A presentation from the first UXify Eindhoven meetup where we talked about what User eXperience (UX) is about, what kind of benefits it can provide for a product and how UX design works.
12. Cost of bad UX
“The rule of thumb in many usability-aware
organizations is that the cost-benefit ratio for
usability is $1:$10-$100. Once a system is in
development, correcting a problem costs 10
times as much as fixing the same problem in
design. If the system has been released, it costs
100 times as much relative to fixing in design"
Tom Gilb,
an American systems engineer, consultant, and author,
known for the development of software metric, software inspection, and
evolutionary processes
13. The ROI of UX
Earned money:
•Increased productivity
•Increased registrations, sales, conversion rates
•Increased use resulting in repeat customers and process optimization
Saved money:
•Reduced cost
•Reduced development time
•Decreased training costs for new application rollout
•Reduced support costs associated with complex interfaces or
processes
Non-monetary results:
•Increased brand loyalty
•Increased brand advocacy
14. Why is it hard to predict how
users will react?
• because people are not rational,
• because people are not like you,
• because people sometimes will not use your
product the way you imagine,
• because even people themselves cannot tell
you what they’ll like.
16. You are not your user
“One of usability’s most hard-earned lessons is
that ‘you are not the user.’ If you work on a
development project, you’re atypical by definition.
Design to optimize the user experience for
outsiders, not insiders. The antidote to bubble
vapor is user testing: find out what representative
users need. It’s tempting to work on what’s hot, but
to make money, focus on the basics that
customers value”
Jakob Nielsen
18. Human-Centred Design
Cycle
• The design is based upon an
explicit understanding of users,
tasks and environments
• Users are involved throughout
design and development
• The design is driven and refined
by user-centered evaluation
• The process is iterative
• The design addresses the whole
user experience
• The design team includes multidisciplinary skills and
perspectives
Notes de l'éditeur
the best experiences aren’t born in a vacuum
think like a user not like a marketer
User Experience is …
all aspects of the users interaction with the product: how it is perceived, learned, and used.
Customer retention is a big deal — yet the majority of users fail to convert because they think you don't care about their experience. Implementing UX processes during design and development builds user loyalty and increases conversions.
http://www.smashingmagazine.com/usability-and-user-experience/#a7
Websites that fail at UX suffer from frustrated users and poor conversion rates - but with the right UX team , the development could be proactive and more profitable.
Programmers spend half their time reworking projects — that means 50% more time added to your development cycle. Get a UX designer and get that time back.
http://www.upassoc.org/usability_resources/usability_in_the_real_world/roi_of_usability.html
http://socialmediatoday.com/bitpakkit/267487/roi-ux
Testing with 5 users can find 85% of all the problems on the website.
http://www.nngroup.com/articles/why-you-only-need-to-test-with-5-users/
One e-commerce site increased its annual revenue by $300 million with a simple, UX driven change. A good UX designer can ensure that you site draws return customers and increases conversion rates so you see more value, faster.
The problem wasn't as much about the form's layout as it was where the form lived. Users would encounter it after they filled their shopping cart with products they wanted to purchase and pressed the Checkout button. It came before they could actually enter the information to pay for the product.
We were wrong about the first-time shoppers. They did mind registering. They resented having to register when they encountered the page. As one shopper told us, "I'm not here to enter into a relationship. I just want to buy something."
Without even knowing what was involved in registration, all the users that clicked on the button did so with a sense of despair. Many vocalized how the retailer only wanted their information to pester them with marketing messages they didn't want. Some imagined other nefarious purposes of the obvious attempt to invade privacy. (In reality, the site asked nothing during registration that it didn't need to complete the purchase: name, shipping address, billing address, and payment information.)
(Later, we did an analysis of the retailer's database, only to discover 45% of all customers had multiple registrations in the system, some as many as 10. We also analyzed how many people requested passwords, to find out it reached about 160,000 per day. 75% of these people never tried to complete the purchase once requested.)
http://www.uie.com/articles/three_hund_million_button/
Application areas
Web -> environments
J.J. Garett
http://vimeo.com/6952223
It is essential to the success of interaction design that designers find a way to understand the perceptions, circumstances, habits, needs, and desires of the ultimate users.
