user experience strategist

The Real Business Value of UX

Published on July 3, 2013

For the past few weeks, I have been the client for a discovery process to better understand the entrepreneurial mindset. It has been an eye opening exercise, and I have learned a lot from our user research team about the workings of the “entrepreneur brain”. This brain is the same one that many of our business people, even in corporations, have. It is an incredibly creative, hugely passionate, but, often times, an unable to execute on the idea brain. These folks usually just know that their ideas are good ones, that people and society need their help, and that, at whatever cost, they will succeed in making the world a better place. This brain is a noble one, however, there is just one tiny problem. This brain often doesn’t know how to build software products, and worse, it thinks that this whole UX thing, is just to make the product look good. Lastly, it thinks that if it makes the product look good, people will love it. Oh boy are they wrong.

“Can you help us make the UX better? We’re certain if we have a great design that people will like and use our product, and it will become viral.” These were the words of one startup founder that attended some recent advisory sessions that I was holding at their co-working space in NYC. This startup, like many businesses, knew they had a good idea, and they were convinced that if only someone could fix “the UX”, they would become hugely successful.

I have to admit I run into these types of people in all types of businesses. From the largest corporations to the smallest startups, there is always someone who concepted the idea and is pushing it to become reality. Thing is they don’t really know how to do that except for sweat equity. I.e. They work as hard as possible and viola their dream becomes reality (at least in their point of view this is how it “should” work). These folks are also the ones that tend to think that design can save them, and that a great interface will make their product the next Facebook (I have seriously heard this several times… in one day), and that interface they need can be found through one person, a UX person.

We are use to business people seeing UX as the interface. Famous individuals like the late Steve Jobs and Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg have used the term “the experience” in all the wrong ways to fail to market the real value of UX. And, to be fair, many UXers themselves still do the same thing in talking about the experience and what UX is.

However, I’m not writing today to scold UXers and business folks on using the incorrect terminology. Nor am I writing this piece to lament the failure of UXers and business folks to properly market the UX profession. Instead, I want to point out that this entrepreneurial mindset, one that so desperately needs help to see their ideas come to life, overlooks one big thing when they think about UX. It is something that is not talked about outside of UX walls, but it is probably the most valuable thing that we UX professionals can provide to our business people. That thing? Process.

Process Diagram

Yes, UX is all about Process, or at least I believe a big part of it should be. And business folks overlook this for two reasons: 1. UX doesn’t market it and 2. Most don’t know software development at all, and don’t want to. They just want their idea to save the world, and their blood, sweat and tears will get them there. Thus, they don’t NEED to know that UX is process. OK Lis, this information is all well and good, but, so what?

Well after studying business folks and entrepreneurs for a bit, I, and my teammates, have come to realize that process is the biggest gap they need to fill in order to see their dreams become reality. For years UXers have been convinced that businesses need to know their users, that they need to understand their technology, that they need personas, and card sorting and insert another UX term here. “If only the business had these things it would be successful.”, is a term we UXers often say. But, we have been looking at the tree, not the forest. All of these things are owned up to Process. What do I mean?

I mean, the business needs to know the users so that they build the right product for them and don’t waste all their resources churning on technology. This is solved with process. They need personas so that they have empathy for their user and can speed up their design and development prioritization and execution, another outptut of process. They need card sorting so that they can understand how users will find stuff on their site so that the business doesn’t, once again, spend money to fix and fix and fix the navigation. Another component of the UX process. Our business folks need process, and the outputs of it, and that is what we provide as UXers.

Because UX doesn’t sell our process we get overlooked as the process people. Thus Business people don’t hire us to help them to execute their product in total, just to design the interface. So, what tends to happen is they either 1. Spend all of their money churning on developing software that is good, but that their users don’t want. 2. They build too early, and end up losing money trying to “see” what it would look like or 3. Their product doesn’t meet user needs and, somehow, doesn’t go viral as “it should”…. Or we see a combination of these.

The point, products aren’t successful, money is wasted and the world never becomes the better place that the business person’s idea should have made it.

Person pushing failing stock arrow

However, there is good news. UX can help! How? We first need to start selling UX as a process to an end. Business people are our users, and we know what they need. That is, help figuring out the most cost efficient way to build the most successful software. That is what we UXers need to be selling.

But the onus is not just on UX. The second solution is that the business people themselves need to realize there is a new set of solutions in town and it is not all out of Tech Crunch, Harvard Business Review, and Mashable. Although these are all great sources, if you want to execute on products that are successful, are not cash drains and that meet user needs, you need the UX process. You can find the UX process by looking at other resources such as Boxes and Arrows, UX Magazine, this blog, and others like it.

The outcomes of seeing UX as a Process are simple. Business people can finally see their ideas really change the world. Why? Because the solutions include the user, are tailored towards them, and the business itself didn’t waste all of it’s money developing what it “thinks” users need. Therefore there are still resources to develop further and make the product even better.

