Pure UX - It's probably not what you think it is

An apology

In previous posts I’ve gone over (and over and over) what UX is and isn’t and what all those documents that UX designers and UX researchers produce are, I’ve even touched on – Shock Horror – UX with no UI. I’ve discussed the what and how of the practice but I’ve not really explained what it is a UX brings to the table other than those tangible assets, and for that I should apologise.

Mark the time and date, I don’t do apologies often.

What’s triggered such a rare and unusual action you might ask? If you know me well you might also ask if I need to lie-down or a brand? Well, for one it’s the talking heads, people who aren’t UX, who have never been involved in any way shape or form with UX who still try to tell others what it is. The ones who dismiss it as Market Research, as Product Design, as UI Design as = or ≠ to CX, to being a BA or a Dev or ... well insert any profession you want, preferably one that can be reduced to an acronym, here, or even just a nonsense term you can amend to your CV to get a nice bump in salary because an employer knows the phrase and the hype but not the discipline.

Make no mistake about it, UX has become a undefined, fluffy, buzzword - a bit like Agile or, gods help us, Design Thinking, words that are precious to those who live and breathe the original unadulterated clear definitions, and are pained at the warped and twisted caricatures that now pass for them – and worse than that there are people in very high positions of influence that shouldn’t be because they have consciously or unconsciously they have exploit that situation and are there simply to fulfil a title rather than a role.

The bit I’m really apologising for, though, is that we UXers have been complicit in allowing all that noise, that confusion, that deliberate misinformation to happen, we’ve been so busy extolling the benefits of UX, of the incredible changes it’s makes and enjoying the unparalleled demands on our services, that we’ve failed, or worse haven’t even attempted, to explain what makes UX different from all those other professions, we haven’t detailed the skills that differentiate UX from anything else.

UX without the noise

So this is my attempt at that, or at least a start at an attempt to try and explain what is beyond the processes, beyond the deliverables, beyond the service or product or brand, beyond the business needs that tell us what the hell is it that makes a UX a UX rather than just another type of analyst or just another type of designer?

It’s probably easiest if we drop the qualifiers, the designer, the tester, the researcher, the architect and all those other titles that have now reached such a critical mass that even I, someone who has been around the block since before the block was built, struggle to understand. I’m going talk about understanding human psychology and emotional engagement and producing something tangible to meet those needs. Not design, not even solutionising (is that really a word?), I’m going talk about the pure, unadulterated, human focused, glorious heart of our profession, what we UXers describe as Pure UX.

Here’s the obvious not so obvious thing. Users are humans, they are not some digital entity with exactly the same motivations, understanding and reactions as any other user. They don’t suddenly become identical robots the moment they interact with your service or product or brand, they are living breathing emotional humans. I know, shocking, right? This is why they define the solution, the solution does not define them.

Understanding humans

At heart Pure UX, is based in sound psychology and behavioural research. It doesn’t even approach being a design discipline until much later, it isn’t even a conventional business driver, which is where a lot of the misinformation and confusion around UX comes from, it is unashamedly a human shaped, human serving, process and like humans it's messy.

There are pros and cons to this of course, understanding a single individual is relatively easily, understanding chaotic group dynamics as they pertain to usability? Not so much. A good UX knows this and brings a host of tools to the problem. Let’s talk about a few of them.

Ethnology

There’s a loaded word for you, it has its roots in anthropology and helps us understand various cultural norms that are different to our own. By culture I don’t necessarily mean race or geography, though they can play a part, I mean culture as something more akin to an island. That island might be the island of banking, or motherhood, of the Apple Product Republic and their arch enemies the Android Federation, of vegetarians, of university grads, any island that has similar social influences that are different to our own, islands that might be part of a larger country, each being distinctly separate but related.

Ethnology is a detailed observational process, rather than the interview or task based ones that are loaded with time-restrictions and unconscious bias in the questions. Ethnological research allows a UX to gather truly deep, rich user insights that are simply not available in any other way. For me, your overly verbose, overly opinionated and overly passionate author, this is the source of all UX.

Mental Models, Conceptual Models and Actual Models

Even before they first use your offering people will have an idea of how it will work. It might be totally wrong but it exists and if we can understand what that model is, how their experience has helped shape that idea, we can work with it to create the actual model which will seamless integrate with those preconceptions.

Recognition and Recall

Now we’re dealing with the tricky subject of memory. Simply put it is easier to build on feelings of recognition, that something feels similar to an existing memory, than to perform a full recall of the actual memory. Identifying and understanding what those cultural recognition points are allows us to tailor our solutions to them, making them infinitely more usable and easier to understand on first use.

