When Business Objectives Collide with User Experience (and Client Timelines) (inspired by Smashing Magazine)

Yesterday, I had a sort of heated email thread with a client and an accounts person about a campaign that was being rushed but needed a registration page and a database to be built. The database structure had not yet been defined well, and one was arguing for user experience, the other was arguing for more profiling data, and I was arguing for the segmentation strategy.


In eCRM, especially during data gathering, you'd want to strike a good balance between ease of the user and the quality of data you're gathering. And an initial registration page is not the best place to start gathering research data. For me, the main goal is to get just enough information as possible to (1) re-contact the prospect, and (2)be able to segment your database. Profiling questions need to be actionable. If there's no contact strategy behind asking a question, then it's secondary to the user experience.
Add to that the considerations of development time needed vs. the desired user experience, and you know what mess you could be in.


Thanks, G.A. for sharing this article from Smashing Magazine, which talks to web designers about the balance between user experience and business objectives. Realistically, I think there's still a lot of discussion needed between design aesthetic vs. user experience in this part of the world, but this article grounds the discussion from the other extreme -- when user experience is all that seems to matter. Read on.
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Smashing Magazine

Business Objectives vs. User Experience

• By Paul Boag
• February 4th, 2011
• Opinion column
• 81 Comments
• Publishing Policy

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Here’s a question for you: would you agree that creating a great user experience should be the primary aim of any Web designer? I know what your answer is… and youʼre wrong!

Okay, I admit that not all of you would have answered yes, but most probably did. Somehow, the majority of Web designers have come to believe that creating a great user experience is an end in itself. I think we are deceiving ourselves and doing a disservice to our clients at the same time.

The truth is that business objectives should trump users’ needs every time. Generating a return on investment is more important for a website than keeping users happy. Sounds horrendous, doesn’t it? Before you flame me in the comments, hear me out.

The Harsh Reality

Letʼs begin with the harsh truth. If an organization does not believe that it will generate some form of a return on an investment (financial or otherwise), then it should not have a website. In other words, if the website doesn’t pay its way, then we have not done our jobs properly.

Despite what we might think, our primary aim is to fulfill the business objectives set out by our clients. Remember that creating a great user experience is a means to this end. We do not create great user experiences just to make users happy. We do so because we want them to look favorably on the website and take certain actions that will generate the returns that our clients want.

Is the business world at odds with creativity? Image by opensourceway

User Experience Is Important

Let me be clear. Iʼm not suggesting that user experience is unimportant. In fact, I believe that creating an amazing experience is the primary means of helping a website fulfill its business objectives. A well-designed website makes it easy for users to complete the calls to action we have created.

Happy users also provide many other benefits. They can become advocates for your website. A happy user is considerably more likely to recommend your services and is more patient when things occasionally go wrong. Enthusiastic users can also become valuable volunteers; they have innumerable ideas about how your website and products can be improved. They are far more valuable than any focus group!

The point, though, is that happy users generate a return on investment, so spending the time and effort to give them a great experience is worth it.

When Business Objectives and User Experience Clash

You may argue that this is all semantics and that business objectives and user experience actually go hand in hand. Generally, I agree, but there are occasions when the two clash, and at these times we need to be clear that generating a return on investment should trump user experience.

Let me give you an example. We Web designers often complain when clients ask us to add fields to their online forms because they want to collect certain demographic information about their users. We argue, rightly, that this annoys users and damages the user experience. But we need to ask ourselves whether those additional fields would make users not complete the forms at all—as we fear—or would just slightly irritate them. If users ultimately complete the form and the company is able to gather valuable demographic information, then the slight irritation may be worthwhile.

Do You Have The Right Balance?

Iʼm a little nervous about this post because I realize that many people could misinterpret what Iʼm saying. But I passionately believe that the Web design community is in danger of becoming blind to all else but user experience. Iʼm convinced we need to spend as much time and effort on understanding and achieving business objectives as we do on creating a great experience.

