answer – “we’re going to the moon.” And guess what? They did it. They achieved the impossible, and, not coincidentally, because everyone shared the same, clear objective.

Establishing objectives is actually quite simple, if you maintain some degree of discipline. You have to force yourself to focus on one key business goal, one key marketing objective, one key target user set, etc. Focus allows you to achieve your primary objective, which usually helps achieve other minor objectives as a welcome side effect. I refer you to Jim Collins’ discussion on the Hedgehog Principle in his book Good to Great for more insight on the value and success of focus. If nothing else, you must at least do one thing well in order to succeed.

Typical business objectives come in various mutations of only two flavors – increase revenue or decrease costs. Lofty goals such as “We strive to be the best in class widget producer in North America” are mission statements, not business objectives. Good business objectives set a goal, are observable and measurable, and have a timeline. “We need to increase revenues by X% within 36 months” is a much better business objective. Moreover, a business objective must have purpose. That’s where the marketing objective comes in.

Given that most business objectives are of the increase revenue form, marketing typically comes in about 4 flavors:

1. Source customers from the competitors – Which is marketing speak for “steal” customers. This is usually a good approach when the market is truly saturated.
2. Deepen existing relationships – Selling more to your existing customers. This is a good approach when you already have the lion’s share of the market and want to maintain that market-base.
3. Expand an existing market – This is a successful approach in somewhat immature or fragmented markets where no single product has carved out a significant foothold. Sometimes a market may look saturated, but is actually underserved or focused on the wrong users. This is often opportunity knocking when most competitors aren’t at home. Think Palm Pilot and iPod. Both launched new products in, what were generally considered, saturated markets (read as flattening sales curves). Launching a product internationally is another form of market expansion that benefits from this process, as well.
4. Create a new market – This can often be an extremely profitable opportunity, but it’s generally not something a company can set out to do without first knowing that they have a market and a product. This is more likely an objective that you identify as a result of your initial user research for one of the other objectives.

Again, just like the business objectives, you must have observable and measurable goals with definitive timelines. So a good marketing objective might be to increase market share by expanding the existing market by Y% within 24 months. Note that the timeline is based on the business objectives timeline. Doing the math, if the business objectives need to be met within 36 months, then achieving a Y% of market-share for 12 months will earn enough additional revenue to achieve the stated business objectives.

Once you establish which approach or objective works for your product, then you need to determine which user set to target. Following the example, if the goal is to expand an existing market, then the target users are those people who are potentially, but not currently, users of yours or your competitor’s product. (Were they the competitor’s customers, then they would fit the source customers objective.)

Conducting ethnographic research on the target user set identifies their key tasks, desired outcomes, and the language or vernacular of their task domain. Those artifacts provide the genesis of their user-experience needs and your UX objectives. Once you have a firm understanding of your users’ desired outcomes, create a list of very specific one or two word terms, usually adjectives, which capture the essence of those user needs and outcomes. For instance, a medical device client determined that their users’ medical license and people’s lives were on the line and those users had to trust the results of the process in which the device was used. So, we settled on Trust as the key user-experience goal. To the design, that meant that zero errors took precedence over other common objectives, such as speed of use.

While desired outcomes need to be defined for each task, as they often vary by task or sub-task, you need to indentify a single, over-arching outcome for the product, as well as for each task. This level of granular discernment, matching each user task objective with appropriate user outcomes is what makes an exceptional user experience—and ultimately, a successful product.

Often times I hear folks describe user experience goals as easy to use, simple, or satisfying. Those are not specific enough to help guide successful designs. Some common, specific user experience objectives we’ve seen are:

• Efficient
• Empowering
• Fun
• Standardized

Sometimes the goal might not accentuate the positive so much as it might avoid the negative, such as:

• Avoid frustration
• Prevent errors

The right term guides your design decisions and directions. Knowing which user experience to achieve improves your chances of delivering an exceptional product. Otherwise, you could just be hoping that a good user experience “happens.”

