Winning in the Marketplace: How Much User Experience Effort Does It Take?

Hi Sean

Very informative article, which covers the practical aspects while designing for UX.

Nice approach you showed in your writeup, right from user research till actual development.

I had a great take way. Thanks for such a wonderful insight.

I generally like the article, Sean, but it doesn’t incite action. I think what it needs is a comparison or a contrast to help readers identify with where their organization is with respect to UX maturity. For instance, you could have described what happens if you don’t include UX processes versus companies that do. Apple is, as you know, replete with good examples, but you could give a discrete example in the introduction. Without such comparisons, the article reads a bit too academic.

In the large versus small company section, you touch on mature versus new markets. I think you could have focused on that instead of company size. Market and/or product maturity tends to be a better predictor of how teams should employ UX principles and practices than does company size.

I like the stages you describe. I think this could lead into a discussion of how to fit them into different product-development environments. That said, I think you could have broken out task analysis and optimization from UX design. Task analysis is still a problem-definition step whereas design is a solution step. I think it’s important to keep the two separate to avoid creating solutions looking for a problem to solve. It’s too easy to justify an early design—and often, an incorrect design approach—if you don’t clearly define the problem first.

By the way, I completely disagree with the notion that you don’t need to conduct user research in mature markets. That’s usually the market that benefits the most from good user research. Most mature markets are mature only in the sense that they have stagnated and the products all reflect the same solutions approach. The book Blue Ocean Strategies agrees that you need a new analysis of a market in order to develop a new approach. Look at what Whole Foods and Wild Oats have done to the otherwise cutthroat grocery market. While Safeway, Vons, and others were fighting for pennies over a 79-cent loaf of Wonder Bread, Whole Foods identified a different value proposition and now sells bread for dollars instead of cents. It’s still bread, but they found a way to make the customers perceive it as something more valuable.

Though I realize that you can write a whole book on user research, I think that section deserves a bit more than just a few paragraphs. Again, a comparison approach might help readers understand that the market research approaches that are common to typical marketing efforts are not the same as the user research approaches UX practitioners take. This is a common misperception that leads to poorly performing designs.

“The real value the UX designer brings is the ability to interpret user research data to elicit users’ needs and deliver a solution that meets or exceeds their expectations.” Well said. This is the art of applying our science.

You make the point of distinguishing between customer and user, but I think you could have expounded on this a bit more for the benefit of readers. People are typically aware that they are different, but not so much how they differ in their needs or that they could be the same person at different times of their product usage.

I think you missed an opportunity to describe the general flow of user-centered design: that you begin by creating an idealized notion of the problem domain, then work down towards a general solution approach, further refining it to a specific solution, which then and only then describes the technology to use. More often, companies do it completely backward, first creating a technology as a solution, then finding a problem to wedge that solution into. This is the comparison between technology-oriented design and user-oriented design.

“Usability testing is at the heart of making a solution easy to use. Early solutions in a market tend not to be easy to use, but this is changing as more progressive, agile companies are doing usability testing early and often and incorporating usability evaluation into their product’s design and development lifecycle.” This is a good example of how to help readers identify how mature their UX efforts are.

The “types of releases” table can be misleading. It assumes that the product was developed with UX processes from the beginning. Most companies have several products on the market, each at different stages of maturity. The truth is, regardless of the stage of maturity, they will need to employ UX practices with a different rigor than the table suggests. For instance, for a mature product getting a minor revision, if this was their first application of UX practices, they would need to conduct a greater degree of user research just to make sure they understand their users well. Without it you may just be automating current frustrations. As you’ve heard me tell before, every client I’ve had thought they knew their customers and were surprised at how little they actually did know once we conducted some user research.

Overall, the article flows well and comes to a nice conclusion. It also raises some good points and questions that could launch into sequel articles. Despite my comments, well done.

Larry

For those who don’t know, Sean and I are good friends and co-authors, so he probably knows that my intentions are not to throw tomatoes at him, but to engage in a meaningful discussion about a topic that he has so eloquently raised.

