“I don’t want realism. I want magic!“
- Tennessee Williams, A Streetcar Named Desire
“One man’s “magic” is another man’s engineering.”
- Robert Heinlein, Time Enough for Love
Our clients at EffectiveUI come to us because they want to create game-changing customer experiences that blow their competition out of the water. Often, they have some idea of what this might be, and they are looking for us to apply our design expertise, experience and creativity to manifest it for them.
Exactly how we do this can often seem like magic. Many of our project stakeholders have great ideas that are captured in lists of features, functions, and requirements. How we coalesce and design those features into a cohesive product experience is often rather mysterious. But what appears to some to be magic is actually a very methodical and informed process. This post aims to pull back the curtain and let you see how the wizard works.
Three Pillars of Product Innovation
The three pillars of product innovation are well known throughout product development industry. How they are communicated often varies slightly based upon from which pillar you are speaking.
The gist of this graphic is that the apparent magic of product innovation lies in the synthesis of all three pillars. It is impossible to get to innovation without all three. And there are known methods and processes that allow us to do so.
Unpacking Desirability & Usability
User experience designers are customer advocates throughout the product design and development process. We are primarily focused on the desirability and usability pillar, but work very collaboratively with business and development to reach product innovation.
Desirability is not nearly as evasive as it sounds. It is derived from the synthesis of three broad categories, none of which on it’s own would lead to desirability:
- Customer Preferences: What customers, market analysis, and statistics say customers need and want.
- Customer Behaviors: What careful customer observation and analysis discovers that customers need and want (sometimes despite what customers say).
- Design Expertise and Best Practices: What trained and experienced designers use to satisfy customer needs and desires and make systems usable and delightful.
Customer preferences are discovered and validated through market research methods. Customer behaviors are discovered and validated through ethnographic research methods. Both are important for helping designers understand the user’s needs and desires, so that the experience is tailored to fit the target customer.
The Magic is in the Synthesis
These elements of desirability and usability must be as integrated as the product innovation pillars. Customer preferences are a very good start toward designing superior experiences, but they must be understood in the context of customer behaviors. Ethnographic research provides answers to the critical “Why” questions behind the customer preferences.
Ethnographic research helps us identify answers to these types of questions:
- How do users think about the process and how can we translate that digitally?
- Are their areas for increased efficiency or improved experiences in the process, for example, what are users doing manually that we can provide online?
- Why do users think they want a specific feature, and what does that mean to them? Can we, as experts, give them something even better?
With this deep understanding of customers, designer can apply their expertise and experience to create customer-focused solutions that satisfy the following types of questions:
- How should we translate manual processes online?
- What order and hierarchy should we employ in the navigation and information display?
- What content and functionality is appropriate on a mobile device versus a tablet device or a personal computer?
- What personality do users expect the product to have?
- What colors, type, and visual elements make that personality?
- What is the appropriate voice for copy? What words and terms are users comfortable or uncomfortable with?
Getting to Innovation
You might have noticed I pulled a slight trick of the hand, and while you were looking in one place, I did something unexpected. I had an ulterior motive. The truth is that I want to clearly explain why user experience designers insist that ethnographic research is necessary to achieve innovative and delightful experiences. In order to create desirable experiences, we must have a good understanding of customer preferences and behaviors on which to base our expert design decisions.
Design innovation that can lead to product innovation is not achieved by magic. Nor is it achieved by design expertise and experience alone. It is achieved through understanding all of the factors involved in the design, and grounded within customer behaviors.
I worked with an awesome team of designers and developers to put this unique site together. The site launched the day before I went into labor.