I’ll end with this: during your last project, how much time did you spend creating personas, testing usability and generally improving the user experience? How does that compare with the amount of time you spent learning about the client’s business objectives and creating great calls to action?

Ask yourself whether you got the balance right.

Attention Web designers: Design experiences, not webpages

One of my biggest challenges right now is working with the concept teams in the agency. Designing for online is a very different discipline from designing for print. Even designing for TV is different because TV or video is still linear, whereas online design isn't. When I try to describe the process, I liken it to designing a choose-your-own-adventure book -- experiences branch out and interconnect in different ways; and you cater to different audiences and personas and try to give a relevant, personalized experience for each.

We have lots of good technical designers here in the country, and a lot with good aesthetic sense. But I still have to meet a web designer who I can say I'm impressed with. Maybe I haven't been around enough. Maybe designing a website takes more than one head. I believe a good web design comes from good collaboration among a collection of aesthetic, technical and stragetic heads.

Nico, our digital producer, has an interesting observation: usual advertising art directors find it easier to work with Flash since it offers a more flexible medium. Once you get into HTML web design, it gets more complicated because of all the limitations it puts on design. That's when good web designers really shine -- when an HTML-based design looks great yet works well and easy to use for visitors.

I found this material from an article by Alexander Wipf in Cultural Fuel.

He shares tips from Tim Richards of Razorfish on web design. Enjoy!

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Experience Design: Why Pages Are The Last Thing You Need To Worry About

View more presentations from Tim Richards.

Here’s a little talk I put together for a UX Meetup here in LA. It’s a bit of an amalgamation of emerging experience design tenets focusing on differences between page design and experience design. Probably not a giant eye-opener for folks that are currently engaged in Experience Design. I’ll offer up what I believe to be the missing subtext for the talk below - not a script; just some stuff that isn’t on the slides, to make it easier to understand.

Background
Originally, the context for this talk was an article I wrote for theFEED report, Razorfish’s Digital Design Outlook. The original title was “Putting Jakob on the Shelf.” Again, for experience designers, it seems like a pot-shot; most of us know Jakob Nielsen’s place in our pantheon of nerd-heroes. I guess the impetus came from quite a few client conversations that seemed to rush into page design as a primary vehicle for redesigning a web experience, to be specific.

Experiences, Not Pages
Pages are the old building blocks. We have square monitors, the Web was borne of hypertext documents, which are “shaped” like pages, pages date back to Egyptian papyrus, I suppose. Pages will probably be around for a while. With that in mind, when we design an experience, we design around the fulfillment of some human need. The truth of the matter is that these needs are very seldom solved via a “page”; folks are looking for fulfillment, conversation, connections, prices, comparisons, knowledge…that sort of thing. What I quickly narrow down to Answers and Entertainment is very seldom page-shaped - it’s smaller, and more fluid.

I think that search has contributed to our page focus - as last-click attribution has placed the almighty index on a pedestal. Image and video search are a step in the right direction, I guess…but, as we map real engagements, we know that actual behavior is quite messy. Impressions across channels build up to actions, interactions, engagement, purchase, loyalty, etc.

The last bit here, starting at Slide 16 and running through Slide 21, I guess, is a plea to all Product Managers, Marketing Folks, and other business stakeholders to start thinking about their products and projects in terms of experience and flow; narrative and interaction. As much as everyone seems to love to agree with me on this point of “Don’t Start Design with a Site Map” - I still see an awful lot of it out in the space. My only point here is that we should use scenarios, narrative, lo-fidelity UI, and map those to a system - and let an aggregation of narratives define the solution. A site map is representative of a design solution. It’s a handy design inventory. It’s not a starting point. In my mind, a lot of  the “good stuff” happens before we have a site map. Sure, designing the individual interfaces is fun, as well…but, the journeys and over-arching narratives are key to nail down before we do those interfaces. I think this goes for representative “comps” and “design directions” as a representative slice of the solution - let’s get better at designing experience concepts, as an industry; we don’t spend enough time there, I fear.

