Engage or Perish!

...or...

Useful, Usable and Beautiful... Useful first.

Does this guy look engaged? No?

Bummer. He was a prospective investor.

Now he is just a guy thinking about sushi, or Disneyland, or pickles. Who cares? 

What he’s not thinking about is you, your product or project …and you are still presenting.

We’ve all been there. The meeting starts off great!  …but by 5 minutes in you can already feel that you’re losing him. By minute ten it is starting to get uncomfortable and you think that you may have just stammered a little. What is wrong with this guy? Why doesn’t he get it? As professional as you are, you kind of want to run, maybe even cry. But you have 11 minutes of presentation left to slog through. UGH!!! Hey, it’s not like your whole company is riding on this. Oh, wait. Yeah. That’s exactly what it is.

So, how do you get your prospect to look more like this?

With a new understanding and a few simple processes…

Now, THIS guy is thinking about how much money you, your product, or project are going to make him. ...and how many pickles he can buy with that.

This guy wants in!

Read on.

Vital Stats:

Purpose: The purpose of this article is to inform the reader as to the benefits of User Experience and User-Centered Design-thinking in areas of business far-removed from the creation or optimization of websites and software.

This process should begin as early as the initial funding processes of start-ups.

Abstract: The area of specialty broadly referred to as ‘User Experience’ is centered around the concept that things work better for people if they are designed with the needs, wants, and expectations of those people in mind. 

Sounds simple right? Not so fast. The art and science of matching up these user-centered design concerns with the strategic and tactical requirements of the business creating the ‘thing’ in question is anything but simple. It is, however, achievable and not just in the areas where it is most often applied such as web design and software interfaces.

This article explores some methods, best practices, and most importantly the value and benefits of applying UX (User Experience) and user-centered-design thinking across virtually all touchpoints within an organization.

Series: Two parts

Read Time: Aprx. 10 minutes each.

INTRO:

Ever wonder why your presentations, project outlines, business plans or investment prospectuses are falling on deaf ears, getting you nowhere and every meeting seems like another uphill battle?

It’s probably not your audience. It’s your understanding – or lack thereof – of what drives them.

Hello. My name is Matt Dahl and I have been a User Experience Architect for over 10 years, in Information Technology for over 25 years, and an entrepreneur since I was 16 (35 years).

In that time, I have had countless opportunities to leverage my expertise in user-centered-design to improve outcomes, optimize systems, accomplish strategic initiatives and just generally make things easier and more fit for purpose.

The term ‘fit for purpose’ is not one that should just fly by in a sentence, left minimally understood and/or poorly defined. Fit for purpose, as it turns out, is one of the key principals in making anything, from a $12MM software and infrastructure project to a simple pitch deck, function at its best.

A previous Creative Director of mine used to say “Useful, Usable, Beautiful, in that order.” I think that captures quite well what UX does best – and how it adds value. In fact, let’s break that down a bit so that we can see how those terms, and the principles that they represent, interplay.

Useful: No matter what we are creating, be it a website or a toothbrush (or this article), it needs to be useful to the people who will interact with it. Useful, in this context, means that it allows the user to accomplish or learn something that means something to them. This first principle means that anything that fails here, fails period. If it’s not useful, it’s not anything. Of course, to truly be useful it should also be…

Usable: Assuming that the thing being created is capable of performing the desired function, now we need to make actually using it as easy and straightforward as possible. This is what we mean by usable. To be truly usable it needs to be understandable (ideally obvious), learnable, memorable, potentially repeatable and enjoyable. That last piece is key. If you can elevate something from being purely utilitarian, and actually make it interesting and fun to interact with, you elevate the entire experience and gain an advantage over similar things that provide the same functionality. Which brings us to…

Beautiful: Beauty really is in the eye of the beholder but, it’s not even remotely random. First of all, there are several types of beauty. For our purposes there are:

1.      Aesthetic beauty (how something looks);

2.      Beauty of design and/or engineering (how something is crafted);

3.      Functional/tactile beauty (how something works, moves, or feels); and finally,

4.      Relative beauty (how it stacks up against other similar things of its kind)

‘Chasing’ beauty is actually one of the pitfalls that inexperienced or single-minded designers often fall prey to. They become so consumed with creating aesthetic beauty (making something look great) that they pay nowhere near enough attention to the other factors. …and sometimes, excessive design (too much flash or flair) can actually diminish the more critical elements of the overall experience. 

In other words: You can never have too much beauty, but you CAN put too much focus on aesthetic beauty.

