It's not rocket surgery
When I was at eBay a friend of mine, part of the burgeoning automotive sales team, made a presentation to Meg Whitman (the then CEO) in the Sydney office. He cleared his throat, and confidently stated “Selling cars on eBay, it’s not rocket surgery”.
Luckily for him, the rest of his presentation made a lot more sense (he went on to become the Director of Australia's largest online motor sales website) and his point was well made. It’s simple until you make it complicated (- Jason Fried, CEO of Basecamp).
It’s simple until you make it complicated
UX (User Experience) is a thing. It is the end result of how a website (or anything) is conceived, planned, designed, built and managed. It can be good, bad, indifferent and all things in between. It can be impossible to define without good measurement, but bad experience design can be very obvious, and that leads to bad user experiences.
So, User Experience is the way a person perceives or responds to the use of a product, service or system.
User Experience Design is therefore the design of this experience (makes sense right?) It is the deliberate devising and creation of a desired experience for the user in order to illicit a positive perception or response.
So when we talk about UXD we should not be seeing it as part of the process.
“Can we do some UX?”
“We need at least 4 hours of UX on this”
“Give it to the UX guy”
It is in fact the entire process (as discussed by Whitney Hess here). A good user experience is planned, designed and built with the customer at the centre of the decision making process. It is everyone’s responsibility, from the business owners, to the UX designer, to the interaction designer, the developer – anyone who touches the creation of that website. We should all understand Who we are designing and building for, and Why.
The business should not be building a website to ‘increase revenue’ – that is a result. The web design agency should not be building a website to ‘stay in business’ – that too is a result. The business should be building it because they want to create a better service, because they believe in their product or the value it brings to their customers. The web design agency should be building it because designing great customer-centric experiences is what gets them out of bed in the morning.
Understand the Who and the Why and the What takes care of itself.
The most successful companies in the world have already matured enough to understand that the customer matters, that listening to them will produce better products, better services, better profits. But the thing is, listening to your customers isn’t rocket surgery. The voice of the customer is everywhere. In the opinions of your staff, in the feedback on your facebook page, in your analytics, in the opinions of your friends, and of course, in the things they will tell you if only you’d ask them.
Everything is simple until you make it complicated.
