Month: March 2016

5 tips for a feel-good user experience

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Armed with a buy-one, get-one free coupon he’d gotten over the weekend we passed over the hallowed threshold of a large, national chicken wings franchise. We were regulars. We’d been there before… many times, but this time, for one of us, lunch was going to be free, thanks to the aforementioned BOGO coupon…

Free wings = A good day – An ancient law of yore, I believe.

We sat. We ordered. Lunch came without incident and the idea of free wings made them that much more delicious.

Lunch bliss ensued.

The Bill came. BOGO coupon was presented.

Lunch bliss quickly unraveled.

So, it turned out that the BOGO coupon was worded badly. The server tried to clarify, but became increasingly frustrated and emphatic when stating that it wasn’t, in fact, a BOGO coupon, but some other kind of offer. Confused, we listened and continued our inquiry, at this point, for purely academic reasons, to try and understand the printed offer. Realizing the server was quickly becoming incensed and on the verge of making a scene, we paid up and left. Our bellies were full, with equal parts wings and resentment.

“Well,” I said to my lunch companion, “that was an extremely unpleasant experience.”

“Yes,” He said, as we walked in silence.

As a user experience practitioner, I couldn’t help but think about our experience and the words of the late Tom Magliozzi, from the NPR Show Car Talk where he said: “Happiness = Reality – Expectations”, but in what world do we live where there aren’t any expectations. No world that I’ve visited, that’s for sure! This led me to the think about how the experience could have been better, and so I came up with 5 tips for a feel-good user experience:

1.) Everybody has expectations

2.) Everybody wants to feel good

3.) Everybody wants to be treated well

4.) Everybody wants to feel important

5.) Everybody has to deal with reality

1.) Everybody has expectations
Can you deliver the goods? What do your users want? Have you done the research? Have you gotten to know them? Do they know what you offer and do they expect it? You have to know what your users are expecting. Without this critical knowledge you’ll always be in the dark where your users are concerned and it won’t take long for another organization to see what you’re doing wrong, improve upon it and put you out of business.

2.) Everybody wants to feel good
Can you make your users feel good? Can your product/service take a bad situation and make it better? Can your support staff? Is your service so good that your users feel empowered, recharged and delighted after an experience with your organization? Satisfaction is one thing, but creating happiness, or at the very least a very positive experience is another thing entirely. Are you up it?

3.) Everybody wants to be treated well
It’s easy to treat users well when things are going smoothly, but how is it when things aren’t going so well? User experience, as a discipline, didn’t come about to deal with things when everything is going well, but to reduce and/or work towards eliminating those areas of the experience that break down when things aren’t going well. Treat your users well.

4.) Everybody wants to feel important
Do your users feel important? Do they feel like they’re being heard and acknowledged? We’ve all heard the adage about how the customer is always right, but even when they’re not, do they feel like they’re right, or at least feel like their perspective is important and valued? If not, those customers won’t be customers for long. The adage about the customer always being right has always been a little tongue in cheek behind the product/service curtain, but the user doesn’t need to come behind the curtain, they just need to feel important.

5.) Everybody has to deal with reality
The old marketing bromide states, thusly: Perception is reality, but sometimes reality is a bummer. It’s hard to integrate considerations for dealing with reality into the user experience, but we have to try. Those conditions in which a user comes to us are the conditions that we need to prepare for. Through quantitative and qualitative research we can learn what our users are trying to do to and how they’re interacting with our product or service and meet them where they’re at. We have to. It’s our responsibility.

These are the 5 tips for a feel-good user experience. Each one, in an of itself, will not make for a feel-good user experience, but together, combined, they come very close to perfecting the user experience. Even if you don’t think of everything the first time through, with ongoing refinement you can get darn close to perfecting an experience.

If our server or the large national wings franchise had any of these 5 tips for a feel-good user experience in their service arsenal this experience would have been dramatically different. However, most organizations are like the large national wings franchise with employees not unlike the server. Thing is, there are a lot of places making wings and a lot of out-of-work servers, and perhaps most importantly a lot of organizations working to create feel-good user experiences. There can be only one; which do you want to be?

 

Why UX should mean User Expectations

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As UX professionals there’s little that we do that isn’t steeped in expectations. Sure, we can have high-minded discussions about design, the vision of Steve Jobs, and of course Henry Ford’s ideas about faster horses, but what we’re really talking about are expectations. Whether we’re talking about the expectations around the speed or performance of a website, app or product or around the design, functionality and usability of those offerings. There’s just no way around it. That’s why, for my part, when I think about UX, I think of it as user expectations rather than user experience and I think that you should, too.