On the UX side of things we maybe, just maybe, are seen as more than interface people. Any step towards that is a good thing.

The moral of the story is, UX, we have a market that needs our help. We have handfulls of business people with great ideas, but no idea on how to not screw them up (and I’ve seen the user research on this!). Business people you have success right on the tip of your fingers, if you are humble enough to take the help. You, business people, need process and lucky for you that is what UX is. Are we all ready to admit that?

UX… It’s time to be the force!

Published on May 29, 2013

Last Spring, I came across an article entitled Better Revenue Through UX out on Adaptive Path’s site. After spending the months before giving my Learn The Business Behind the IA Business talk, I realized running into this piece was fate. The article features a video of Melissa Matross’s MX Conference talk, and I highly recommend watching. But today’s piece is not just about promoting a great speaker and their great content. You see, once I saw this post I had even more evidence for many of the claims I make in the Learn the Business talk. And that is what I hope to share with you today. But first, allow me to back up a bit.

Sign with person walking backwards

Lack of UX leadership in an organization is one of the biggest, if not the biggest, epidemic to plague the User Experience community. Even though the role of Chief Experience Officier has been popping up in companies more than ever, many UX practitioners are still seeing the consequences of this lack of UX leadership plague. All we UXers want is representation at an executive level, but it seems that will never happen. In fact, sometimes it can feel like we’ll never really “get a seat the table”.

Further, the problems we see with a lack of UX leadership, even though well voiced, are still very much alive. First, because we don’t usually see someone with a solid UX background sitting “at the table” it is impossible for UX thinking to flow through the rest of the organization. Thus, there is no one with a big enough budget, or with enough power, advocating for real UX, and this literally stifles all movement towards creating a company that extends a great user experience to its users.

Second, without a real UX leader who knows how to grow a solid user experience, organizations try to stop the bleeding with process changes and new trends. They thing that shortening the UX process, putting UX into Agile, or making UX deliverables less formal (and anything else you can think of that is a quick fix), without making an organizational change at the same time, will guarantee a solid user experience for their users. These organizations only see the face of UX (I.e. The interface) as the experience, and, once they’ve created that “experience” more quickly than before, they assume that a great user experience can be achieved. With no one there, in power, to disprove these claims, the Wireframe Machine rages on.

The Wireframe Machine

But dear reader, do not fear, for there is hope. There is a way that we can begin to get that seat at the table, and stop our organizations from seeing UX as just a pretty face. That way? We Learn the Business Behind Our Business, and once we do that, we use our knowledge and UX expertise to not only affect our businesses, but to prove that effect. And, in her talk, Melissa shows us how she did just that (Read the article and view the video here).

Melissa knew her business, she knew her data, and she knew both so well that she was able to use creativity and UX know how to couple business need and user need into a new way to generate revenue for the company. Without having a in-depth knowledge of her data and business, she would not have been about to do this. And, THIS… this is what User Experience really is to me. It’s not just about the users, it is creating a partnership between users, business and technology. But, Melissa didn’t just stop there. Once she saw her ideas make real business value, she talked about it! She spread the word and made sure every knew that UX was at the center of this success

Once we start to do the same, we’ll see changes in leaps and bounds. Our organizations will WANT user experience in a leadership role, becuase doing so will just be better for business. Having more UX leadership will help us to extend great UX throughout our companies, and even more to our users.

Sir Issac Newton’s First Law of Motion (also known as the Law of Inertia) states “An object at rest remains at rest unless acted upon by a force. An object in motion remains in motion, and at a constant velocity, unless acted upon by a force.”. My advice to you today is to be that outside force. Be the one that changes your organizations trajectory and speed. Learn the Business Behind your business, and then use your new knowledge to create real UX change in your organization. Lastly, be sure to publicize that change and provide UX the credit it deserves.

Yes UX… Business IS Creative

Published on April 25, 2013

Building Business models is one of the most creative things we can do ~ Lou Rosenfeld, WIAD NYC 2013

It’s no surprise that I’m writing more about business and its intersections with UX. I see the many crossovers each and every day; from attending an event like World IA Day in NYC, to working on client projects. The theme even infiltrated the membership meeting at this years IA Summit. We are starting to see, more clearly, the rift that is being created by our field and it’s ignoring the need to understand better how businesses work. When I heard Mr. Rosenfeld say the above quote this year, it started to make me think that among the many misconceptions we have about business that help to cause this rift, the fact that we think it is not creative is probably one of the biggest.

Business? Creative? Is she serious? Yes, indeed! We as IAs and UXers tend to look at “the business” as the opposite of our field. Business is calculated and structured. We are adaptive and free flowing. They care only about profit. We care about and advocate for our users!

The reality is, our outlook is simply not true. Business is very much rooted in creativity. Especially when you think about the overall concept for how to structure businesses. Things like which roles should be involved, and how are we going to make money, these are, in essence, problems for information architects to solve.

