How is Advanced UX Different?

I’ve heard that question many times, so here’s an answer that should clear up some of the confusion. The following is a brief introduction describing the differences between an advanced UX, knowledge-based approach and typical UX practices.

The past decade has seen an explosive growth in the demand for User Experience designers. Many universities and private enterprises now offer courses on the fundamentals of User Experience. While these courses do provide a sound foundation for the fledgling UX practitioner, they are just the beginning.

If these UX courses are like driver training, adding 5 or 10 years of experience behind the wheel is still not enough to prepare the driver for competing in a Formula 1 race. A few years of typical UX practice is not enough to achieve a high performing UX, either.

But how is advanced UX different from typical UX practices? Advanced UX is more than just a refined and polished version of standard UX practices. It is a more evolved methodology that focuses on different elements and deliverables. Advanced UX relies on a different perspective. For instance, advanced UX includes:

• Knowledge-based personas, not demographic-based. How will knowing that a user drives a minivan influence a design? It won’t. A more successful approach identifies and bridges the knowledge gap between what the user knows and needs to know in order to succeed. Therefore, it is imperative to characterize the user persona based on their tacit and missing knowledge components rather than extraneous demographic data.
• Task-Persona composites instead of generic personas. Typical personas are stand-alone generic characterizations often applied to several task scenarios or use cases. Given that advanced UX focuses on bridging the knowledge gap of a user for a specific task, advanced personas are actually tightly coupled to tasks.
• A Viability Matrix that avoids opinions and guesses at defining the MVP. The MVP is supposed to contain only those artifacts that are minimally required to help the user succeed at their most valuable task. The Viability Matrix balances the users’ needs, the business and marketing goals, and the technical feasibility to objectively identify the MVP and suggests a roadmap for future iterations.
• Task-oriented rather than feature-oriented designs. Users perform tasks to achieve their desired outcomes. A task-oriented design optimizes those tasks to eliminate the reliance on user knowledge to figure out which features to use to successfully complete a task. A key indicator of a feature-oriented design is that each feature exists in one and only one place in the design and users must know how to find and use them, correctly.
• Leveraging psychology to elicit specific user behaviors. Users respond predictably to known stimuli. Knowing which stimuli elicits a desired user behavior and achieve desired outcomes is a hallmark of advanced UX.
• Knowledge strategies to help users succeed beyond their own levels of skill and knowledge. A company is much more knowledgeable about their users’ problem than the users themselves. Embedding that knowledge into the website or product helps the users succeed beyond their own knowledge. Knowledge design transforms a company from a product company to a knowledge company and knowledge is more valuable than any product.
• And more...

(For more details and examples of the differences between average UX and advanced UX visit: IntuitiveDesign.com)

How can you tell if your team is practicing Advanced UX? Simple. If your team practices most of the above methods, then you are practicing advanced UX. If you have average results, they aren’t. Do you have:

• Greater than 5% conversion rates or lead gens?
• Market dominating products?
• Disruptive product designs?

If the answer is no to all of these questions, then your UX team has room for improvement. This is not to discredit typical UX practices. They are useful and successful, but only to a point. Standard UX can achieve competitive parity, but lacks the capability to generate sustainable competitive dominance or leadership.

Typical personas lack definitive descriptions of user knowledge. Moreover, the typical persona is not task specific. Knowledge requirements differ based on the task and the persona, enough so that it demands a more evolved approach to persona descriptions. The knowledge-based design approach of the advanced UX method combines the knowledge components of the user persona with the knowledge requirements of each task to create a task-persona composite.

This focus on knowledge defines the knowledge strategy approach of advanced UX. Most websites are little more than electronic brochures that rely on the users to assimilate and understand all of the information in order to make an informed choice. A knowledge strategy creates a design that acts more like a concierge or knowledgable assistant to help users solve their problem.A knowledge strategy identifies the knowledge that must be embedded in the design to help users succeed beyond their own levels of skill and knowledge.

It is possible to perform one of two of these advanced UX methods on any project, but to repeatedly perform all of these methods on every project should be an objective of every UX team. Average UX practices achieve average results. Advanced UX achieves remarkable successes, again and again.