Simon van Wyk discusses how user experience is so much more than usability.
As global brands try to work out how to make their brands relevant in the social media age, user experience begins to take on a far more strategic bearing.
Indeed, according to the second Annual Online Customer Engagement Report by E-consultancy and cScape, ninety percent of companies are paying more attention to online customer engagement than ever before, with three-quarters of organisations (77%) saying that its importance has increased in the last 12 months.
So with customer engagement key, marketers are learning fast that good user experience is the backbone to online customer engagement. And that user experience is far broader than just usability.
Hygiene factor
Certainly usability is important, and websites do need to be easy to use. Clearly you can’t have a good user experience without good usability. But it’s just a small part of the whole user experience. HotHouse’s User Experience Manager, Piero Colli, likes to describe usability as the site’s hygiene factor - something that’s important, but simply the minimum standard required.
When you focus on usability, you’re simply ensuring that the user can accomplish their goal - finding out information, subscribing to a newsletter, purchasing products from the site. However, when you focus on the user experience you are ensuring that you’re meeting users’ expectations and providing a fulfilling and valuable experience at the same time.
User experience experts like to use the road analogy to describe the difference. “Freeways are usable, since they take you from A to B in the most effortless way. But they are also utterly boring. A twisting mountain road on the other hand is exiting. But far from usable.”
The trick isn’t simply combining the two (who wants a freeway over the mountain?), but helping make the exciting mountain road, easier to use.
With the shift to engagement strategies, marketers need to offer the best possible user experience as consumers are now unlikely to tolerate anything less.
Indeed the customer experience is something about which Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos is deeply passionate. His business philosophy is simple. It starts with the customers and he works out what they want and how to give it to them. His customers care about having the lowest prices, vast selection, and getting the products fast. As he says: “the reason I’m so obsessed with these drivers of the customer experience is that I believe that the success we have had over the past 12 years has been driven exclusively by that customer experience. We are not great advertisers. So we start with customers, figure out what they want, and figure out how to get it to them.”
Success for Amazon of course has been huge. As Joe Nocera recently wrote in the New York Times, Amazon’s belief in and delivery of the customer experience has produced something like 72 million active customers, who, in the last quarter, were spending an average of $184 a year on the site. That’s up from $150 or so the year before. Amazon’s return customer business is off the charts.” In the same article Nocera points out that according to Forrester Research, 52 per cent of people who shop online say they do their product research on Amazon.
User experience honeycomb
Steering the conversation beyond usability, Peter Morville, president and founder of Semantic Studios, evolved his thinking on the user experience and with the help of his peers developed a user experience honeycomb which features seven segments or facets, each of which are unique attributes of the user experience.
These facets are:
Useful - does it help users achieve their goals?;
Usable - is it easy to use?;
Accessible - can all users access the content without problems?;
Desirable - do users want to engage with it?;
Findable - is the navigation, and content intuitive, is it optimised for search engines?;
Credible - does it engender trust?; and
Valuable - do users perceive value in the interaction?
These facets of the user experience clearly show that it’s not just about slick design, nor is it just about usability. It’s about the value and usefulness of the experience, how desirable and credible it is, whether it is accessible and easy to find.
Naturally it’s critical to know who you’re designing for and working out what they want. Understanding the psychology behind how users relate to a website is the key to its lasting success. So, if the purpose of a web site is to support the goals of the user, it’s necessary to understand what those goals might be.
Understanding customer motivations at the point of the interaction is fundamental to designing the detail of the online user experience. Clearly for every website task, there may be many motivational factors that need to be identified.
Personas and user representatives
Applying a persona or user representative methodology in order to identify every interaction - what customers find valuable, what engages them and what they push back against - streamlines this process.
So rather than designing for all people or for averages, user experience designers focus on the unique goals of a specific person to develop a website that satisfies the needs of many users. Although designing for one to satisfy many may initially seem counter-intuitive, it’s a very effective technique.
