Is HX just doing UX right, or is It More?

When I was a young whipper snapper my mother took it upon herself to pass down to me the grand skill of playing the accordion. I know, you’re saying in your head, that’s my favorite instrument too!

Now we did not come from a long, proud heritage of people where this instrument was a part of our culture and DNA. For some odd reason though we had an accordion in our home growing up. When many children are forced to plunk out the keys of chopsticks and Mary Had a Little Lamb, I was introduced to the sweet cacophony of the sounds emitted from the accordion.

I learned the ins and outs of playing the keys while expanding and contracting the bellows. It was always amazing to me how far I could extend the device and really open it up, to expose new sounds. When you explored the full length of the instrument you really got to know more and see the fullness and the potential of your interactions. The device is deceptive and at first you think all you are doing is confined within a medium-sized, awkward, defined space. However it’s when you extend yourself, put in the effort and explore further you can see that there is more. Oh so much more. This is Human Experience Design for me.

When I first heard about HX I started to wonder if this wasn’t just describing the right way to do UX. When I’ve heard HX or Human Experience Design described many times it seemed like it was putting too narrow of a definition on what UX is. However, thinking about it a bit more it doesn’t have to be a competition but rather a way to further describe how to do experience design well. Can we approach it with more rigor and maturity? It’s thinking more holistically about designing experiences that’s more inclusive, is involved much earlier in the journey and is from a more rich and multi-dimensional…a more real-world human perspective. It doesn’t put blinders or walls up to what your playbook addresses when interacting with people, it opens it up and includes all the messy pieces that is the reality of our lives.

The Evolution and Maturity of the X’s

Let’s dig into this more and look at the evolution from UX to CX to HX. These days there’s always a new X tacked onto the ends of words to talk about experiences. It’s funny too, because as they talk about frameworks, methodologies, processes and tools, it seems like at their core are many of the same things that always existed in the beginning of UX. I think this is to be expected as any general area of study is diversified, and the studies become more faceted and mature; they all build on a common core of human centered design.

So just what is HX? Like many terms and titles in UX, it depends. It depends on who you ask. I’ve seen a number of interesting things pop up, but at the core they are all talking about the Human Experience of interacting with not only a product, but a brand and company in a larger way. The interactions are more complete and multi-dimensional and more fully represent how messy and complicated our work and time on this planet can be. I see it as a more holistic approach to the experience design where you consider not just the customer and end user, but all those who have come along and had an effect somewhere along in the journey.

To break it down further, let’s look at the evolution of experience design.

User Experience - User is the end user who uses the product or goes through an experience. This is the experience prime, the intended digital experience in the case of software design. This is the flow, interaction, layout, and visual design of the experience. This is the people clicking and tapping on the bits and pieces we have designed to accomplish their tasks.

Customer Experience -Customer is the one who purchases the product. This can reach beyond the digital and encompass all the touch points that a customer might interact with. Think of a journey and the digital and non-digital touch points that a person interacts with when becoming acquainted with a product or experience, researching it, getting recommendations, obtaining information about the product or experience, interacting with a website/store, purchase, delivery, customer support and post purchase interactions to name a few.

Sometimes the customer and the user are the same, but in many cases they are not. There are many instances when the end users of software or experiences are not the ones with purchasing authority or means. There are managers, directors and others who gather input at times, but are the ones controlling budgets, holding the corporate cards and making the purchase decision and may never use the product or experience.

Human Experience -Human experience is more holistic from my point of view. It’s looking at everyone involved in the creation of a product or experience from the design and development to the purchasing and usage of it. It’s a 360 degree view, more multi-dimensional than a simple customer journey. Think of a human experience journey map as having multiple interactions by a cross-functional group of actors instead of one actor stopping at points along the way. It’s more realistic as we are rarely entities unto ourselves. We have purchasing departments, accounting, customer services and countless other touch points of people that contribute to decisions being made around the lifecycle of experiences that make up a product.

Thinking from just the perspective of the customers (not just teams and people within your organization) you can start to see how other people may bring more realistic, multi-dimensional aspects into an experience map. This becomes less rigid and narrow of mapping of the true experience and better represents all the players and interactions that happen.

Who Is My Customer?

What you do is consumed by more than just the end user. Human Experience Design has us thinking about all the people involved with what we do. I like this because it makes me a better, well-rounded professional. Not only am I looking at how I’m delivering value to the end customer, but all those I interact with along the way. When a designer designs a component, they have to gather research from customers, requirements from stakeholders, interact with a product owner, multiple discussions with developers and QA teammates, marketing, sales, product and more at times.