When one finds the right balance, with usefulness as the first principle, then one creates something that is more than just the sum of its functions or ‘what it says on the tin.’ You create something Valuable.

AN EXAMPLE… THE NOT-SO-HUMBLE BOX.

Let me give a very simple example: My latest new cell phone. 

Actually, the box that it came in.

On the box, it basically shows a picture of the phone in question, its brand, model designation, and/or maybe a few key features or specs. It could just as easily say “Phone” but, instead, it is designed to be very attractive, on brand, and to not-so-subtly imply that whatever lies within this box must be expensive and exclusive.  Special.

Open the box and one is not merely presented with a phone, charging cable, earbuds and a user manual flopping around in the box in no particular order. No. Instead, there is a sense of occasion as the perfectly fitted cover slowly reveals its contents (you actually can’t open it fast), which begins with a ‘Quick Start’ guide placed delicately atop the remaining items.

Everything feels solid, smooth, premium and of high quality. Nothing is askew by even a few degrees. …all seemingly reaffirming your excellent decision in purchasing this outlandishly expensive piece of hardware. As such, your first experience of the phone begins before you can even see it.

Remove the thin but ideally sized quick start guide and you find the phone itself, nestled perfectly into a recession in an otherwise smooth slab of glossy white cardboard. At one end of the recess is a small semi-circular cut-out, just big enough to get a fingertip under the phone to extract it.  At the other end of the seamless white platform, another cut-out with a pull-tab, this time obviously intended to allow the buyer to access the remaining contents of the box, underneath.

Out comes the phone. Large, solid, heavy in the hand and completely wrapped in protective film, small tabs sticking out at two opposing corners for easy removal.

It continues like this, layer after layer until all of the contents of the box have been revealed and the buyer (me) has been instructed as to how to turn on and begin setting up their phone.

Now, I ask you, does any of this overpriced packaging and seemingly excessive design make the actual phone any better? Of course not. However, that was not the intended purpose or, as the case may be, purposes.

This box had a number of things that it was designed to do:

a)      Safely contain and protect the phone and other contents;

b)     Present the phone and other contents in an orderly, formal, almost ceremonial fashion;

c)      Encourage the buyer to read the quick-start guide, thus making activating and setting up the phone easy to do correctly without reaching out to technical support; and…

d)     Reinforce the idea that this is a premium product and was well worth the money.

Note the conspicuous absence of ‘make phone better’ in those criteria. However, by accomplishing all of the above, the user is led toward the conclusion that they have indeed purchased something ‘better’ even before they turn on the phone itself. Even knowing exactly what they were doing I could not help but think “Man! If they put this much attention to detail into the packaging alone…” In other words: Exactly what they wanted me to think.

SOME KEY TAKE-AWAYS

Want to know something interesting? 

That whole unboxing ceremony was ‘beautiful’ even though, other than the outside cover, everything else about the box itself was made of plain glossy or matte white cardboard. In other words, it relied upon usefulness, usability and largely non-aesthetic beauty to create the desired user experience. Turning plain white cardboard into the desired end results (phone safely transported, activated and in-use by the customer) while creating a positive, memorable experience. Minimalistic user-centered design at its finest!

NOTE: This experience was not designed to appeal to, or even be noticed by, everyone. Some buyers (like your teenager) may just flip the box over, dump its contents unceremoniously on their bed, tear off the protective film and turn on the phone. No, this experience was designed expressly for the type of people most likely to notice it, and to write about it on social media. Again: Worked exactly as planned.

OK, BUT WHAT ABOUT MY STUFF?

OK, so user-centered design works for websites, software, hardware, and even packaging, but what about other facets of your business? What about your next business, sales, or financing presentation?  …your ‘pitch deck’ or your next shareholder update?

Yes, every single one of those things and many many more can and should be elevated through the use of user-centered design thinking.

If you want to know more and be able to put these principles into practice, check back for the second half of this two-part series tomorrow.

If this article benefited you, please give it a like or even a comment. ...and please share!

Let me know if and how this information was helpful and feel free to reach out to me with your questions and, just as importantly, with your success stories.

SHAMELESS SELF-PROMOTION:

I live for helping elevate everything from complex websites to simple communications by making them Useful, Usable and Beautiful. I’ve been doing it successfully for three decades now and still love it every day. I like to think that my love of ‘the game’ comes out in my work. My clients seem to agree.

Notably, I am now spending the bulk time, not working on digital customer experiences and complex enterprise software, but rather working with companies and entrepreneurs to elevate early-stage communications (often with funding goals attached).

If that sounds like something that would benefit you…

You can contact me here (via LinkedIn) or at [email protected].