However, we never get invited to help solve these problems, do we? We don’t even have the knowledge to go out on our own and start creating UX and IA led businesses, and this is why we all need to change our minds.

The reasons why we aren’t invited to the right conversations, or we aren’t using our creativity to create businesses are simple. We not only don’t know business, but we see it as the exact opposite of what we should know. This does not go unnoticed by our business partners who then decide that:

They don’t trust us to have their best interests as a priority.
They don’t think we “get it” so they don’t give us responsibilities outside of our little design sandbox.

No wonder you aren’t getting invited to the cool conversations to help make businesses better! Would you invite a person that not only didn’t understand UX, but saw it as “the enemy” to your UX party aimed at defining how UX should be structured? I didn’t think so.

But worse, if we don’t switch our frame of mind to seeing business as a partner, then we’ll never take the step to learn more about business. Further if we don’t know business, then we can’t start businesses. “No big deal”, you may be thinking, “I don’t want to start a business anyway”. The thing is, we NEED IA and UX first businesses to see our profession earn the respect we think it deserves. (Read more of my thoughts on this in my piece The Only Way).

What are we to do then? First we need realize that UX, as well as business, has a calculated side as well as a creative side. We have processes we stick to, and mantras (User First!) that we shout from the rooftops. Just like business has processes and mantra (Where’s the ROI??). Our professions are not so very different after all.

This mind shift, this realization, is really the only key. Because once we realize that business can be creative, and that it is not so different than us, several paths can unfold.

First, UX will see and take advantage of more opportunities to partner with our businesses to help make them better, instead of colliding with them. This will not go unnoticed by our business partners who will then be able to see our real value, instead of our omnigraffle skills. They will see that we can help them with their creative thinking around business and its necessary structures. Our sandbox will, in effect, grow.

With the walls down, many of us may also start to learn more about business. This can only set our profession up for more success as we move into an age where IA lead businesses will rule the day.

Thus, do we continue down this path of alternate reality where we see business as the opposite of us, uncreative, uncaring, inflexible OR do we start to see businesses and their ultimate potential? The choice is yours, but I caution you to choose wisely. The wiser of the two choices is the one that puts us in a place where we can help set our businesses up to be more geared towards our users, and how do you expect to do that, when you don’t understand how the business is run in the first place?

The Only Way

Published on March 7, 2013

“The only way we are going to get recognized for what we do is to make money doing it” ~ Lou Rosenfeld, World IA Day NYC, February 9, 2013

When I heard Mr. Rosenfeld speak these words, I thought to myself “Yes, that’s it! That is the only way that this UX thing can work.”. It’s no secret that information architects and designers are sick and tired of being seen as ‘just the interface people’ churning out deliverables to make our project teams feel productive (whether those deliverables are paper or electronic). We all know that our skillsets are more than just ‘Yes people’, and we are waiting patiently for the day when some one or some thing emancipates us from this stronghold. And up until this moment I, along with many of you, had been racking my brain to couple this complex problem with a simply stated solution. I think that Mr. Rosenfeld brings us just that (Thanks Lou!).

Associating IA, UX and Design with business, and making money doing the things, all the things, that we say we can do and should be doing (instead saying that we should be doing one thing, and only creating the interface) is the way, the ONLY way, for information architects and designers to get recognized for our true expertise. The problem is… none of us really wants to get into the money side of things.

The Current State of UX and Business

It is no surprise that our industry currently sees business and business people as immoral, evil, greedy and only motivated by profit and gain. Businesses and advertisements that profit and gain by taking advantage of consumers are exposed daily in the news. Further, not only do we see this immoral business behavior in the news, but many of us see it within our own companies and project teams as well. Thus, it’s no wonder that when I put out a short, informal, non-statistically based and some would say biased poll (I think I covered all the rants here), that the responses I got were fairly skewed.

In this poll, I asked respondents to finish this sentence: “Most business people are motivated by”. Of the 30 respondents, 24 replied “profit” and only 1 answered “the best interests of the user.”. Other answers I received include “client deadlines and money”, “their own beliefs regarding what is best”, “winning”, “their personal interests”, and “the two are not mutually exclusive”. (A big thank you to all that responded!).

As you can see profit and gain as the motivator for business people was far and away the winner, and I agree with this notion. I also most definitely agree with the idea that user interests and profit and gain are not mutually exclusive options, and that is part of the point of today’s post. As architects and designers, hell as people, we tend to view profit and gain as greedy and evil, as the opposite of helping our users. But, who said that profit and gain is wrong? In fact, profit and gain can be quite good! For instance, we all love Apple products. They are not only beautiful but they make our lives easier, better and more delightful. You can bet your bottom dollar (pun intended) that Apple profits and gains from our consumption, and yet we still love them for it! But that same emotion is not garnered for a rival company… let’s say Microsoft. Microsoft makes similar products to Apple, but the love for them is not nearly as strong. In fact that company is construed as ‘only in it for profit and gain’, and that makes them… evil.