Sean,

I appreciate your clarity of process and the pragmatic approaches that will help widen the audience, as well as inform existing practitioners. Companies that do not get that user experience encompasses all aspects of users’ interactions with a company, its services, and its products risk becoming legacy-only players in their markets. By understanding and delivering great user experiences in all the interactions, companies become positively different and better than their direct and indirect competitors. Additionally, they slow down margin compression and increase profitability relative to their industry benchmarks within the company, product, or service lifecycle.

I have observed this with companies such as Apple, Pure Digital Technologies Flip Video Camera (now owned by Cisco), and Netflix. NetFlix is one of my favorite examples that supports the steps in the process you outline, since they architected the experience and left the DVD product (at the time) the same. You know the rest of the story…. Now, if Blockbuster does not reposition itself profitably and pay off its large debt balloon due in 2012, they’ll be gone. They’ll be gone because they did not get the strategy, tactics, and delivery of user experience. They were busy managing a library model that produced a costly, customer-irritating experience instead.

The stages you outline are farther reaching than mere product or service developments. They are critical parts of company disciplines leading to winning and profitable strategies. I have witnessed this up close from my experience with companies like LPL Financial (they just went public last month!), I Drive Safely, and ComplianceMAX, to name just a few. One of the many things they have in common is that they got user experience as a complete strategy and tactical solution, then delivered it well. Each of these firms has the equity and sustainability to show for it, relative to their unique business objectives, of course.

Notably, this small list includes Fortune-sized corporations and small companies like the 80 people at I Drive Safely in Carlsbad, California. The process you describe is applied in part or in its entirety by Websense, ProFlowers, and SkinIt, too. Some of these players were opening new markets. Others were reinvigorating tired, mature markets that had razor-thin margins. These markets and margins were redefined with great end-to-end user experiences attracting customers with a high willingness to pay. Nice!

Each of these companies determined their user experience investment, the maturity of their market (or lack of it!), and the lifecycle of their product solution. They delivered elegant products, and some even went end-to-end (all interactions!). They then created distinct competencies and won in their markets … sounds familiar Mr. Van Tyne? Well done! What’s next?—Jeofrey Bean

Excellent article, Sean. While I disagree with some of Larry’s comments, and I do think it will incite action, I echo and extend his thoughts on the benefit of comparison and contrast to establish reference points for the reader, amongst a few critiques of my own:

• It would aid the implementer if you provided meaningful examples to illustrate your points—for example, representative products in mature markets and in new markets.
• Neither market is forgiving of clumsy, inept, or unintuitive user experiences, which means that, at a minimum, establishing and maintaining standards based on market and industry experience, knowledge, and best practices are key to survival; the less time one has to devote to research, the more critical is one’s reliance on standards and best practices.
• Table 1 provides a summary of guidelines for the UX effort that is recommended for each type of release. However, �substantial� has no meaning in the abstract; is this 100 hours, 1,000 hours, 15% of development budget, what? The table provides relative guidelines by release type, but there is no benchmark, and therefore, no starting place; examples would make it usable.
• In terms of release types, for an “Update,” one should adhere to product design templates and style sheets—an application should not gradually deviate from the UX architecture of the product line.
• Lest your very comprehensive article be taken as the last word on UX design, sources for further reading might be cited at the end of the article and at relevant points within the narrative.

These critical observations notwithstanding, I will use your article to educate and to motivate clients and design and development teams. Thank you, nicely done!

Tom

Excellent article, Sean.

Your discussion of doing the “right (UX) thing” versus the practical everyday challenges is a topic about which I wish more UX practitioners would share ideas and experiences. Very rarely are we ever given the luxury to fully perform all of the UX activities that would be ideal for a given product / service due to constraints on time, budget, resources, product maturity, company size, and so on. There’s the ideal UX world we strive for, and then there are the realities of the world we live in. So how do we make the best of it?

I can’t wait to see your follow-on to this article, and if I may suggest, I’d love to see a forum of fellow UX practitioners discussing how they dealt with commonly faced constraints and challenges.

Cheers!

It continues to amaze me that companies do not see that Apple’s success is almost entirely due to their investment in UX and are unwilling to make a similar commitment.

