Remembering to Put the User in UX

Last year there were several articles and responses to the Web is Dead article on Medium. One of the responses thought the answer was Experience Design. It went on to talk about how we should “just make things easy” and create for the stupid user in mind. If you are in a small shop, or have never had the pleasure of working with a good UX team, that just might be tempting. As a strategist and interaction professional I immediately thought, no wonder there is an issue, they forgot the WHOM portion of UX.

Regardless of whether you are building a website and are tired of all the templates out there, building a text field heavy application, or a native app, it doesn’t matter. Just like arguing about what technology to use should come after you solve the big questions, not before. Solving for the user, then figuring out which technology to use to accomplish that, is just common sense. If you can’t tell me who your users are, their demographics, what they want the app to do and what they are doing when they are using your app, then you risk failing. You might even make some money doing the broad stroke of “making it easy” for people to do things in your product, but you will make a heck of a lot more if you actually understand who the users are, along with what they want from your site/app/product.

Recently I was doing some research for a project. All the client could tell me was all the competitors apps were bad. Just bad. In what way, he couldn’t say, but bad. Ok, well then lets do a competitive/comparative analysis and a current state analysis to figure out why the others apps are bad and in what way. What we found was essential to the new product. All the competitors used a chart or calculator to show how their product saved the workers more as opposed to the government. The client had no idea they had that prior to the research.

Also, it turned out that the target audience was federal workers. After some demographics and persona work, the next revelation was 68% of these workers, were not the average worker age in their 30’s, but 45-64. Not only were they older, but a super high percentage of those had college degrees. That meant the tone of the content needed to reflect the demographic.

After doing a journey/experience map and figuring out the pain points, we also came to the conclusion that a step by step process might be fine, but these were people who tended to research first, then buy. They wanted to do their own homework about the product and then go through the step by step to make sure what conclusion they came up with was the same as the recommendation. Had that research not been done, they would have targeted an attractive app to a totally different demographic and user. Would they have made money? Probably, but not nearly as much now they knew for whom they were building it.

Even if your product/app/site has “Everyone in America” as a potential user, there are other things you can do. Perhaps instead of personas, use behaviors to figure out what motivates them. A lot of UX’ers actually prefer this to the age old persona anyway. A behavior gives you the opportunity to also change the way they behave inside your app. What you present to the user matters, but you had better be doing lots of testing along the way.

In the UX field, we are in a dilemma right now. We can barely tell you who does which discipline (research, strategy, interaction, visual, UI and front end), let alone expect companies to know who to hire. There is a lot of UX/UI confusion. A lot of it. Maybe the answer is more specific titles. Who knows. I can tell you that this confusion is hurting the user. So many people think UX is actually UI. Who can blame execs or clients who just want to see something pretty and money in their pockets.

It is up to us UX’ers to educate the why of knowing who the user is and it could be the most important factor on the products bottom line. We qualify and quantify all day, but are we applying that to the product lifecycle? Products are only as good as if the content, tone, structure, interactions etc., are created for the actual users and not because some client or developer that it was easy. How many websites for instance do you go to and think, “I can’t find what I am looking for#@!”? Personally, it is still about 9 out of 10 in 2016. No wonder there are articles about the web being dead when everyone seems to just be focused on if it is responsive, or it is a parallax site or its use of colors and whether it is attractive. None of those things matter if you don’t know for whom you just built that for.