Which Experience should you design for?

User experience design is more than just designing for a “delightful” experience. It’s about achieving a specific experience that supports your business and marketing objectives, as well as the users’ objectives. But which experience is right for your product, site, or service? The specific experience that your design should achieve is dependent on both your users’ perspectives and your marketing objectives.

Apple’s iPod is a well-known success story, as products go, but also a good user experience success story, as well. It’s no coincidence that we are all pretty familiar with the Apple brand image. They go to great lengths to ensure and support that image. But how, specifically, did the iPod achieve that success?

Let’s review. At the time the iPod was conceived and launched, there were over a hundred different MP3 players on the market, worldwide. A few well known ones and a host of lesser-known, or even unknown, ones. Everyone was getting on the MP3 bandwagon. Some even thought Apple was too late to make an impact. But we all know how that story ends, and Apple is still riding that wave.

But the questions remain, how did they do it and how does “user experience” fit into the story? One answer: they focused on the right user experience. There are two notable parts to that statement; 1) there was a right vs. wrong experience, and 2) there was a “specific” experience that could be defined and achieved.

[Honestly and frankly, I don’t have a whole lot of insight into what decisions were made behind closed doors, but we still can review this to identify the user experience aspects of this HIGHLY successful product.]

Back to the review.  If you think about the task environment in using the previous incarnations of MP3 players, you might recall that there were several different tasks and interfaces (mental models) to contend with. First there was the task (and interface) of finding your music (MP3.com), then managing your playlist (MusicMatch), and then loading your playlist onto your MP3 player using the proprietary interface for your player. Of course there was also the interface ON the player, as well, that you had to contend with to listen to your tunes.

Notice that each task had a separate and unique interface. It was all so VERY techie. You basically had to be tech savvy in order to find, download, manage, upload, and play your tunes. MP3 sales followed the Edwardian early adoption curve popularized by Geoffrey Moore’s book, Crossing the Chasm. For the most part, the early MP3 players had saturated the “available” market. I say available, because they were designed for (though not likely targeting) the techie market.

What Apple did was integrate all of those tasks into a single cohesive interface and added in their own user experience image to make their MP3 player accessible to the mainstream listener. They identified and solved the bigger problem that the others missed. The techie nature of the existing solutions, of the time, were self limiting and inhibited mass adoption by the less tech savvy, yet vastly larger, market base. Apple recognized that user confidence was a critical factor in accepting technical solutions, and solved for that critical factor in their solution.

From the inception and acceptance of the iPod, Pod and “i” have become synonymous with a specific experience, not just ease of use, but a specific user experience that signifies a quality product that we all feel like we can successfully use.

So what’s the specific user experience that Apple has established with the iPod? Confidence. You buy the iPod, iPhone, and iMac, believing that you will be more successful at achieving your desired tasks and outcomes using their products than you will anyone else’s. But they achieve that by actually focusing on supporting that experience in their designs.

I have a medical device client whose target user-experience is Trust. People’s lives and livelihoods are on the line every time their product is used and folks need to trust the results and their efforts to generate those results. Usability tests of early prototypes show 100% acceptance of the approach. We nailed it.

What experience are your designs trying to achieve?
Why?
How well are you doing?

Stay tuned for other posts that go into more detail about this.

What is Strategic about User Experience design?

The usability industry has enjoyed some increasing momentum for about the past 20 years. In that time, the industry has evolved from being perceived as little more than lipstick on the pig, prettying up screens and web pages, to managing the experiences a user has with the product or website. However, too many business and product managers still perceive UX Design as somewhat of a warm and fuzzy value proposition, with little relationship to their business objectives.

This is largely due to our own ineffectiveness to position and justify our contribution with respect to the bottom line. Sure, it’s easy to state that customers like better designed products, and most everyone would agree, but there is little direct relationship between UX design and profits.