As a designer you could think about how an idea for a project originates and the people you interact with. Have you thought about evaluating your interaction with them, are you measuring OKR’s/KPI’s with your those relationships? Do you provide a design system that third-parties use, how can you improve the consumption of your system? How do you infuse the brand guidelines from marketing into what you do or work with the physical designers of products if you have them? There are so many people involved in what you do before you even approach a customer or user.

Then as you focus more inward, you can also start looking at how you interact with your team. How do you collaborate with a product owner to gather requirements and research, how do you involve the teams in the design of a product or experience (is it just you and your sketchpad coming up with solutions?), how do you work with developers and QA to communicate design and interaction, how do you interact with CAB’s, alpha and beta testers and customers in production? There are so many touch points you can think about beyond did I do a good heuristic analysis, gather quantitative and qualitative data and produce a product that delights the user.

This list is by no means meant to be exhaustive, but to help you stop and think of all the departments, teams and people you interact with as you produce the parts of the product and experiences within your organization.

One of my favorite worker champions, Sir Richard Branson has sound thinking, that if we take care of the employees, they will take care of the customers. He said, “Clients do not come first. Employees come first. If you take care of your employees, they will take care of the clients.” This has been sound business advice for the Virgin Group despite recent troubles. It does help you look at things from a different perspective and how affective it can be at looking at the whole human experience of our businesses.

Deloitte Digital has done some good work on what they call the HX Quotient to help quantify the human experience. Their HX quotient takes into account the customer, workforce and partner to produce insights into what they build.

This speaks to me as I’ve seen organizations as they mature focus on the experience of various customer types as well as the employee. I’m grateful that many organizations are now turning the power of experience design on interaction with it’s employees. Should we only measure the NPS of our customers or should the temperature of our teams be measured with HR as well? Deloitt’s workforce component of the equation is a measure of this.

I think aligning our experience design strategy to be more inclusive like this has the benefits of human interaction and coming closer to delivering experiences that meet the needs of the obvious and not so obvious customers throughout the whole interaction of our journeys in a multi-dimensional approach.

Deloitte is a consulting firm and so it’s equally as important for them that the companies they partner with are happy and engaged as well. In my industry, we rely on thousands of entrepreneurs and distributors to sell our products. They are a customer, but not the customer in many cases and we need to think of them differently as their needs are not the same as someone buying a product or service. They are partners with us in building our business, when we succeed, they succeed and vice-versa. If we were just to focus on the end consumer of our products though we would be missing a great opportunity to provide data and tools for the distributors, our partners in business. We need to understand how they do their work and build their businesses as much as how the end consumer likes the physical products we make.

HX Lends Itself to be More Inclusive

I’ve recently had the privilege in talking with Dr. Eric Shaffer who founded the Human Factors International organization. He reminded me of something that I’ve been looking into further, and that’s how we can be more inclusive in our designs. As I’ve studied Design Thinking and Design Sprints, I’ve come to see the importance of having cross-functional teams participating in the design of our software. We don’t want our developers to become just order takers, we want them to be able to think and reason for themselves. We don’t want the onus to be solely on the product or experience owners to come up with what should be produced and when. We want the work to be done by the team. It’s also never good to have a designer making large design decisions without the team being involved.

Tim Brown from IDEO has a saying I’m growing to love and question at the same time. He said, “Design may have its greatest impact when it’s taken out of the hands of designers and put into the hands of everyone”. Part of me screams, yes, that’s the way it should be done! Then the designer in me goes oh, wait. Thinking it out further though, designers should become the shepherds and facilitators of teams thinking about design as a solution to problem solving, rather than off in a corner with Sketch/Figma twiddling with the pixels. This is a much greater and more fulfilling role. There is a greater contribution and opportunity to deliver value for our customers and organizations.

“designers should become the shepherds and facilitators of teams thinking about design as a solution to problem solving, rather than off in a corner with Sketch/Figma twiddling with the pixels. This is a much greater and more fulfilling role. There is a greater contribution and opportunity to deliver value for our customers and organizations”

I’ve been working on putting together training on design thinking and how it could be embraced better by our agile teams and not just the experience designers. Dr Schaffer reminded me of something from my background, and that is that UX should live outside of the efforts to design and develop software. It is an engineering endeavor and we need to be partners in that work. It should not be a them vs us situation but a scrum team doing just enough work to get the sprint across the goal line.

Most of my past was from the point of a designer/developer. I usually sat side-by-side with the developers, gathering insight from users, getting their input on the capabilities of our systems, and working to implement the design in our code. I wrote Perl, ColdFusion, PHP, C#, Java, and then a bit into modern JavaScript frameworks all the while shepherding the CSS base styles and component design.