Think about it — Many of the practices that make up the discipline of user experience are, in fact, centered on establishing user expectations. Whether, we’re talking about personas, use-cases or journey maps, these all revolve around establishing user expectations. Additionally, user-centered design, which is really at the core of UX is all about getting a user’s perspective on what they expect through research and iterative development, ultimately delivering on user expectations.

It’s all about expectations.

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard the term ‘manage expectations’. For a long time, I thought of it as almost a pejorative perspective, like I had to sell something that wasn’t quite up to what a user wanted, and at times that’s exactly what I had to do. At other times, though, especially when I could get in front of a project or an initiative before it got off the ground, managing expectations became something entirely different. The managing of expectations became a practice in determining expectations, researching user needs and making them part of a product vision.

Many organizations still try to manage expectations as “requirements” during this phase of a project (waterfall), but the speed at which a project tends to move and the maturing realization that not everybody can visualize what they want in a software, app, etc… 6-12 months before they ever see even a paper prototype (show don’t tell) has increased the need to undertake UX in a different way. Many organizations are doing this as “lean UX” or building a UX approach into some form of agile software development. In my experience I think that we have a ways to go here, but were on the right track.

The right track being the maturing of the UX discipline and building out that discipline across organizations to capture user expectations and include them as part of the product vision… That’s why, for me, as a UX professional, there are times when the work that I’m really doing is researching and establishing user expectations, that work alone, defines the user experience, and for that matter designs the user experience, too. After all, if you don’t know what the user expects how can you design a user experience that suits those expectations?

The privilege of service

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Today, I began thinking about a blog post that I wrote onmy mattborghi.com website back in 2009 – The tool of choice, the privilege of service – It feels like a dog’s age since I wrote down those words, and it was well before the idea of ‘user experience design’ was getting used as much as it does today (corroberated by Google Trends, below), but the ideas there were as true then as they are now.

uxd_google_trend

Let me set the stage…

Google was the king of search, kind of like they are now. Microsoft had just released Bing and they were working very hard to knock Google off the search mountain. Many folks thought that they would succeed. As a heavy Google user then, well before mobile/Android ubiquity, I didn’t think Microsoft would be able to pull it off.

Back then, I wrote:

The thing that’s easy to forget is Google did next to no marketing for their search (interesting Salon article from 1999 that touches on this a bit, as well as a 1998 Cnet article here). I know for me, back in 1999 or 2000, numerous people recommended that I use Google, as I had been a big user of Yahoo! for everything. Eventually, Google became my search tool of choice, not just for me, but for a lot of folks. Was it because it worked well? Was it because it was lean and uncluttered? Was it because it was quick? Honestly, it’s probably some combination, but I know that value that Google offered came to me through word-of-mouth, and when I tried the tool, it delivered as promised. It was no frills, just a simple tool that worked well.

What I wrote here really is the essence of what user experience design is all about. Google worked well, it was lean, uncluttered and quick; It wasn’t bogged down with ads or Flash graphics… It just worked, quickly and the results were good. Google understood user experience and user-centered design, whether intuitively, or otherwise, and that was the tool that they brought to the marketplace.

This isn’t new news, but rather a history lesson, of sorts, to remember the roots of user experience and the benefits of user-centered design.

More from 2009:

Again, Google did very little marketing; they put something out there that worked, and people came to it. Clearly, they knew what people wanted, and how to add value… to serve is a privilege, and if your tool is chosen, then it’s bonus and bonus! Create the tool of choice, and cherish the privilege of service.

The fact is any company that stops thinking about, or doesn’t consider their, customer is going to go out of business; whether they’re selling Web services or hot dogs…

As true today, in 2016, as it was in 2009, I’m reminded that as a designer and then a design manager, my goal was always to ensure that we were serving the users, to ensure that we were delivering the best possible user and customer experience possible by delivering the best possible solution. That means that you have to be conservative and not just jump on every new trend. Try things out and see what works. Of course, there’s a balance between this and analysis paralysis, but you don’t want to be constantly throwing new tools at your users or your customers… vet the tools with research and always try to undertake a user-centered design approach. It’s not always easy, as simplicity is almost always complicated, especially when you’re working with pre-web companies, but the privilege to serve is a great and noble pursuit. And if you get your chance, it just might make you one of the richest and most successful organizations in the world.