Ignore the value of design at your own peril

Over 20 years of designing interfaces, experiences, and businesses, I’ve iteratively expanded upon and refined a single document - carried from the building of one team to the next, lessons learned and in hand. Below are just some of the key ideas within it, now on LinkedIn to share with the world. In doing so, I hope not only to provide insights into some of the principles that underpinned the design and development of award winnings products built at Contact Light and Horizon State, but inspire an appetite for better outcomes across all businesses, where user-centred focuses too often remain in the peripheral - for as you'll read following the links within: design success means business success.

What is UX?

Despite what some might believe, good design isn’t merely visual design, usability testing, or common sense. In reality, accessibility best practices, behavioural psychology, language and tone, interaction patterns, information architecture, colour theory, and more, are all critical parts of what makes up a great user experience. This isn’t just the responsibility of experts in these fields, however. User experience is everyone’s job, from development to support, and their ability to empathetically put themselves in the shoes of users, and take on the responsibility of shouldering the burden of complexity — instead of passing it on — is of paramount importance. Read more on this subject in my article “What UX isn’t”.

“Design is not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works.” — Steve Jobs

The UX process

Design is cyclical. Design never ends; design is never done. User satisfaction can only be maintained with a company culture that sees change as opportunity, not as risk. Expectations of every digital product will continue to change, generally for worse, when the product doesn’t also change. Market, technology, culture, and competition are all factors for the evolving opinion of your product.

The real MVP (Minimum Viable Product)

If a product is merely functional, it’s unlikely that it’s truly viable. A real minium viable product understands that for a product to be adopted and embraced, it requires much more than to simply work. In respect to continual improvement, a real MVP creates feedback loops early, which redefines what your next steps should be as not all features or ideas turn out to be good ones. It doesn’t matter how good you are at building software if you’re building in the wrong direction.

The value of good UX

What is the sum of being easier to use, more delightful and improving time to task completion? What happens when design is embedded amongst business leadership and utilised as an innovation resource?

Design-driven businesses have outperformed the S&P by 228% over a decade, while on the London Stock Exchange they outperformed FTSE by more than 200%. Learn more about these figures and others in my article “The Bottom Line Value of Design”.

What these companies practice, is ultimately informed design. To practice informed design, you need to intimately understand who you’re designing for…

Research and testing

Prior to bottom line impacts, what does user testing achieve within the business?

• An ongoing feedback loop for stakeholder consideration
• The fostering of a culture that makes informed decisions
• Real user guidance on what’s useful and what’s usable
• The revealing of issues overlooked internally
• Data-driven reasoning that squashes in-house politics and disagreements
• Baseline data and documentation for change comparison
• Understanding what users really do, not just what they say
• Decrease support costs and reduce design/dev rework

Practices to live by:

1. Informed design is the critical practice of making conscious decisions, backed by real information rather than assumption.
2. Even the minimum amount of usability testing can deliver extraordinary results. Test everything you’re working on, with a specific problem or objective in mind.
3. Everyone should be observing people using our products an hour every month. It’s all too easy get too close and lose objectivity.

With the above in mind, it’s also important to maintain a culture of being data-informed, but not necessarily data-dictated. Sometimes a giant leap away from the ‘local maxima’ requires not merely iterating upon designed solutions, not merely incremental improvements. There’s no harm in appraising problems with a clean slate and imagining brand new solutions all over again, as long as all assumptions are qualified, tested, and measured.

If you A/B test the two worst options, your best possible outcome is only the second worst one. Data gathered is only done so based on current strategies and product realities — not possibilities — and can be interpreted with bias. Data alone does not create great products.

6 principles for more human design

#1 Pursue simplicity

Visually complex interfaces are rated less beautiful than simpler ones, which add additional work for the brain to decode, store and make sense of.

“Perfection is achieved not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.” - Antoine de Saint-Exupery

#2 Always consider visual hierarchies

It’s not enough to merely have great content — you need eyes to be drawn to what’s important, and create consistency in these treatments. Humans are pattern recognition machines, so pay attention to everything from weighting which enables quick scanning, to commonality in the placement of navigation elements.

“Clutter and confusion are failures of design, not attributes of information.” — Edward Tuft

#3 Carefully craft affordances

Follow what works for your users, not trends. While skeuomorphic design continues to take an increasingly distant back-seat to flatter design languages, to ignore the usability benefits of certain treatments for certain user demographics is never a good idea. Sometimes what looks better doesn’t work better.

#4 Use appropriate typography

Using a font perceived as something comical probably isn’t the right fit when documenting one of the greatest discoveries in modern science. Typeface characteristics not only affect aesthetic appeal, comprehension, but credibility as well. In fact, given the same statement in Comic Sans versus Baskerville, the one in Baskerville is more likely to be believed.

#5 Talk like a real person

“PC LOAD LETTER”. HP’s infamously thoughtless language frustrated users around the world, and cost the company tens of millions in unnecessary support time. “What am I supposed to load into my PC, exactly?” Of course, in America, A4 paper is called letter, and the eventual realisation is that you need to re-fill the paper tray. Design is in the details, and every detail matters — overlook them at the peril of user satisfaction and profitability.

#6 Don’t make people think

Don’t insist on requesting information (such as personal details) before demonstrating value. Don’t expect recall (such as where content is) when you can design for recognition. Don’t ask questions (such as location) when you can make intelligent initial assumptions. Don’t make the user trawl through options (such as to hide or show a pane), when you can remember their decisions contextually from the place where it exists.

Most importantly, acknowledge that being “intuitive” isn’t always possible. Intuition can only exist if a user has had prior experiences that resemble yours. The first mouse to be manufactured en masse for consumers was not intuitive, but learning how to use it was fast. Sometimes the greatest ideas cannot relate to prior experiences, so strive to be quickly learnable, not “intuitive”.

UX design is not voodoo

A note worth closing on is that good design is largely pragmatic, not magic. Above all else, good design is achieved as a result of conscious, collective decisions to avoid personal bias, avoid anecdotes, and together employ a genuine care for how people will react to the choices we make for them.