A critical evolution of our industry is a more direct correlation to profits and other strategic initiatives. In order to gain greater appreciation for our contributions, product owners need to see how UX relates to their specific product objectives. But, what are these strategic objectives? They are the objectives that directly support the business and marketing goals set forth for the product, website, or even service charter.

While it is commonly understood that a good user-experience can’t save a poor technical design, a bad user-experience design can surely kill a good technology. Assuming that good experience design is a given, how can it be applied in a strategic sense? For instance, if an e-commerce company, Acme Widgets, needs to increase their revenue, they may try various marketing approaches, but ultimately it comes down to how well the customers adopt the provided solution. The successful solution is a complementary combination of many aspects including technology, marketing, and management, as well as a good user-experience design.

Due to the tightening economy, Acme is finding it difficult to maintain a minimum revenue stream that covers their operating costs. They really only have two strategic choices, increase revenue or decrease costs. They might decide to cut costs, so Strategic User Experience Design would strive to find ways to reduce the amount of expensive support costs. But cutting costs only works so well, you can only cut cost so much, so instead, they want to increase revenue.

Acme’s marketing has determined that their widgets are a mere commodity, so they need to increase their revenue by increasing their market base. In this regard, they have four basic options:
•    Deepen existing relationships – sell more to their current customers
•    Source customers from their competitors – market-speak for steal customers
•    Expand the overall market base – create new customers
•    Create a new market – usually by creating a new product etc.

Given that Acme’s market is rather saturated, they see more opportunity in sourcing customers from their competitors. To do this, they need to understand what those customers found of value in the competitor’s offerings.

[The common mistake here is for companies to investigate their own customers. Remember, your customers have already drank the Kool-Aid. The most successful means of identifying where your product fails to meet expectations is by observing your competitor’s customers.]

So, Acme’s marketing embarks on some user-research (not market research, mind you) to identify the needs and tasks of the target user base, their competitor’s users. While they initially thought that users were primarily interested in getting the lowest price, they found that folks were paying slightly more at some of their competitors’ sites.

This raises the question of why would customers pay more for the same widget? Despite conventional wisdom, price is usually not the foremost consideration. There are a number of other common factors that many companies fail to support in the shopping experience. In the typical selection/shopping paradigm, there are about 5 key steps:
•    Perceive a need – oops, I broke the widget
•    Identify the options – what kinds are available and where can I get one
•    Narrow the choices – which ones meet my needs, which stores are trustworthy
•    Select one – purchase one and move on
•    Service after the sale – track the shipping, return policy, etc.

Typical Purchase Task Flow

Most e-commerce companies are little more than desktop cash registers and tend to focus mostly on the purchase step. Real and sustainable success occurs in addressing the earlier stages. So, Acme’s marketing and UX teams focus on the earlier stages of product selection flow.

The user-experience research determines that users have the most difficulty in identifying which widgets best fit their needs. Subsequent research shows that the users are just as much concerned with not screwing up as they are in getting a good price. The UX design, therefore, focuses on helping users determine their needs and find the right widget for those needs.

The user role analysis identified that the users typically know very little about widgets and therefore find the technical aspects of widgets somewhat overwhelming. The resulting UX design effort focused on getting users to describe their needs, then offering a list of suggestions with supporting info on how each widget serves their needs.

The strategic aspect of this example was understanding what role the e-commerce site could play in helping users purchase the right widget throughout as much of the task sequence as possible. Too many sites leave it to the user to read and assimilate an overwhelming amount of data in order to find what is right for them. In the absence of any other knowledge, price is often artificially elevated to a higher degree of importance. However, price is less important when the user has faith or trust that Acme Widgets has just the right widget to serve their specific an unique needs.

So, in this example, the strategic user-experience was not in providing the lowest price, but in making the user comfortable in the knowledge that the Acme Widgets were the right choice and that by purchasing one, they were NOT going to screw up.

This differs from how many UX practitioners design user experiences in that the project was focused on creating a specific user experience to achieve a desired strategic objective.