We should ask ourselves, what makes Apple a good business in our eyes and Microsoft a bad business if both are motivated by profit and gain? We can say that we support Apple because in return for the profit and gain they get, they provide us actual value. Apple has, in essence, earned their profit, whereas, in most cases, Microsoft has not. With this example, we can see that being motivated by profit and gain in and of itself isn’t morally bad, it is when you are motivated by profit and gain without giving value in return you are acting immoral. More, because we usually only hear about profit and gain in these evil business scenarios, we start to associate being motivating by profit and gain as evil. Lastly, because we see profit and gain as evil, and because businesses and business people are motivated by it, we then associate business and business people as evil too.

Whew, ok, let’s get to the point here. The 24 people who said that business people are motivated by profit were right. And we, as a community must not see this motivation as wrong, or our business partners as evil, because that is holding us back in a big way.

The Problems with Viewing Business as Evil

Perhaps the biggest problem that we face when we view business and its hunt for profit as evil, is that we as designers and architects separate ourselves from our businesses and business teams. We see ourselves in opposition to them instead of thinking of ourselves as their advisors and partners. They want profit and gain (bad for our users), we want delightful experiences (good for our users), and this must mean that we aren’t like them. Thinking this way means that we don’t see our businesses for what they are, the organizations and systems that we are hired to help and support because they are the ones providing a good or service that will make our users lives better.

This separation and opposition holds architects and designers back because it 1) prevents us from seeing ourselves as business people which 2) means that we can’t get better at being business people which means 3) we have to continue to work for the bad companies in order to ensure an income because we are scared to leave these jobs or to start our own awesome businesses.

If only we were armed with business knowledge we’d understand the economics behind this and then we could strike out on our own or to better places with real experience work. But, alas, we’d rather keep up the UX and Business divide. We’d rather push back on the idea that we, too, are business and as such should learn more about business to be better. But, let’s face it, you are a business person too!

A businessperson (also business person, businessman, business man, businesswoman, or business woman) is someone involved in a particular undertaking of activities, commercial or industrial, for the purpose of generating revenue from a combination of human, financial, and physical capital. ~ Wikipedia

You may not rack up numbers, create product goals, attend board meetings, or wear suits to work, but work designing and architecting for good user experiences… i.e. Experiences that generate more company revenue, is what you do.

Shunning this fact prevents us from learning more about and understanding business. And business, is what drives our economy, feeds us and our families, and provides us homes. When we don’t understand business, we have to become more dependent on the “business people” (both good and bad) to make money for us and to pay us (and our bills). This setup, one in which only the “real” business people know how to be fiscally successful, makes it even harder for those of us working for the bad business people to leave to find morally good work that is UX based.

And finally, if we don’t associate ourselves with and better understand business, we can’t negotiate better work or start our own companies that do great work. Meaning, we will never, ever really make money doing what we say we should be doing (facilitating experiences that are delightful, doing real ethnographic research, creating useful research based personas, need I go on?)… and therefore we will never be recognized for that really fun, awesome, valuable stuff that we should be doing.. aka we’ll still be only involved in the interface.

Solutions

It may be obvious to you at this point, but the first steps that we should take to combat our separation from business is to 1. See that each and every one of us is “in business” and 2. Realize that the occupation of business is moral, noble and worthy. As Rabbi Daniel Lapin writes in his book Thou Shall Prosper – Ten Commandments for Making Money, most people believe that business is inherently bad, but as we saw above, this is not the case. In fact, it is time to start seeing business for what it really is: The way that we create and exchange valuable goods and services that people want and need. And, doing this in a way that upholds morals and virtues, while still making a profit, is not only morally good, but it is the entire point of not only a successful business, but of architecting and designing for delightful user experiences! Therefore, not only are we business people, but we aim to be great business people who stay moral, nobel, and worthy by advocating for our users, while matching their needs with business needs.

Outcomes

The outcomes of us realizing we are business people, and seeing that business and profit can be good (if done through moral means) are us not only closing the gap between UX and business, but making it almost invisible. This enables us to be not only user advocates for good businesses, because we know more about business and don’t fear losing or changing jobs as much, but can even help us decide to start our own morally good businesses with IA, and great UX as the output of great IA, at the forefront! In either case, knowing more about business helps us to do what we say we should be doing, what we want to be doing to really provide value. It helps us to not only do the work, but to make money doing it, so that we can be recognized for our true value and not for our software manipulation skills only.

I’ll leave you with this…

The only way we are going to get recognized for what we do, for the value we know we provide, is to make money actually doing the things we say we should be doing. The only way to get to do those things is to learn more about, and get closer to business. It is your choice which path you go down, but I recommend the business path… otherwise plan on keeping that Omnigraffle file open.