Nice article.

I think it’s important for product teams to understand and keep in mind the difference between a core feature and a bell or whistle throughout their process. How do your designs affect the company’s bottom line?

For example, in a freemium or tiered-pricing business model, a good UX person will know which features they need to make free and which they can charge for. With that knowledge, the user experience can be designed to be simple and modular.

I also think good research looks for, understands, and does not group outliers, just in case an outlier can be transformed into a best practice.

Great job, Sean. I just had a few comments I wanted to add.

I definitely agree with you on the importance of user experience for a successful product. To be truly innovative, I would also consider broadening the scope to more than user experience; what is needed is a total solution discovery team. Solution discovery involves user experience, technology engineering, or architecture, and product management. All three elements have to be considered simultaneously for a winning product. This is especially true of today’s most innovative product companies such as those in the medical industry, clean-tech, and information technology.

So what’s really needed for a winning product is a solution discovery team—a cross-functional team of user experience, engineering, and product management—in order to prototype solutions that will win in the marketplace. The prototype this team builds will not only be tested by users for usability, but the core underlying technology will be feasible and buildable by engineering.

Sincerely, Armond Mehrabian

CEO, Portofino Solutions, Inc.

@armond_m (on Twitter)

Very well thought out article, Sean. Here are a few of my thoughts …

1. You clearly touch on the crucial point that companies need to understand their product’s market and the target users. This is where I have seen many products or Web sites failing, because companies do some quick user forums to gather user feedback and then define the product around those features without doing any in-depth market research and study.
2. I agree with Tracy regarding developers many times ending up adding features that were more bells and whistles and making a product heavy with rarely used features.
3. Unfortunately, most small to mid-size companies are always in the agile mode, know they have to change products quickly, and hence, have little budget for serious UX analysis. So they end up just building what users want.
4. I also agree with Thomas that it would help to provide some range of hours using some concrete example of a product as a scenario. That would have more impact and value for readers, I think.
5. If you could add a valid case summary from your portfolio just before the “Conclusion” section, that would probably give a good overall perspective.

Other than that, I still feel this is an excellent overview of the development process, with a UX emphasis, and it was fun reading it. Happy Holidays!

Best wishes, Sanjiv

Sanjiv Prabhakaran, Bytes, Inc.

Great article. One of the things I think needs to be touched on is the importance of benchmarking the before and after state, so you can measure whether the new enhancements actually achieved the users’ and customers’ goals—for example, time on task (TOT). How long did it take for a typical user to complete the task prior and post?

It never fails to amaze me how few companies measure this and lay out concrete goals around this. Considering that most of us are in the productivity business, TOT is a key selling feature and can be easily translated into cash value for customers. By identifying the importance of TOT, abandonments, requests for assistance, and so on, you can build an economic argument for focusing on softer UX enhancements versus adding more features. Without that, it may be hard to build the alignment required to ensure UX isn’t considered just a nice to have.

Kevin Mireles

Sean, I enjoyed this article a great deal, especially the part that took the pragmatic view of small to medium-sized companies. You brought out the key reasoning stream at the start, when you talked about prioritizing. Regardless of whether the company in question is Apple Computer or Granny Smith Apple Farms, each of those entities has a budget to deal with. In the former case, it is gigantic. In the latter case—a company I made up—it might not include much, if any budget for user experience research or design—and frequently cannot, in light of their constrained budgets. I deal with companies like this all the time. They recognize the need for user experience and would love to utilize it. But they have to weigh its expense versus that of many other expenses they have. I even frequently hear that they would like professionally drafted content, but simply cannot afford it, beyond the cost of having a Web site designed. Are they doomed to poorly functioning sites? Most of the time, no doubt.

Small to medium-sized companies also typically suffer from the lack of several other things besides budget—most notably sophistication and understanding of this subject matter. And no, I am not making a universal condemnation of smaller companies, which would be patently silly. But if you ask them, and I frequently have, they feel they have bigger fish to fry. Speaking of which, it is striper season. Hope to catch up with you soon.

Chandler Turner