Life as a user experience designer

I've been told on more than one occasion that I point out a lot of things to my friends and family that they don't even think twice about. Here are some recent examples...

Example 1: Misleading affordances

Every time I go to a meeting on another floor at work (which is a lot) I need to open a door that leads to the staircase. The door has a handle on it so I pull the door towards me as indicated by the design but this is in fact a trick as you actually have to push it. The other side of the door has the same handle so when I need to come back in I push it because my mind remembers that the handle affordance is wrong but in this instance you do need to pull it. It gets me every time and I see other people do it too.

Example 2: The unattainable plug socket

There was a plug socket in my hostel room in Chiang Mai last year that was approximately half way up the wall. It was the only socket in the room that I could reach (the other one was about a foot down from the ceiling and used to power the fan) and it was just ridiculous. The length of my charging cable was shorter than the distance from the floor to the socket so every time I wanted to charge something I would have to make a little tower out of my luggage to balance it on. I was travelling light with only a small backpack so this task involved a careful stacking of objects on top of my bag only to realise afterwards that I needed something from my bag so I would have to disassemble it and start over again.

Example 3: Chaos in the deli

There's a deli near to where I used to work that had no obvious system that agitated me so much that I stopped going there as I couldn't enjoy my lunch. There were two counters that each took different types of orders (wraps from one, hot food from another), however you could only pay at one which meant that if you wanted a wrap you first had to queue and order from the wrap counter and then you had to queue up again at the other counter to pay but this wasn't obvious and you only discovered this when you got to the front of the wrap queue. After ordering your wrap you were given a piece of paper with a number on it but nobody seemed to know what to do next or where to wait. Everyone would just look at each other and shrug their shoulders. Eventually somebody would shout your number from across the room and you had to make your way through the crowd to collect your lunch.

So there you go.

I hope this post doesn't give the impression that I'm a negative person because quite the opposite is true. Every time I encounter things like this I think about what could be done to change the situation and improve usability. Replacing the door handle with a plate to indicate that you need to push it rather than pull, a small table or shelf placed underneath the socket, and a process that streamlines sandwich ordering, payment and collection – order here, collect there, lunch ready, happy customers. These things are all easy to resolve and I think that's what makes me notice them the most.

Small changes, big improvements.

UXPA UK February Event – Brand and Experience

The February 2013 UXPA UK event was about the intersection of brand and experience design. Here is a short overview of the talks and a few thoughts on the subject.

User experience is at the heart of your brand Kevin Keohane (@brandviolet) and Don Fogarty (@DonFog) from Brand Pie gave a talk titled 'User experience is at the heart of your brand'. They began with some brand basics: be relevant (to the audience you want to engage with), be authentic (don't say one thing and do another) and be differentiated (why should people chose your product over a competitor's?). When working with clients they ask what's your purpose, ambition, strategy and positioning? These questions apply to both internal and external facets of the company and they believe that strong, enduring brands align what they do with what they say and position themselves based on what they're great at and not just on what's happening in the market.

They then explained why they think that brand experience and user experience need to be one and the same thing and referenced a study published in the Journal od Applied Psychology that gave poor treatment as the number one reason why people leave brands (a whopping 73%). Customers who have memorable experiences with your brand are more likely to remain loyal, spend more money with you and recommend your brand to their friends. Conversely customers who have bad experiences will also share these with people in their network on a variety of channels.

"Create an experience that provides a memory that relates directly to your brands purpose, ambition, strategy and positioning" – Kevin Keohane and Don Fogarty

As Kevin and Don explained the prize is to become market leader but even leader brands can be knocked off the top if a nimble challenger brand comes along with a simple, usable, focused product that is backed up with a superior end-to-end customer experience connected across all touch points.

Brand is Interface David Eveleigh-Evans (@eveleighevans) from Method spoke about the ways in which the nature of brand definition is evolving and adapting and how interaction design is shaping the experiences between people, technology and brands. He explained that interaction design is becoming ever more important in differentiating a brand and maintaining customer loyalty as product experience surpasses traditional marketing communications and advertising.

David explained that your brand is more than a logo, a typeface and a series of colours, your brand is your interface and the gap between brand promise and brand reality is determined by the truth of use. Being consistent and transparent creates trust and brand loyalty.

"A brand is not a product or a promise or a feeling. It's the sum of all the experiences you have with a company" – David Eveleigh-Evans

Social networks provide brands with opportunities to join in the discussion on a much more personal level and they are also opening up new touch points for customer engagement and support (conversely they are also creating new outlets for your customers to talk about you). David explained that the challenge now for brands is to bridge the gap across all of these online and offline touch points.

Summary Digital technology is bringing us closer to brands than ever before via mobile, desktop and offline channels. How can brands differentiate themselves in this ever-changing world?

Customer experience should be at the heart of everything you do. A user-centred design approach aligns business goals with the needs of customers across channels, devices and touch points. After all, customers who have a positive memorable experience are more likely to return. However, if you have a fantastic product but your online presence leaves your customers frustrated and unsatisfied then they may well start looking for alternatives.