Apparent and Inherent Usability

Have you ever the heard the phrase “The first bite of a meal is taken with the eye”? Despite being a slightly queasy mental image it means if the meal isn’t good to look at you aren’t going to enjoy it as much as one that does. It doesn’t always work of course, Lobsters are delicious but how hungry was the first person to think about eating one of the barnacle covered, scorpion looking, monster sea insects? Conversely how many times have you opened up a gorgeous looking app or website or device but found it impossible to start using?

What are we are talking about here is perceptions of value based on beauty. There is a phenomenon whereby a good-looking design is perceived to be more usable than one that is less visually appealing. How do you measure that though? Aesthetics are totally subjective . . . aren’t they? Actually it turns out not to be the case, ethnology plays a huge part in this, understanding what the cultural norms of beauty are and utilising them to inform your UX and so adapt your designs is a major factor in a successful service or product.

Social Proving

The good looking, seldom talked about, cousin of Peer Pressure. This describes how people make decisions based on other people’s observations and even how they change their own behaviour because of it. This is the desire to act correctly, to not standout in unfamiliar surroundings and is influenced by perception of those who are recognised by other peers as being more knowledgeable than themselves. Often these are grouped into five types: Experts, Celebrities (though even a truly talented UX would be hard to make sense of why some celebs are role-models) Single Peers, Crowds and Friends. This has been exploited by marketing for years, people really do make purchase decisions based purely on the star ratings of people who they have never met, will never meet, may or may not have anything in common with, but still for some reason trust. Within UX circles discovering those cultural perceptions allows us to meet them and be directed by them rather when it comes time to think about solutions.

Miller's Law Variables

Miller's law states that human can only maintain 7 pieces of information in their short-term memory. This 'Magic Number Seven' is often used within design to limit UI clutter, or for chunking information, in reality the law is quite clear that it pertains to memory not visual stimuli. If it did aeroplane control consoles would suddenly need to be much more simple to stop the things falling out the sky. Even when it comes to memory there are variables to this number, often Miller's law is displayed with a +/- 2 variable, but in reality this too is a generalisation and a lot of it comes down to cultural conventions and understanding just how much information is the cultural norm when it comes to active memory can pay dividends when deciding on content strategies.

Conditional Responses

Humans aren't rational, read the headlines for more details, we are reactive, prejudiced, conditioned, tribalistic and emotional creatures. Logic might dictate that your content is accurate, it might be backed by hard data but unless it resonates emotionally it will be forgotten or ignored or even criticised. Discovering emotional responses based on conditioned norms is one of the big drivers for UXers, discovering what criteria triggers positive emotions to build on, or negative ones to avoid always, always, throws up unexpected results and by producing a well structured approach based on emotional responses, well that's as good a definition of UX as any.

I’m going to end there as I think, or hope, that I’ve made my point, because I could go on for pages and pages more. There are hundreds if not thousands of different psychological processes and techniques that Pure UX calls on before approaching solution design, and hundreds if not thousands more that influence that solution design as it is made. So to answer the question a the start of this section, that is what makes a UX a UX.

Conclusion

One of the big, common, smug, dismissals of UX in general is ‘It’s just common sense’. What utter nonsense, what a fraudulent, ego-driven, ill-informed, nonsense. What is common for you and your peers, for me and mine, is not common for our users. Yes, we may have some commonality but not enough to state authoritatively that you truly understand your users’ needs by just saying 'We're all the same, it's just common sense.' My usual example is to point out that you might have passed your driving test it doesn’t mean you know what it’s like to drive Formula 1.

Pure UX is not a digital process, it is not a design process, it is not a coding process, it is a process about defining what it is to be human under a fixed set of certain conditions. While those conditions exist we define the people in that situation as users, but that is not the totality of their experience it is just one brief interlude in it. A UX changes the conditions, designs the experience to meet the users needs, they do not even attempt to change the user to meet the conditions.

Pure UX is not something that can be guessed at, it is not something that can be bolted on to another discipline, like a filter in Photoshop or an API call in code, though it can and should feed into them easily, it is about understanding humans and meeting their needs. That's it, nothing more, nothing less.

The final disclaimer

Let’s be clear, you can absolutely design based on your own experience, especially if that experience is based on rigorously tested previous designs that have worked for a similar user base. In a large way that’s the way Lean UX works, iterative design based on pre-existing specialist knowledge. Same thing with developing solutions, when you're experienced enough you know what works, what doesn't, what process has bought better results before and will work now.

But there is no way, no way at all, you can create something new, something truly innovative or even something that differs significantly from an existing feature or function based solely on your own experience and assumptions. Well you can, and a lot of places do, it just won’t be as valuable or as successful as those using Pure UX as a basis for their offering.

To have that success you need to truly understand the motivations, the expectations, the fears, the frustrations, the hopes, the desires of your target audience before you even think of a solution. You need masses of empathy and insight but more than that, you need to know that, unlike design, your experience is of little importance, it’s your users' and only your users' experience that has value here.

The process of getting that understanding, quantifying and qualifying it, that's Pure UX.