The backgrounds for these last slides of the section are scenarios and scenario maps - early site maps that evolve when we overlay several scenarios (scenarios are user segment + user need + narrative user story (of fulfillment/experience) + lo-fi UI’s.

Die, Enterprise, Die
I’ll come right out and let you know ahead of time that I think this next section is the least-baked. Sorry. It started out as an approach to Experience Design when there are already significant brand touchpoints out there - that by “Growing Organically,” we could meet emerging brand and user needs more quickly by bypassing the tendency to build every new experience in the context of the previous. That’s where that title on Slide 23 comes from, I guess. The cartoon map backgrounds were a deliverable for a big company who had hidden the most important content (according to their some-odd 16MM users) behind some impersonal promotions for prospective customers. These concept maps showed how hard it was to find the good stuff - and I even designed a peaceful town plaza/square to represent the suggested new design.

The next bit on Slide 24-25 are remnants of the first section, I guess - maybe it’s a recurring theme. The idea comes from  experiencing so many project kickoffs and requirements-gathering sessions where we were collecting “feature ideas” instead of user requirements. It’s not easy, managing the line between requirement and feature - but, I tell you, that line is representative of what I call “Design.” Slide 26 is a shout out to my man Saul Bass. I find it helpful to drop this quote from time to time to define and redefine our activities as Design, even if we’re working at a whiteboard, and not Photoshop.

The next little area may be a bit outdated - as I’ve seen so many integrated Creative/User Experience teams as of late. However, in shops where UX is highly-evolved (or devolved?) a divide sometimes grew between Creative and User Experience. My view on the division is best expressed in “Making is Thinking” recent post, “Logic Occludes Intuition.” Basically, it’s easy to slip into a solely performance-based innovation model as a User Experience Designer - trying to “prove” our way to an innovative solution.

Slides 27-34 explore some of the differences between the UX and Creative roles (even if they’re occurring in the same person) - and tries to make it OK for UX and Creative to be out of sync for periods of time, while concept catches up with insight, and such. Also, there’s a slide of a blue frisbee where I make a joke about Tron. Hopefully, you’ll get that joke.

Design Inside Out + Outside In
OK. Yes. I talk about Semantic here. Jumping the shark? Maybe. But, as the Experience Design field advances, and we learn how to measure and discuss the differences between bad experience and good experience across channels, we’re going to need to understand how Ontology Design should affect the design process. With so many experiences leaning so heavily upon good aggregation techniques, landing pages, and contextual navigation, we’ll do well as designers to know that we’ve got to be able to design very fluid experiences that allow people to move laterally (with context, as opposed to vertically “down” in an information experience) in an experience, in units that are smaller than “pages.” Slide 41 is usually when I like to drop a trip through Spock, looking for my favorite Daler Mehndi video, “Tunak” to show how Semantic Tech will change the world - and to show how rad the Tunak video is.

Slide 45 basically disallows Experience Designers from straying too far away from practical design, diving so deeply into ontology structures that they forget the “containers” for the experience; pages, modules, templates, screens, messages, videos, etc. The background for this slide and the previous were sketched by Darren Wong, a very talented experience designer in LA. I like the “Context and Container” thing quite a bit - I’ll dive more deeply into that in a subsequent installment, I am sure.

So, as I just returned from Memphis and the IA Summit 09, I reflected on this talk that I had put together - and I feel a kinship with Jesse James Garrett, who delivered the final plenary talk on Sunday, when he shouted us out - to rise, and be Information Architects no more - but, to be User Experience Designers (among other great things he said.) Yes, we perform information architecture. No, it’s not all we do. Should it be our job title? Nope. But, that’s just me.

Now that you’ve received the fullness of my approach to handling emerging challenges in User Experience Design, you are also relegated to go forth, and do good; design great experiences via storytelling, and not just information science. How’s that feel?