UX… The Ultimate Advertisement

Published on February 20, 2013

Several months ago I wrote a post entitled “Finally! Real Proof that Good UX Equals Business Success”. In it I talk about how Airbnb has begun utilizing a new feature, Neighborhoods, that helps inform users about the areas of the city where they are looking to stay. I also talk about how Neighborhoods is an ad-free way for Airbnb to increase user engagement, and, hopefully, business success. Shortly after I wrote the piece, I received a great email from Caleb Brown, posing to me several interesting questions. After a few back and forth emails filled with in-depth comments and ideas, Caleb responded with this.

“I am wondering if – rather than being a site without ads – Neighborhoods is really one big undifferentiated ad? A piece of content that is designed to hook you in and make you consume something? Maybe the next age is when we stop being able to detect advertisements…They’re still there, but they have stopped being rectilinear distractions from the main tasks in a page. I am thinking of Pinterest, which could be described (very well) as a big pool of ads or visual miscellany that is stoking consumption.”

It was this thought that eventually led me down the path to the realization that even though I architect for experiences, what that really means, in many respects, is that I am one hell of an advertiser.

The current state of ads on the web is, for the most part, for them to be explicit and, many times, intrusive. Because of this, many of us UX professionals, have started to see them as evil. They only get in the way of the progress of our user, and because of that we should try to decrease their presence as much as possible.

We hound the marketers by telling them that ads have no place in the experience of, say, trying to get an auto quote, or purchase a watch online. Ads simply are clutter and distraction. Because of this many of us have also pushed ourselves away from thinking about our roles as marketers. We are experience designers damn it! We don’t just sell stuff… right? Wrong!

Taking a step back, many of us think that we only design great experiences to make the world a better place for the user. We want to make their experience delightful and ensure that they have a voice in what they do online. But, why do we do all that, really? Our intentions are usually pure, meaning we really do want to help people. But is making it easier and more delightful to spend more money virtually really something that users need to make their lives better… is it really? Or, on the flip side, does creating a delightful and enjoyable experience work in the business’ favor to get the user to consume more, buy more, engage more. Thus, as architects and designers of these experiences that are created in order to hook users to get them to consume more, what we really are are some of the best darned advertisers around.

Granted, many of you IAs and UXers out there already know this. I’ll admit that it has probably crossed my subconscious once or twice, but that I have never fully embraced this fact. And, I’m also willing to wager that many of you out there right now are standing up, yelling at your screen, saying that you aren’t an advertiser (those greedy, manipulative people!) but you are an advocate for the user!

It may be true that you are an advocate for the user, but it is equally true that you are an advertiser, meant to manipulate (probably in a good way) user’s behavior in order to get them to use your product or service much more than they normally would. And, that, dear reader, is OK. The problem comes in when we don’t realize and own the fact that we are advertisers.

When we pull away from this fact, several things can happen. First, we leave the advertising of products and services up to a separate unit (usually marketing) in our organization. What this means is that someone else, who may be completely unaware of the intended user experience across channels, has a job that involves making sure their content gets seen. Because they have this goal, and because they are outside of your purview, they usually have no choice but to create something that will take the user out of their task flow. If this advertiser doesn’t know about the experience you’ve architected, then they surely don’t know how to fit their content and goals into it, after all.

Second when we as UX professionals don’t see ourselves as advertisers, we are not being real about our responsibilities. This means that we may not be aware that it is our job to figure out how to integrate advertising and marketing goals into our user flows and designs. Both of these issues can cause us to have ill relationships and outlooks on our advertising and marketing partners. The main problem with all of this is that we have a disjointed approach to crafting the user’s experience. And, a disjointed approach means a disjointed experience for all.

What then, is the solution to these problems? First and foremost, we need to embody our roles as supreme advertisers. Many of us, as I mentioned, have already done this. I would bet the farm on the fact that those of us who have embodied our roles as advertisers are creating more fluid experiences for our users.

In order for us to embody our role as advertisers, we first need to realize that advertising in and of itself is not always bad. If an advertisement is not a distraction, but is instead something that enhances the user’s experience by providing them more information that they need (ala Neighborhoods for Airbnb) than it is actually making the world a bit easier for the user, while better for your business.

Once we realize that advertising is not evil, we can begin to see our roles in it. By doing so, by embodying our roles as supreme advertisers we will better integrate with our internal, as well as, client teams to create products and services that enhance the user experience while helping the business to succeed. We will also stop seeing advertising and marketing as evil, and instead see them as partners who can help us do our job better. All in all, taking on and embracing this role makes us better at what we do, and that is how we really help all the users out there.

Poll: UX and Business – How different are we?

Published on January 22, 2013

Some time ago, a good friend and fellow UX colleague recommended I read the book “Thou Shall Prosper: Ten Commandments for Making Money” by Rabbi Daniel Lapin. This friend (who is Chris Pallé over at Wisdom & Craft. Check him out, he’s awesome) knew that I had been increasingly curious about the intersections of UX and Business (especially after he saw my Learn the Business Behind the IA Business talk). It is my duty to say that I’m glad he made this recommendation. It is a book that I highly recommend for any professional out there; from those working in Corporate America to those working for themselves!

