The days of competing on price or features is over. Prices can be beaten, features copied. To truly stand, your product must be well designed and offer a rewarding experience.
Not all companies fully grasp the importance of design yet. Sure, they hire some designers and throw around terms like UCD and UX; but more than often it is without understanding. Working at one of these companies can be frustrating, you feel you’re there as a wireframe monkey or simply as a ‘geek that can draw’ to prop up and impress potential clients.
This lack of understanding isn’t the fault of our client or colleagues however, it is ours. As designers we need to pitch the benefits of design effectively and build this understanding.
As you’re reading this, chances are you’ll know that design research is critical to the success of a project. Sadly, this relatively new approach is difficult to communicate especially in a company or industry where it’s benefits are yet to be widely proven. It is time consuming and the output is minimal and deceptively simple looking, building a set of three A4 sized personas could take months of multifaceted research.
Often the ‘faster horse’ story or the fallacy that Apple don’t do user research is used as an argument against design research. You’ll face blank faces when you suggest a persona project or ethnographic study and you won’t get budget or time to conduct the research you want to do.
So, what can you do?
Designers are passionate about their work, but are generally meek and vastly outnumbered by project managers, developers, sales and stakeholders. We need to share this passion for design and our vision for crafting a great experience with the rest of the company.
Most importantly, even if insufficient time or budget has been allocated or your work is frowned upon find a way to complete the research you feel the project requires. Get creative and make compromises to conduct whatever valuable research you can. Your designs and the project will be better for it and you’ll have the evidence to support the benefits of design research in the future.
More reading :
Cennydd Bowles and James Box’s Undercover UX
Adaptive Path’s Subject to Change : Creating Great Products & Services for an Uncertain World
“Take the risk of thinking for yourself, much more happiness, truth, beauty, and wisdom will come to you that way.” — Christopher Hitchens (via nevver)
“Creative workers are not motivated by money, directed by authority, or impressed by status.” — Alan Cooper (via mralancooper)
is plain fucking English.
It’s fine to talk about intrinsic and extrinsic rewards, Gestalt principles, gamification, ethnographic studies, qualitative and quantitative research when talking to other practitioners, but these terms mean little outside of our little field. Nor does their use help our reputation of being pretentious douchebags within some circles.
Sure, buzzwords are handy shorthand for complex concepts, but are dangerous when not understood (watch a Web Developer respond to the term Web 2.0 for an example). Terminology can be interpreted differently too, leading to confusion or arguments about semantics.
We pride ourselves with creating intuitive designs and clear copy, but all too often we fail at communicating with our team. Anything can be expanded and explained in plain English, so why not practice what we preach and do so?
“Software is not built with “resources”, nor is it built with “money”. It is built by intelligent, non-fungible people.” — Alan Cooper (via mralancooper)
“I want everything we do to be beautiful. I don’t give a damn whether the client understands that that’s worth anything, or that the client thinks it’s worth anything, or whether it is worth anything. It’s worth it to me. It’s the way I want to live my life. I want to make beautiful things, even if nobody cares.” — Saul Bass
Usable is vanilla, its a C grade. Aim higher.
Nobody ever recommended a restaurant because the food is edible, they say things like ‘the menu had these great stories about each cocktail’s invention’, ‘they played this cool authentic music’ and ‘food is served on these antique plates’. It’s details like this that create a memorable experience and that keep customers coming back.
How do we achieve this on the web? You need to trigger emotions, make your users smile or feel like they achieved something awesome. It can be through great copy, the way you deal with complaints or quirky easter eggs in your site. Get this right and your customers will fall in love with your brand and become ambassadors.
Brand ambassadors will tell their friends about your product and be willing to engage at a much higher level. This can lead to drastically reduced marketing budgets and even allow you to crowd-source your support.
So stop doing usability testing, it isn’t enough for a task to be be achievable. Instead really observe users as they interact with your product and gauge their reactions. What could make this task more fun, more enjoyable, more rewarding?
More reading :
Stephen P. Anderson’s Seductive Interaction Design
Aaron Walker’s Designing for Emotion
“The future is already here. It’s just unevenly distributed.” — William Gibson
Recently I’ve been doing a lot of research into gamification, which despite being a fairly revolting buzzword, is a fascinating topic. In my research I came across the talks and writings of Jane McGonigal, which has got me thinking for the first time ever - I don’t play enough games. I used to feel slightly superior to my friends that sunk 100 hours plus weekly into games like World of Warcraft, like I was doing something of value with my time. Now I’m jealous and regret not ever subscribing and playing along; realising that watching through every episode of X Files again, riding bikes and drinking beer wasn’t necessarily a better use of time.
Investing in 10,000 hours in any activity is considered enough time to be an expert in that activity, an increasing number of the current generation have comfortably clocked up 10k hours of online gaming by the time they graduate. So what are they experts in, what skills does online gaming give you? Considering WoW as an example; I recognise the game requires skills in problem solving, teamwork, resource management, organisation, strategy, communication as well as encouraging research into and learning about the history, backstory and geography of the world. All of these are useful and admirable skills and with the equivalent of over 5 years worth of working hours before even starting their professional careers, todays youth have huge potential, probably without even knowing about it. In Jane’s talks and in her book ‘Reality is Broken’ she asks what if these skills were put to real world problems instead of defeating alien hordes and slaying orcs? There is no denying, gaming is huge and growing - the challenge we now face is how to untap the potential of games and gamers.
To illustrate my point about UX design really being product design I thought it would be useful to come up with an analogy.
This is product - it’s functional, it’ll get juice out of lemons; but how much thought went into it? It’s metal handle will become slippery and is rather uncomfortable.
This is a designer product - a beautiful object but not all that good at its job; in fact it’s designer Philipe Starck has said it was “not meant to squeeze lemons, but to start conversations”.
This is a designed product - while it is aesthetically pleasing, the Catcher from Joseph Joseph is made from soft plastic so it feels comfortable in your hand and the integrated stand also catches pips and prevents juice from getting on the handle. In thinking about ways to improve on existing paradigms - adding value and delighting the user, good designers are able to create truly great products. However in daily use, their owners will rarely consider the individual details, just enjoy using the product without giving any thought to why. This for me, is the challenge and reward of UX.. I mean, product design.