Is UX Mired in Mediocrity?

15 years ago, there were dozens of MP3 players on the market. Sales were flat, with only about a million units sold. Even when the iPod launched in 2001, it only sold a few hundred thousand. It wasn’t until iTunes was paired with it that sales approached 20 million units per year. Why did iTunes make such a big difference?

Before iTunes, playing digital music required 4 main steps with 4 distinctly different and cumbersome interfaces:

1) Find and download music (MP3.com)

2) Organize the music in a playlist manager (MusicMatch)

3) Upload the music files into your MP3 player with quirky, proprietary software

4) Select and play the music using clumsy controls (single-click buttons)

iTunes revolutionized this by reducing the effort and improving the user experience. iTunes basically reduced the process to about 2? steps using only 2 interfaces:

1)  Find and select music in the iTunes store (automatically downloaded it)

2)  Automatically create general playlists (artist, album, genre)

3)  Automatically upload music when charging the iPod

4)  Play the music using more intuitive controls

Early MP3 players were focused on the technology. Steve Jobs called them all “crap” and demanded that Apple improve the user experience. iTunes was not his genius but a committed effort by a team of UX designers who followed User Centered Design principles to redefine the problem and craft a solution so superior that it disrupted and dominated the market, rescuing Apple from the brink of death.

This story began as a classic case of one company designing a product, and all of the lemming companies merely following suit. No one took the time or effort to dramatically improve the design. This is also true with most of today’s websites which are mired in mediocrity. Yours is probably one of those sites.

How can you tell if your site is mediocre? It looks and performs pretty much like all of the other websites in your market. Top performing sites start out looking and behaving very differently from the rest, and usually defy the conventional wisdom.

Take Proflowers.com, for instance. The developers took some liberties with the design that we gave them because it didn’t look like any of the competitor’s sites. That design failed miserably and the Proflowers execs made them redevelop it, following our original designs That design has been one of the top 10 preforming sites for 20 years. 20 years! How many other sites do you know have that kind of success for that long? That’s the kind of UX success we should all come to expect from good UX designers.

Some veteran UXers lament that the UX industry suffers from a proliferation of wannabe UX designers, such as Visual Designers and Web Developers who claim unsubstantiated UX design capabilities that inflate their market worthiness. In reality, our domain suffers more from mediocre performance by real UX designers than it does from the rush of wannabes trying to cash in on this purportedly lucrative field.

Poor quality designs from real UX designers make this industry vulnerable to novice interlopers. Therefore, these wannabes can rightfully claim that they create UX designs that are equally as (un)successful as designs crafted by “expert” UX designers.

When performance results are barely distinguishable between good and bad UX designs, product managers struggle to differentiate true UX designers from novices and, instead, rely on “sizzle” to hire a UX resource. Visual designers provide great looking portfolio’s (the sizzle), and, in the absence of any other distinguishing criteria, the managers hire the designer with the best looking designs. Unfortunately, the best looking design isn’t usually the best performing one. After their site fails to achieve the desired UX results, many product managers are left to believe that UX doesn’t make enough difference to warrant the budget, eroding the perceived value of UX design, and, thus, UX designers.

If there were more categorically successful UX designs to serve as examples of the power of good UX, it would be easier to distinguish the expert from the novice and to justify the bigger budget. Unfortunately, many UX designs are mired in mediocrity, so much so that product managers have come to accept mediocre results as successful. I’ve even heard outright disbelief that good UX designs will make that much of a difference. (I take that as a challenge and relish in dispelling that notion.)

However, most site designs don’t live up to the UX hype and perform pretty much like every other mediocre site with lackluster results. The typical website is considered successful if it converts at 3%, and companies willingly accept a 70% shopping cart abandonment rate. A used car salesman does better than that!

So, how do we improve our discipline?

Rather than lamenting the influx of wannabes, some of who turn out to be good designers, we should focus on holding UX designers to a higher standard. We should expect and achieve 10% conversion rates. We should expect negligible cart abandonment rates. We should expect single digit bounce rates. Only when UX designers routinely achieve such obvious successes will we be perceived as valuable assets.

It’s no fluke that a number of top performing sites are the result of good UX design. I give credit for my design successes to an authentic commitment to UX principles and processes. Following the User-Centered Design process will always produce astounding results for any skill level.