Jane Fulton Suri, 2005
About the company,
“Have you ever used Airbnb? What was your experience?”
about the idea
2 levels of user experience: hosting-visiting and web site (home page, renter and rentee views)
Trust issues, disgust - > adventue
Clean home page with a focus on booking a reservation — not sign up
Action before registration
Tells the user what they can do on the site; NOT what the site does
Language that fits a user’s mental model
For autocomplete dropdowns, sort not just alphabetically but by popularity
Resources:
Airbnb commercial (1:45)
Joe Gebbia: The Airbnb Story (22:56)
Host Opening 2013 (2:01-3:37 - how the idea was born)
Airbnb.com: Necessity Begets Creativity - an interview with Brian Chesky
#19 of the 50 most innovative companies (story)
Design at Airbnb (2:57)
AirBnB hosts = UX designers by Jonathan Wegener
How the Airbnb home page lures us in by Jason Shah:
Clean home page with a focus on booking a reservation — not sign up
Action before registration
Tells the user what they can do on the site; NOT what the site does
Language that fits a user’s mental model
For autocomplete dropdowns, sort not just alphabetically but by popularity
The New Airbnb Focuses On Pretty Pics Rather Than Searches by Austin Carr
References:
The ROI of UX by Susan Weinschenk (Feb 2011)
UX ROI by Vibor Cipan (Oct 2009)
What is the ROI of UI or UX design? on ux.stackexchange.com
How to Calculate the ROI of UX Using Metrics by Yury Vetrov (Jul 2012)
The ROI of usability by Aaron Marcus (2002) - examples and statistics
13 Questions Answered about Measuring the ROI of UX
Why an expert review can’t substitute usability testing
They have different purposes: expert reviews focus on general usability standards while a usability test is better at finding issues related to special domain knowledge and actual user tasks. A good comparison of the two can be found at Webcredible.
Users’ behavior is often hard to predict, even for professionals. According to Stephanie Rosenbaum, “real users always surprise us. They often have problems we don’t expect, and they sometimes breeze through where we expect them to bog down.”
Since experts are rarely members of the target group, they sometimes “miss the real problems that cause users to fail tasks. This can be especially true when the target audience has a particular skill set.” Seecomprehensive comparison of the two methods.
A usability test can reveal much more than how usable a site is - it can also demonstrate the “users’ emotional response to the brand, statement of business purpose, graphics, long- and short-term messaging, competitive position, sales path, and more”, Tedd Follansbee explains at UX Matters.
Empirical data is always better than guessing, Jakob Nielsen says. He believes that any empirical fact “improves the probability of making correct UI design decisions.” His article Guesses vs. Datahighlights a few case studies showing that even experts are very inefficient when it comes to predicting how users will react to a given interface.
Plasq co-founder Keith Lang says that thinking that experienced designers do not have to test their products is one of the greatest misconceptions in web design. According to him, even the most successful and experienced designers confirm that “user testing is the absolute key”.
When a design decision has to be accepted by many stakeholders, an expert review might seem another disputable opinion while data based on usability test results - often including metrics - is seldom questioned.
Expert reviews have their benefits and purposes, too:
When a quick overview of the interface is required, “expert reviews are especially useful for finding violations of usability standards and best practices”, Jim Ross advises.
Expert reviews are a common usability method because they’re relatively cheap and quick. Inspecting a site and writing a report might only take a few days and, in addition, many still think that a usability test needs a big budget.
It’s always recommended to do an expert review before usability testing an interface, not only to avoid exposing the users to obvious usability mistakes, but also to “determine what to focus on during testing. You can do an expert review to find the obvious problems, allowing usability testing to find and validate the more important problems”, a UXmatters article suggests.
The scope of a review can sometimes be wider than that of a test. According to Jim Ross, “an expert review can be more thorough and evaluate more parts of a user interface than in usability testing, finding a greater number of problems, because testing is usually limited in time and scope, focusing on certain tasks and parts of an interface.”
!! People are different
!! It is rarely possible to accommodate all people perfectly !! design often a compromise
!! ceiling height: 8‘ !! but tallest man: 8' 11"
!! You do NOT necessarily represent a good average user of
equipment or systems you design
!! Do not expect others to think and behave as you do, or as you might like them to.
!! People vary in thought and behavior just as they do physically
In an ideal world, users would scan through your entire page to find the very piece of information they’re looking for, but research shows this is not the case. Usability tests prove that people tend to choose the first somewhat reasonable choice that catches their eyes.
That is, once they come across a link whose label refers even a little to what they’ve come for, they’ll click it. This is due to their experience that guessing wrong and hitting the back button is still more efficient than reading a whole page to find an exact match.
This behaviour, known as satisficing, is a well-known decision-making strategy in psychology.