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.