The other night, as I was reading more of the book I started to think about the UX community and our reactions towards the Business community. I found myself making many assumptions based off of my own personal views, but realized that I should probably verify those assumptions. That is what this blog post aims to do.

I have included below a question that I’d greatly appreciate your response to. For being generous with your opinion, expect a follow up post with additional insight (hopefully good insight :-)).

[polldaddy poll=6841281]

More thoughts to come when the results are in!

Finally! Real Proof that Good UX Equals Business Success

Published on November 14, 2012

“Ads are the way that many companies can afford to maintain websites. If you don’t like them in your designs, then you need to design a better solution that makes your company money. Until then, ads are it.” I heard the amazing Karen McGrane speak these (paraphrased) words back in 2009 (they are from her 2009 IA Summit talk entitled “Designing For, With, and Around Advertising”). To this day, those words still ring in my ears. I couldn’t agree more with what Karen was saying. And, thankfully, on November 13, 2012, somebody finally did design a better solution. That solution, a more complete user experience.

I was introduced to Ann Montgomery in the Fall of 2010. Her startup, Nabewise, was one of Hubert Experience Design’s very first clients (in fact, my second client… to be exact). At the time, Nabewise was still in the very early stages, so my time with Ann was usually spent in a coffee shop, somewhere in NYC, commenting on and discussing her ideas for how the product should work (a product which I loved from the get go!). Although I wasn’t able to remain a “certified” Nabewise employee for the duration of their growth, I was able watch the product develop from the sidelines. As I did, it was easy (and awesome!) to see that the product decisions that we hammered out in those coffee shops had a great impact on the trajectory it took. I am thrilled to say that yesterday marked the announcement of Nabewise’s acquisition by Airbnb, a tremendous feat indeed. In only two years Nabewise had built a tremendously successful product. Kudos to Ann and the rest of the Nabewise team… you guys are truly amazing and successful to boot!

But what, pre-tell, does this have to do with ads and a better solution? As I was digging through all of the coverage of Neighborhoods, the new Airbnb product from their Nabewise partnership, I found this article from CNNMoney. Here is the relevant quote:

“Unlike the glossy travel magazines and travel review sites it mirrors, Neighborhoods offers no advertising opportunities; Airbnb’s primary revenue stream continues to be the fees that it collects when users book listings on the site. The beautiful images and stories will likely keep potential travelers on the site longer and lead to more bookings. What’s more, Neighborhoods expands Airbnb’s position in travel beyond home-share opportunities alone, making it a go-to platform for dreaming up ideas—and putting it more firmly into competition with sites from TripAdvisor to Frommers, which Google (GOOG) has agreed to acquire. It begins to open up the opportunities for Airbnb to expand into other travel-related services. (Local tour guide, anyone?) And it creates new opportunities for the 21st century travel journalists, a couple dozen of which are still hanging around Airbnb’s offices this week.”

That’s right, Neighborhoods will be ad free. And, the way that Airbnb can afford to do this? They know that the product will not only keep potential travelers on the site longer and lead to more bookings, but it also expands Airbnb’s position in travel and opens up more opportunities for them.

You see, Neighborhoods creates a more holistic user experience for Airbnb users. The product fulfills the user’s mental model of wanting to know about a neighborhood before actually staying there. By closing this gap for the user, right there on the Airbnb site, users don’t have to leave Airbnb to get more information on a neighbordhood before booking. By users not having to leave to find information, it means that they are more likely to book right there on Airbnb. Badda bing… Badda boom!

This is a sure-fire example of a more holistic user experience creating more revenue, and thus more success for a company. When you hear me mention this in any of my talks, posts, meetings, wherever you hear me or others mention it, know it’s true! Once again congrats to Nabewise and Airbnb for getting this right. And thank you both for providing a clear example of how a good UX = a more successful business!

The Myth of Interaction Design

Published on March 14, 2012

One day, as I was drifting off into one of my frequent reveries, it came to me. How, I said to myself, can we really call ourselves Interaction Designers, when the majority of us aren’t really designing any new interactions? I know what you are going to say. “But Lis, surely you agree that we design interactive sites, apps and other digital products all the time!”. But we need to ask ourselves, are we really creating new interactions based on human capabilities or just reusing old digital interactions in new ways. Chance would have it that this amazing article crossed my path, A Brief Rant On the Future of Interaction Design, and it greatly helped to clarify my thoughts. In this article, the author talks about how many of the videos and hypotheses that we see of “future” interactions are really just riffs off of technology that we already have. He uses the example of touchscreens heavily throughout the article, and points out something very key; that these so called “future” touch interactions are not really based off of the gap between human capabilities (how humans are capable of interacting) and current human interaction (what people are already doing today). Instead they are based off of the fact that we have touchscreen technology and thus feel the need to figure out more interactions that people can do with it. The author’s plea is for us to “be inspired by the untapped potential of human capabilities.”, and to me, the people that do that… are the real interaction designers.

