What 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.