My work never was separate from the teams work. We sat together and worked on the same features in the same sprints. Somehow we got off the tracks though and made the playbooks about a separate study and implementation of experience design work. Somewhere we gained our own Jira boards and streams of work. The upside was that we were a real team contributing to the understanding of our customers, the downside was that by doing that work outside of the team focus we often relegate all our great discovery and insight to be largely ignored. How many of us have found amazing insights into our customers but that understanding just sits in a report and is never consumed because it wasn’t in-line with a sprint? A teams cognitive load has a finite capacity and many times if research isn’t relative it can overload the team and not be consumed regardless of the amount of money that it can earn/save a company.

I think Human Experience Design can help us take a step back, make sure that the work we’re doing involves all the humans we work with and have the important work we do become an integral part of the understanding of our whole teams. We are humans and we work in the messy middle, in often complex environments where we struggle to find places to add value. If we look at this from how we as humans interact with those around us more, I think we can make the work we do more satisfying for us and more effective for those around us.

Doing the Right Thing

I have a great VP that I’ve had the pleasure of working with that always encouraged us to do the right thing. I also have a great designer on my team who is zealous about ethical design in UX.

I believe that Human Experience Design helps us to do the right thing more often than not. If we look at the outcomes more of what we’re doing we can better make sure that what we give to the customers is not only valuable for them now, but has their best interest at heart for their future. Are we sacrificing revenue this quarter for doing the right thing for our customers? Stopping to think about how what we design affects us as human beings can help us from falling into the trap of delivering something that may come back to haunt us in the future.

Along with all our OKR’s and KPI’s, do we have an acronym that measures the ability to do the right thing? Are we focusing on the life-time of our customers, their well-being or are we just focusing on the next quarter.

With the state of commerce, social norms and how people are interacting with each other having an eye out for the overall human experience is a good idea. The normal flow and interaction as well the need for basic human connection and trust of people has changed. Things they never stopped to think twice about are different now.

I believe it has heightened the two extremes. We see people who did not have an outward mindset continue to pull in and worry about themselves (basic self-preservation) feeling an ever growing discord that feeds fears and anxieties. On the other hand, we’ve seen others who were in-tune with people and their emotions become greater givers and nurturers focusing on the wellbeing of those they interact with in all walks of life from their families, church, work and other organizations and affiliations. These ties, emotions and drives should become part of our conversations when discovering motives, needs, tasks and desires that customers all around us are focusing on.

In HX, Sometimes I Am the Customer

One of the interesting bits that I’ve heard in the discussion of Human Experience Design is that we, at times, are the user.

I know, I know all my training, indoctrination and experience serve to remind me that I am not the user. In fact, on my old MacBook I had a Gandalf sticker where the Apple logo illuminated his staff. Directly above that I had my sticker from NNg certification that in a booming voice shouted, “You are not the user!” With as much force and gusto as Gandalf declared to the Balrog (please pardon my geeky moment) I’ve routinely echoed this to people in a satirical way. This should serve to say that I don’t say this with out a little trepidation and reserve.

If we’re on the employee journey however, we are at times consuming components built by us or others on our teams or using internal systems. We CAN be the users. This flies in the face of what we’ve always learned as experience design practitioners. We are too close to the system, we know too much, we can’t be the customers. Yet at times in places like employee stock purchases, employee product stores, users of our own design systems, we are the customers.

It also helps support the practical approach to UX as there are times when we don’t have the time and resources to test everything. Sometimes we have to stand on prior internal research, standards, external research and anecdotal experiences to do some work. We would always prefer to have better insight, but in the real world there are politics, heightened deadlines, pivots and the like that inhibit our ability to do perfect UX work.

There are also times when we just need to update a component to add a new feature that we don’t have the ability to do ethnographic studies, create a prototype, conduct a usability study and synthesize all the data from around the globe. Sometimes we do work outside a discovery sprint where we just have to use what we have to make decisions and us as human beings can be the customer.

In looking at Human Experience Design I think this isn’t just another acronym or iteration on UX or CX, but a better way of looking at what we do in each of those. Approaching it from a more realistic and inclusive way.

There are a number of aspects that i’ve put forth so far, including:

Evolution and Maturity of UX has brought us to HX.

We can benefit from asking who are our customers, beyond the person buying our products?

How can I be more inclusive in my design efforts and mature the team as I learn.

Do the right thing, long-term for our customers and companies internally and externally. This will become more important in a time of heightened social stress.

Sometimes I am the customer and have great insight.

So the next time you are building out a persona, exploring a journey map, discussing the requirements for a feature, take a step back. Expand the accordion of your mind and think of all the other personas, strike that, humans that are involved in the production and see if you can change your interaction just a bit. If this helps or works for you, I’d love to hear about it.

Head ’em up, move ’em out!