So what if my whacky theories are true? What is the big deal? Well, I’ll tell you what the big deal is. The problem with us believing that we are interaction designers without really taking into consideration human capabilities is that we are stunting the ability to design new and meaningful interactions for our users. We stunt creative and innovative design growth because we plateau and refuse to push ourselves further. “We’re already interaction designers”, we say. “We’re the creative ones, the ones that can see into the future of digital interaction, so we must be right.”. Wrong. We are a big part of the gap that users have between interactions today and their physical capability to act further. Thus, what we end up really designing for are technical advancements as opposed to human capability, and our tools are not really for use by real people, but are just pushing the limits of technology to see how far we can take it. That is not design, it is selfishness and greed.

But, I promise you this, we can solve this problem, we can make ourselves part of the solution. The first step in doing so is to take a minute, stop and think. We need to, at a minimum, take the time to understand human capabilities. That is really what user research is all about. Bret Victor, the article author above, mentions that user research is all about understanding how people are already using interactions and tools, noting user goals and needs and then noting gaps and hiccups in the interactions the user is having. We need to go back to the roots of the user, the human, in order to design for them, and not for our own technological progress.

By understanding human capabilities and the gaps in interaction between those capabilities and the user’s potential for the interaction, we become interaction designers. Real interaction designers. We can create more meaningful digital interactions (and physical if that is the space you are in) and we then come even closer to meeting and exceeding our users’ goals. Being an interaction designer means that you have taken an oath, an oath to make the world a near effortless place to interact with. So, take that first step and understand your users capabilities so that you can begin to design for them as opposed to designing for the technology. By doing that you are making this complex interactive world an easier place to interact.

The De-Evolution of UX Design

Published on February 15, 2012

When I was first introduced to the field of user experience it was the summer of 2005. After leaving my job as a Java Programmer in Hartford, CT I moved to San Antonio, TX where I randomly fell into a UX job (talk about lucky). It’s an understatement to say that I had no idea what the hell I was doing, and I scraped along for awhile trying to figure it all out. Back in those days, my role was not UX Designer or Interaction Designer, in fact, the term UX didn’t even exist in my world! Instead, those of us that weren’t visual designers were called Information Architects, and that was exactly what we did. It was our job to architect, organize and make sense of the information within a website or application. After we mapped that out (either in an IA doc or some sort of concept mapping), we worked with a visual designer to put our mapping into an interface.

Unlike a lot of what we see today, the first thing I did on the job was NOT learn how to wireframe. In fact I didn’t create my first wireframe until I moved back east to NYC almost three years later. Instead, the first thing I was instructed to do was visit Jesse James Garrett’s site. I was tasked with understanding what the Visual Vocabulary for describing information architecture and interaction design was from a conceptual standpoint, and was then expected to map out IAs for my projects. There are several reasons why this was my first step. Reason one was that we IAs and VDs simply needed to know how information was related and prioritized within a website or application before we could design the interface for that system. How else can you design a proper interface solution unless you understand which information types need to be included in that solution, and which are most important to the solution? Without knowing this information, we would have been guessing at the interface. Reason two was that we didn’t want to show an interface to our non-design partners and stakeholders as our first deliverable because what we really needed from them was not feedback on the visual, but feedback on the content and context that related to the system. It’s seven years later, and, sadly, it seems that the time I’m speaking of has come and gone. And, because of that we are facing a huge problem in the world of UX.

The problem UX is facing is, simply, we are devolving. The definition of de-evolution is to degenerate through a gradual change or evolution, and it seems to me that by removing the information architecture step from our day to day process we might be on that path. To be fair, I’m not saying how that IA phase should be structured in detail (that is for another post), but I am saying that this type of thinking needs to be done and signed off on by certain team partners before we can move into interface design (including wireframes).

We see several problems that come out of skipping the IA phase. First, the team (UXers, Visual Designers, Project team members, other stakeholders) won’t all be in agreement on the prioritization and context of the information to be designed for which will cause disagreement in later phases. Second, by showing wireframes without agreeing on IA, we are focusing our stakeholders and other partners on the interface and not on the real thing we are designing for… content and context. Third, we are, in essence, beginning to lie to ourselves. We are lying to ourselves by telling each other than UX is not just about form, but it is about function as well. Because if it was about function, we’d spend time on the information (the IA phase) before we went right into talking about the form that the information should take (the wireframe phase).

To make matters worse, we, as an industry, have been trying to validate the discomfort that many of us feel subconsciously with skipping the IA step, by turning to “sketching” as the end all be all answer. Of course, sketching is important, but it all matters what we are sketching and when. What I’m talking about is that we UXers think that since sketching doesn’t involve putting our wireframes into an electronic format, than it doesn’t really count as skipping straight to wireframing. But guess what, even sketching the interface without first sketching the structure of the information means you are skipping the one step that will make your designs truly successful. That step is where you think about the content, context and users, and force your stakeholders to do the same, WITHOUT thinking about the interface (also known as the IA step).

