In this blog post, I am going to share some of our experiences in one of my current projects where we had to develop a product from scratch. We had to work from conception to launch and this included defining the user experience. Due to confidentiality clauses, I cannot reveal the client or project details so I apologize for the element of secrecy. I would like to give out a disclaimer at the very beginning, we had no UX experts in the team. The User Experience design in the project was done by an HTML Developer, a Project Manager and a .Net Technical Architect. This post is our learning from this project and should not be treated as an UX Bible.
At the start of the project, the customer had a two sentence requirement about what they expected from this product (A Digital Marketing Platform) – users of this platform are not tech savvy people, the platform should be user friendly and responsive, the most important feature should be achieved in three clicks and our brand is known for its flamboyance and it should show on the product so nothing less than a world class user experience would be acceptable !!!
There are a few common myths about UX – Good UX means visually sexy, UX is something you just make up – it is an art, UX is too expensive and finally anyone can do UX. Our tryst with UX in the past four months taught us some very valuable lessons – UX is not only about being visually sexy but blending the sexiness with the interaction design. You can have an extremely pleasant looking website/web application but if it really sucks when it comes to usability then it is no good. Most of us know this but somehow usability almost always is an after thought while we think of User Experience. Thinking like the end customer who will use the application is the key to good user experience. Putting yourselves in the shoes of the end users is half the battle won. Getting the usability right is far more complex than getting the visual appeal right – if you don’t get the visual appeal right in 2 iterations you will get it right in 20 iterations but if you don’t build a very user friendly product, well, then you are not going to find any takers for your product. Since of one of our key business requirements was around usability, a lot of emphasis was laid on it during the design stages. We sought constant feedback from the customer – we had very little or no UX experience and had no ego about our designs and were always looking for feedback to improve the designs. We had a very active customer who was more than willing to give feedback. The end product has come out really well and we topped the customer’s expectations a little bit. They wanted the most important feature of the application to be achieved in 3 clicks, we have come up with a solution (a fairly sizeable product in terms of number of pages) where any functionality in the platform can be completed in 3 Clicks irrespective of where you are on the application.
Something which we hear very often is UX is common-sense, it is something you just made up or oh it is an art and you need a really good artist to come up with good UX. To me, UX is more of science than art, it is how people interact with artifacts and carry out tasks. UX is based on 200 years of scientific knowledge, 30 years of industry best practices and specifically applied research.
UX is too expensive. It surely is if you hire a top notch creative agency. I have worked on projects in the past where millions of dollars were spent on the creative designs and the end product was so bad that the customer had to go in for a re-design in less than an year’s time. In our current project, we were on a shoe string budget and there was very little leeway in terms of spending. We thought of hiring a creative agency to do the UX work but they were way too expensive for our liking. Our customer kept emphasizing on world class user experience and set expectations very clearly during the project kick-off – “We will not compromise on UX. The last time a creative agency did UX for us they took about 20 iterations to get the designs right. We know you are a technology company and not a digital agency but we want to challenge you”. We did not have the kind of budget to support 20 iterations. For the kind of budget we had, the agencies told us they would support 2 at best 3 iterations. We decided to take a huge gamble. We told ourselves – “Let’s do the designs ourselves”. Our 4th design variation was approved and we took a couple of more iterations to get a formal sign-off on the designs. How did we do it? Research. We researched a lot about the customer’s existing digital properties (for Visual elements) to understand what their earlier choices were, we asked them a lot of questions, we kept asking them for feedback constantly and a couple of rockstar HTML developers.
A few more things that we learnt – People’s taste varies. What you like might not be liked by your customer, what you don’t like might get approved. So, put everything that you have got infront your customer; finalizing the experience is an iterative and long process so don’t panic – you just need to make sure that you are going down the right path once you have established that its just a matter of time; think like a designer but don’t think only like a designer, you should think like your customer whats better is if you can think ahead of your customer (all the best with that), go the Bootstrap way if you want to build responsive stuff and finally a cheap trick – always set low expectations at the start and work towards exceeding those expectations.
We are just a few days away from launching the platform and I am hoping that we will have a smooth and successful launch. I will share the details once the platform has been launched.
digitalade 