A Corporate Strategy for Elegant User Experiences

An article by Om Malik at GigaOm discusses Google’s challenges in transitioning away from their famously minimalist User Experience (Ux) to one that is more engaging for its consumer product offerings. Malik’s article mentions that Google is aware of the disconnect in their products and that they are taking corrective measures. The article leaves out the specifics of how Google will address these challenges.

This got me thinking;  is there a business strategy that technology companies could adopt in order to systematically create elegant user experiences?  Here is what I would recommend to any company looking to establish itself as a Ux powerhouse:

• Hire a CEO (or more realistically a Chief Design Officer) whose leadership, core job function, and incentives are focused on driving exceptional quality user experiences into the company’s products and service offerings
• Make elegant Ux a centerpiece of corporate business strategy
• Hire top-tier designers to work on the product and service offerings
• Design and build an elegant Ux platform that will engage users
• Make constant Ux refinement a major focus in every product release
• Build 1 or 2 game-changing features in each release
• Avoid “incrementalist feature development”.  This approach plauges 98% of the software/tech industry and just adds clutter to products and services, makes them more confusing, more difficult to build, harder to maintain and refactor, and problematic to support.
• Do not empower or incent engineers and product managers to make the ultimate design decisions about what will ship as product Ux
• Do perform “user acceptance testing” to ensure that your design ideas make sense, are usable, and perceived as elegant
• Ensure that your products and services undergo a rigorous Quality Assurance program where every behavioral and visual detail is refined to perfection before the product is released to customers

UI Patterns

Pattern languages are a design tool used to describe a set of best practices for a given design-space. Pattern languages have been used for centuries in urban planning and architecture;  more recently they have been applied to software product design.

The earliest pattern books were created by the Roman architect Vitruvius wherein he describes best practices for siting buildings, proper arrangement of rooms, external ornamentation, fenestration, etc.   Christopher Alexander coined the term “pattern language” in his 1977 book that focused on designing buildings and ranged from the macro (regional planning) to the micro (interior window treatments).

Jennifer Tidwell started an early effort to catalog UI patterns online which resulted in her book Designing Interfaces.  Yahoo’s design pattern library is a popular site for Ux designers interested in pattern languages.  There are many web sites on UI patterns that can be found using Google.

My team is currently in the process of constructing a set of UI pattern libraries that will serve as the canonical design references for our entire product suite.

Agile + User Experience Design

I’ve recently been thinking about how to better blend Agile development and User Experience Design.

Given my education in Industrial Design (ID), that was a natural first place to see what models might translate.  Yes, there is all the prototyping, mockups, and rendering that are highly applicable to any software project.  However ID doesn’t really do it because it is classic “waterfall-based” design approach.  There is no other choice when designing for manufacturing on an assembly line.  Everything has to be defined up front in order to build the tooling and stamp out the parts.

Next, I looked to Architecture (the building kind).  Although I’m not an Architect, nor do I have Architectural training, I helped to re-design the kitchen and master bedroom/bathroom of my house. I also served as general contractor on the kitchen remodel.  Building buildings is a lot more like software development than ID.  You try to define most things before construction begins, but there are always quite a

User Experience Design Simplified

A product management colleague recently asked me for a concise explanation of user experience design.  Here goes…

1. Product UI designs should be based on real-world use cases & customer needs
2. There are multiple possible solution spaces for any design problem—each one has relative pros & cons
3. Design assumptions & decisions should be VALIDATED with users (and your sales team) BEFORE “beau coup” dollars are spent on implementing them
4. This point is somewhat orthogonal to the above, but is important if you are designing a suite of products;  in this case you should be leveraging design patterns & standards across those tools in order to ensure transfer of training, ease of learning & use, and coherence within the suite

This doesn’t mean that Ux design is easy or trivial, or that by simply following these steps you will end up with good products.  However if you don’t follow these steps in your process you can pretty much be assured of ending up with products that suck.

The Skipper, The Boat & The River

The concepts for this post were taken from an interview given by Erica Payne on KPFA radio. Payne holds an MBA from Wharton School of Business and is founder and principal of the Tesseract Group–a boutique consulting firm that specializes in strategy and communications for foundations, philanthropists and organizations engaged in the public policy arena.

Payne’s interview focused on the US presidential elections of 2008. She described politics as essentially a supply chain problem. Payne went on to describe how we ought to conceptualize political change through the metaphor of the skipper, the boat, and the river. Her message has a direct application to User Experience teams.