UX: It's About Expectations

As most industry leaders in tech understand it, "User experience" encompasses all aspects of the end-user's interaction with the company, its services, and its products. Today, I'll get it back to the basics using our favorite platform - LinkedIn - and invite you to rethink the "X" - from "User Experience" to "User Expectation".

After launching Camera Awesome in 2012, a fun little app for iOS which got 1 million downloads/week for the first 6 weeks of its life; and working on Perfect365, the #1 makeup app with a little over 80 million downloads, I got to understand this at a very practical level: from reviews, to stickiness, to recommendation, it really just boils down to expectations. You over-promise, and there comes the slew of (deserved) 1-star reviews; but if you focus on delivering the experience you want to promote, you're on solid ground for a winner.

So often the discussions of "experience" get lost however; because the promise is so broad; we imagine the tech equivalent of a 5 star spa or a Michelin star dining experience, porcelain and froufrou naming galore. And we spend hours arguing: which details matter? What flow is optimal to get users to exhibit behaviors that lead to a "virtuous cycle" of growth? Where and how many ads really kill the experience? So often, I see a very basic level of UX completely overlooked: the expectation that certain phrases, icons, flows create, and whether or not those expectations are fulfilled. 

Let's take a look at a 3 step flow on LinkedIn. The reason I'm choosing this flow is because it's at the core of what LinkedIn's existential crisis seems to be about: content (and not just any content - UGC, aka User Generated Content). How do you retain great people on this platform? By making it a great personal growth platform. You do this with the ability to expand and utilize one's professional network; facilitating professional growth events; and learning new skills (I'm looking at you, Lynda.com). Part of professional development and showcasing leadership is publishing great content. But you open up the floodgates, and gems of wisdoms get drowned in a tsunami of click-bait junk. How do you fix this? How do you keep your audience without taking away their freedom of speech? One way is to let users give you feedback on the content, and to adapt the delivery based on the intent that feedback creates. Here's one of the ways LinkedIn does this; you see a post, and there's a "..." = more options. A menu pops up, as below:

Now I want you to take a look at that icon... and what it says next to it. This icon suggests a few things... The text's promise is to "improve your feed". In the context I clicked on, which is a post that appeared on my feed; and with the above 3 options in mind (hide; report; leave), what do you think you're going to see next?

That's the screen here...

Wait a minute... What are these "+" signs? Why am I asked to add MORE content on my feed? Where are the dials, for the "less" part of "more or less"? Surely I'm missing something. I'll just hit "I'm done"...

And there you have it. LinkedIn: great content isn't about more. Like in many things design... most of the time, "less is more". More importantly - UX isn't about getting people to what you want them to do irrespective of context; it's about setting and meeting expectations. So in this case your icon implies your may users want to dial some content up, some content down; if that's not what you want them to do, one option is to edit the dropdown menu in the first screenshot to say "Add more/other content". If the icon was "right" in setting expectations, you'll need to edit the flow to be able to remove categories of content. Expectations are about making a match; this illustrates that there are two ways of "fixing" bad UX - you either reset the expectation, or fix the flow to meet the expectation you set. And that, in my mind, is the basic of UX, and why the very first reading of it should be "User Expectation" - because if you don't meet expectations, you're at a base level not delivering a good experience.