From Our Brains to Yours
User Experience: Not a one and done
First a little Ben Franklin to set the tone:
- “I didn’t fail the test, I just found 100 ways to do it wrong”
- “When you’re finished changing, you’re finished.”
- “Being ignorant is not so much a shame, as being unwilling to learn.”
Then a couple of great thoughts from Whitney Hess’s post at Mashable: “10 Misconceptions about User Experience Design:” (emphasis added)
“User experience design isn’t a checkbox,” says Liz Danzico, an independent user experience consultant and chairperson of the new MFA in Interaction Design program at the School of Visual Arts. “You don’t do it and then move on. It needs to be integrated into everything you do….”
“…2009 is going to be a year of scaling back, but let it also be a call for pragmatism. It’s time to adopt more streamlined, smart, progressive and effective practices. We’ve reached a level of technological maturity where functional just isn’t good enough.
It’s how we engage people and the respect and value we provide to them that will separate the wheat from the chaff. Which side will you be on?”
While Whitney is talking about user experience generally from a web site or software perspective, it can apply to how any user uses your service.
Her 10 misconceptions could easily be a checklist of things to remember for any organization looking to launch new and improved experiences for their users:
- Everyone who is helping should know what your strategy and goals are – most importantly you.
- It’s a process – it’s about constant improvement not design and done.
- Technology is only a tool – you must first identify the problem you want to solve before you choose the tool that can help you solve it
- Being simple and easy to use is only good if it is valuable to the user and thus the organization.
- You still have constraints. You may not be ready or able to change all of your sytems or processes to make the user experience perfect. Do your best, implement a better, but not perfect experience and then see #2.
- You’re constraints are often financial. Do your best and see #2.
- When possible, test your assumptions before implementing a big or expensive change.
- Someone should be thinking about how users will, well, use your service. Preferably someobody who is separated from the rest of the process. They can be internal or external. For big projects – the more experience, the better.
- When you do need outside expertise, be sure to consider what type of help you really need. Do you need a specialist who can really improve one piece of your process or a generalist who can help you with the overall project?
- A corollary to #5 – enhancing the experience you’re users, customers, members have is a choice. If it is valuable and has a positive return on investment, it’s a wise choice.
So my question is – what are you doing to improve the experience of your users, customers, members, donors, supporters, partners or staff? When was the last time you asked yourself that question?
-Stephen