So where do we go from here? How do we stop this process of devolution and backwards movement? Well, we bring back IA! Ok, ok, I’m not saying that we should all learn Jesse James Garrett’s Visual Vocab (though it wouldn’t hurt) or that we need to institute a structured process that we follow the exact same way every time. But, what I am arguing we need to do is slow down, put down our sketching pens, and our omnigraffle and just think. Think about, draw out and get buy in on your content, your context, and your users. And do so without a wireframe or a sketch of a wireframe. Pick up the Polar Bear book, and ignore the wireframe chapter and learn IA.

By bringing the IA phase back and by concentrating first on the information, several things will happen. First, your sketching and interface design becomes much, much better because you have prioritization and buy off on the content, context, and users you are designing for. This means that your wireframe/prototyping phase becomes a lot more about the interface and not what content should go in the interface and why. Second, you are showing your stakeholders that UX design truly isn’t just form, but really is also about function. We are moving away from the interface, which is how we started, and towards a real solution of which the interface is only a part. Third, we stop lying to ourselves, and we stop saying that the best UX solutions aren’t just the coolest or the best aesthetically, but they are those that take content, context and users into consideration while creating an aesthetically appropriate interface. Most importantly we stop UX’s slide down the evolution scale back towards the time of print design and outputs, and instead continue our climb up the mountain towards being the user experience experts.

UX… Let’s Stop Being Unicorns

Published on November 16, 2011

I’ve mentioned several times before how I have the opportunity to attend many UX and technology events (mostly because I live in NYC and am a consultant, but also because I try my hardest take advantage of these situations). I’ve also mentioned before that I got to attend this year’s NY Internet Week (see UX… so you wanna work with startups for more thoughts on this event). What I haven’t mentioned here before is that I have discovered that we, as User Experience Designers, are unicorns. Meaning, we have skills and talents that technology companies want, need, but don’t truly understand, AND we are super hard to find.

Now, these technology companies, especially startups, are creating a ton of new products and updating a great deal of old products all the time, and they are going to these technology events and discussing lessons learned and tips to success from their experiences. Unfortunately, when they are doing their creating and updating and reporting back to the tech community, they aren’t talking about user needs, goals and tasks in the least. Not one company, at least in the events I’ve attended, has talked about how they went out and did user research to understand current user behavior. They do market research, at times, but that isn’t what I’m talking about. I’m talking about the real, down low, getting to know your users. Instead, these companies talk about giving users new functionality they didn’t know they wanted or giving them functionality that they should want without knowing why or how the user might use it in real life.

Of course, in the UX world, this is a problem that we are well aware of. By not taking user behavior, tasks, needs and goals into account, these companies are designing for solutions to problems they haven’t yet defined. How can they be successful in this regard? We’ll leave that discussion for another day. The problem I want to talk about today is one for our UX world. That being, these companies have no idea who we are, what value we can bring, and that we are sitting right in front of them watching, listening, and shaking our heads in disappointment. This is a problem for our community, because it means that the people and companies that need us the most have no idea how to engage us. Thus, we are unicorns. We have the power to heal these companies “sickness”, to make their products better… but they don’t know how we do it (must be magic!). Further, we can only be captured by a virgin… ok that’s a long shot but the idea is that we are really hard to find. This is something we need to change.

So, what is our solution, how do we stop being unicorns? First thing is first, we need to be in the room. We need to be around the people whom we want to help (see UX… so you wanna work with startups for more thoughts on this). Whether startups or larger corporations, we have to get out of our shell and make our presence known. We can do this by attending events local to us, participating online in conversations that are related to the work we want to do, and ensuring we are branching out, beyond UX, in our search of knowledge.

Second, when we are in the room (or online), we need to be vocal. We can’t be flies on the wall. Instead, we need to speak up and make sure we are adding the UX perspective and educating others about the value that we bring. This, of course, should not be in a condescending way (don’t say “you idiot, you aren’t even thinking about the user.” but instead “how have you integrated the user perspective into your product roadmap?”).

Third, we need to have empathy for the business and technology folks that we want to work with. We need to understand why they aren’t looking towards UX, or if they are what are they hoping to find. A lot of companies, especially startups, don’t realize that we can help them with their product definition and roadmapping. They just think we are UI! We need to gain understanding of their point of view of what UX is so that we can solve the problem of them not thinking of UX in the early stages.

By taking these steps, we stop being that unicorn. We make our presence in the technology and corporate community known, and we make sure that those involved realize all the value that we bring. We become tangible, real, but no less valuable. Once companies are better able to find us and understand us, then it becomes easier for UX to work with the businesses that we want to. This, of course, allows us to do what we do best; help define and solve problems for the betterment of our user base. No unicorn can do that.