This is a figure from my forthcoming second edition of Next Generation Wireless Applications, due out in March. It sums up the relationship of end-user experience to technology. All too often this diagram is inverted in companies with a heavy technology/engineering background, which tends to include a good many of the operators.
Of course, we can ask what is a good user experience? In the first instance, there’s plain old usability. Leaving aside the ongoing debate between usability gurus and design gurus, usability is first and foremost about task-driven design and, most importantly, getting users to try those tasks in order to eliminate basic UI flaws. It is remarkable how many product designers take it upon themselves to design a product which they like. This isn’t user-centric design, this is ego-centric design.
This is why any organisation in the ‘experience business’ should hire an Experience Architect whose job it is to ensure that the experience is compelling and marketable irrespective of the underlying technology. If the technologists responsible for the implementation (i.e. the middle and low layers in the above diagram) are also responsible for the experience, they will nearly always compromise the experience in favour of some technological feature or method, which is often to satisfy their own technological biases. Here’s how it goes:
Marketing guy (Pete): “Hey Joe, I can’t seem to get my contacts list synced with my doo-dat. It’s not obvious to me how to do it.”
Tech guy (Joe): “What do you mean not obvious? I’ve done it hundreds of times.” (Classic intimidation technique, but also classic usability myopia.)
Pete: “Really, well couldn’t you put a button on the homescreen or -” (Joe interrupts.)
Joe: “Yeah, we thought of that Pete, but we’re using AJAX-joo-joo, so we didn’t want to fill up the home screen.” (Classic techno-misdirection to fool Pete, but also classic usability myopia.)
Pete: “Yeah, but it doesn’t work.”
Joe: “Of course it works. It’s the latest technique.”
Pete: “But -” (Joe interrupts.)
Joe: “Your not technical are you Pete.” (Classic put-down to shut Pete up, but also classic stupidity.)
Don’t delay, hire an experience architect today and also develop an experience-culture within your organisation!
[This blog has moved to here]
2 responses so far ↓
1 Barbara Ballard // Feb 18, 2008 at 5:05 pm
It’s pretty hard to find the right match for your company. You want a good user experience, so you hire a bunch of engineers to get the product “pretty close” to market. Then you finally get around to hiring a marketing or product VP. That person takes a look at the core technology and he (usually he) realizes that what we have is a collection of technologies.
Then the product guy looks for somebody to help. If he’s smart, he understands that user experience goes beyond visual design. If not, he hires visual designers and he has eye candy sitting on top of a product designed for engineers. If he does understand the development side of the business (product more likely than marketing, but either can work), then he brings in somebody who will challenge most of the assumptions made to date regarding customer behavior and needs. I frequently get that phone call, if the company is in the US and in the mobile business.
We’ve had to learn to decline projects that just want the eye candy. You can tell which ones they are in several ways, such as “we are launching in 3 weeks”. Another way is somebody who wants the work done for a price similar to somebody just doing visual design and/or prototyping. I don’t want our name associated with a product whose design I don’t believe in.
2 Paul G // Feb 20, 2008 at 12:27 pm
Thanks Barbara for your comments. In the first instance, we need to educate those in our industry that user experience is an integral part of the “product lifecycle”. My intent with the diagram and discussion in the book and on this blog is to alert those mostly with a certain type of engineering-company history, that we are selling experiences not products, and certainly not technologies. Of course, some companies, like Apple, already get this. But I’m mostly talking about operators. Even as recent as last year, O2 were still putting up huge billboards for iMode where the pitch was “faster than WAP” or something like that. What the hell is WAP and what does faster than WAP mean to my life? This is the kind of product-feature stuff that people can’t really internalise, if we’re honest.
At the same time, I think that a lot of the people in the industry who do get it are undermining their own case with so much techo-babble, which has a kind of irony. So we talk of “taxonomies” (favourite technorati word) and other BS that’s as clear as mud.
Leave a Comment