The document advocates shifting the focus of user experience design from creating great user interfaces to empowering users and helping them achieve their goals. It argues that users are motivated by succeeding in their larger contexts rather than mastering individual products. The document suggests product teams should understand users' real needs and priorities, which may have more to do with challenges like getting a loan approved than interface design details. The goal should be giving users "superhero powers" to succeed rather than creating superhero apps.
3. What’s on tap today?
• How do we do user experience at DE?
• How do we create great UX at DE?
• How do we know it’s great?
• What are the limitations of this approach?
• What are we supposed to be doing?
• What are the limitations of this model for our
businesses?
• A better approach for our businesses: make your users
awesome
4. Write your
ideal review
1. Amazon has upgraded
Reviews. Our users can review
our stuff. Write the ideal review. What would you love
to hear your customers say about your product?
-OR-
2. Think back to a time when you had a great user
experience. What did you want to say to tell other
people how great a product was? Write that review.
5.
6. There’s no new Amazon Review product
It was a heuristic device to get us talking
7. Why did I do that?
1. To model a UX technique: scenario and role
playing
• You are not your user
2. To model a UX technique: Indirect questioning
• People tell you what they think you want to hear
• To elicit adjectives and descriptions of feelings
3. Use this as your own team exercise for
rethinking product design
17. What are the best practices for designing a link:
• blue
• Underlined
• appearance changes (states)
• response times
• progress indicator
• …
Practices
32. The D word problem
This? Desirable? Delightful?
33. The D word problem
This? Desirable? Delightful?
34. 1. Too squishy for the C Suite
• When there’s no competition
–Internal tools
• When delightful design undermines trust
–Rounded corners and delightful messaging in a
tax app
• When too squishy for the C suite
52. Dashboard ux
Selling the American Dream!
Connect is awesome.
I can turn leads into
sellers and buyers like
no one’s business.
53. Product design the new way
Images from Kathy Sierra, BadAss: Making Users Awesome
54. Post UX drives our success
• Users who are successful in their
motivating context will recommend us
• Success in their motivating context is why
they start using your product
• Making sure they are successful is what
keeps them using it.
55. Users don’t get up in the morning
thinking, I wonder…
No one wants to
master search
57. When the clicking’s over (post UX)
• What did the product enable?
• What does it empower them to do?
• What can they now show others?
• What will they now say to others?
• How are they more powerful after the
clicking’s over?
60. Marketing / SEO team wants to know:
Is there a gift giving gap around Mother’s and
Father’s Day?
(They’re producing “fun” content for our users)
Product team and UX researchers wonder: Is
there a gender gap between what Moms want and
what Dads want?
(Us? We’re just curious: are users are people, so
let’s get to know them as people who do more than
search for homes)
So, users, we were wondering:
62. • The poll interrupted them while they did
something that was part of their bigger,
motivating context
• They don’t stop caring about their context
just because we ask them a question
• What’s important to them: achieve bigger
goals (not the mechanics of searching for
listings)
• What they are doing with our “tools” is
crucially tied to their identity, who they are,
why they get up in the morning
Why?
64. Product team wants to know
1. What did you come here to do today?
2. Did you accomplish that task?
3. Is there anything we could have done to
help you accomplish that task?
65. What the team wanted to know:What the team wanted to know:
• What’s broken?
• Any other features you want?
• Are the forms right?
• Are there too many banner
ads?
• Are the photos big enough?
• Can you navigate?
• Can you find the stuff we
made for you?
(We’re really asking: how do we get you to
fill out a lead form?)
67. They didn’t want better search
They want to get rid of the
problems in their bigger context:
68. They want these things:
• Get a loan
• Get prequalified
• Save up for down payments or deposits
• Find rent to own options
• Get credit checked / fix their credit
• Understand the home buying process
• Know how they compare to others – where
they stand financially (income, debt,
savings)
72. Stop focusing on making great UX
Instead:
• Help people become successful at their bigger
context
• Look for the attributes our successful users share
(and stop looking for the attributes that
successful products share. It’s an unsustainable
feature war)
73. For more research-based insights
about Homes.com users, check out the
UX insights portal:
http://insights.homes.com
Thoughts? Questions?