User Experience: It's in the Batter

Jessica Stillman writes:

Five years ago you only really had the engineer. Then you started to get the hustler because you had to have the guy that was willing to execute everything down the road ... Now you're seeing the designer have a seat at the table because, in order for consumer Internet plays really to be successful today, the user experience has to be baked into the product. It can't just be added on top. ... design is just as important if not more than the technology that makes it actually happen.

Page Bloat

John Naughton observes:

Over the last decade, the size of web pages (measured in kilobytes) has more than septupled. From 2003 to 2011, the average web page grew from 93.7kB to over 679kB.

The article in which this statistic is presented has drawn some fire from the design community, as Naughton is in favor of minimalism while designers claim the added items improve the user experience. The statistic itself if good, but what it implies (and the author goes on to state) is that the additional weight comes from elements the clutter and junk up the user interface.

An opposing view from Craig Grannell (quoting someone else):

Good design isn't about being flashy – it considers the content and aims to present it in a way that aids comprehension rather than detracts from it. Good design also concerns itself with how services are to be used, and will often focus on making them as simple and easy to use as possible. That doesn't mean stripping away all design. Instead it means making sensible choices around layout, positioning, and legibility.

Ultimately, both sides seem to be taking extremes rather than a sensible position more toward the center: not all design is bloat, but neither is all design essential or even helpful - it's defies assessment in the aggregate, but must be considered case by case.

A Culture of User Neglect

An old, but excellent bit from Jared Spool:

We asked a ton of people to send us their settings file for Microsoft Word. At the time, MS Word stored all the settings in a file named something like config.ini, so we asked people to locate that file on their hard disk and email it to us. We then wrote a program to analyze the files, counting up how many people had changed the 150+ settings. … Less than 5% of the users we surveyed had changed any settings at all. More than 95% had kept the settings in the exact configuration that the program installed in.

Then, it gets better, or perhaps worse …

We had friends in the Microsoft Office group, so we asked them about the choice of delivering the feature disabled. ... It turns out the reason the feature was disabled in that release was not because they had thought about the user’s needs. Instead, it was because a programmer had made a decision to initialize the config.ini file with all zeroes.

[The programmer’s assumption was that] at some point later, someone would tell him what the “real defaults” should be. Nobody ever got around to telling him. ... The users’ assumption that Microsoft had given this careful consideration turned out not to be the case.

I'm positive that Microsoft is not alone in doing this. I’d even go so far as to speculate that the programmer in question wasn’t as apathetic as the brief detail above makes him out to be, but likely raised the issue several times and was ignored, or even told to back off. This happens far more often than any firm would likely care to admit.

Service Versus Policy

Chris Brogan relates an incident:

In my most recent stay at my favorite hotel in Las Vegas, I needed to order some lunch around 11am Vegas time. I wanted steak and asparagus (or some other suitable green). So, I called room service ...

Chris:	I was hoping to order steak for lunch, but I don’t see that you serve it until 5pm.
Room Service:	Steak and eggs?
Chris:	No, you know, an entree steak.
Room Service:	Right. We don’t serve that til 5pm.
Chris:	Oh. I was really hoping to order it for lunch.
Room Service:	Right, I suppose we COULD do it, but it would take over an hour, because we’re not set up to prepare that yet. We don’t sell that until 5pm.
Chris:	But you sell steak and eggs?
Room Service:	Yes.
Chris:	…

Treating All Customers The Same

From Bruce Temkin:

Customers have different needs, interests, and familiarity with offerings, but companies often turn their back on these differences. While it may sound appealing to deliver a great experience to everyone, it’s an impractical goal for most companies. ...

It’s easy to fall into the trap of thinking customers are the same if you just look at data about them. To truly understand the nuances across your customer segments, it’s critical that you use qualitative techniques ...

Experiences built to meet everyone’s needs often meets meets no one’s.

UX Degrees and Certifications

From UX Matters:

A degree in user experience—or more likely, a degree in one of these specialties—provides you with an opportunity to learn this body of knowledge in a structured manner. Through course assignments and assessment of your work, you also have opportunities to put that knowledge into practice in a controlled and protected environment. A degree program also ensures that you don’t skip over parts, that you lay a solid foundation, and that you do, in fact, apply knowledge in practical ways.

However, you’ll find that, if you ask most UX professionals with eight or more years of experience whether they have a directly relevant degree, they’ll answer no. They learned by doing; through trial and error; by reading, sharing, and putting what they learned into practice daily.