Contents
Defining UX
There are many similar definitions for user experience (UX) as a concept that you can find all over the web (such as this or this) but we would like to define UX simply as the discipline that makes products a delight to use. This simple definition hides a lot more complexity than is evident.
The reason for the complexity is because making products (or services) a delight to use is hard. There are many moving parts to the UX engine that are intricately connected to one another that making all of them work in tandem involves many teams and a well-functioning project management system.
Complexity also comes into picture because of the multiple touch points that end users have when using a product. For example consider a user trying to book a hotel for an upcoming vacation using a travel website such as trivago.com. The following could be the key steps or tasks that a user may perform.
- Search for hotels at the destination city for specific dates.
- View information (price, rooms, etc,.) and facilities (parking, WiFi, etc,.) about different hotels.
- Compare the information different hotels.
- Check for any available deals or promo codes.
- Select the most promising hotel and
- Complete the booking after entering relevant information and payment details.
The experience of booking the hotel room starts right from Step 1. Ease of searching, relevance of search results, presentation of hotel information, ease of comparing different hotels with this information, ease of entering personal and payment information are all become part of the user’s experience with trivago.
Cross-channel experience
It could also happen that the user may stop during any of the steps and decide to perform rest of the tasks at a later point in time. The user could then return to the booking site from a laptop, a mobile device or even through trivago’s native app.
For the user to be able to complete the tasks now, the booking experience across the channels should be consistent with the expectations of the user. In other words, channels (e.g., the website and the native app) should not feel like separate entities delivering different results about hotels or having separate booking process.
It could also happen that to complete the booking process, trivago could redirect the user to the hotel’s website. This transition to other websites has to be seamless while using any of the channels to maintain a consistent user experience. In addition, the user could have changing goals such as the vacation needs to be rescheduled, canceled or put on hold. It is important that the booking website is flexible enough to handle these scenarios.
In the end if the user completes all intended transactions with little or no effort in an engaging way and if the same user would be happy to return to trivago for future bookings, we could say that trivago offered a delightful UX.
What’s more?
So is this all there is to the user experience? Actually, if we think about it more, the answer is no. Remember, the actual goal of the user is to go on a great vacation. With this goal in mind, we can think of adding more value with the booking website. Well, one of the ways will be to include options to arrange for travel.
Booking flights to and from the destination, booking taxi for first and last days of the vacation are also part of overall goals of the user. Including such value added functionalities within the website can help the user avoid multiple websites to achieve these distinct but related goals.
So the more we think about the overall goal and different touch points of the user, we can uncover more areas where we could add value. Now, as you can see, though we started off with six simple steps to book a hotel, the complexity gradually starts building up.
Bring users into focus
No matter how much underlying complexity goes into the making of delightful products, the core idea of UX is to involve the end users of the product in all stages of design and development. If you are designing a hotel booking website for example, it is important to test the initial designs and concepts with the end users before developing such a complex website.
This can make your website easy to use and intuitive for the users to perform the 6 tasks. Also, how do we make sure the value-add features that we thought about really do add value? By involving users in every stage of the design process, it is possible to validate our designs and concepts and nail out any issues. This brings us to the lifecycle of the UX process.
UX – Process and Lifecycle
A typical UX process goes through 4 key stages as depicted below in Figure.1.
Figure.1. A typical UX process
Research
It starts off with the research phase where the primary objective is to gather user needs and requirements. The most common ways of doing this is through interviewing users, and by observing them perform tasks. There are other ways too such as conducting focus groups, running diary studies which we will not cover now.
If you are designing a travel and hotel booking website, the first thing you should do is to interview potential users and document their needs, how and what they currently use for travel booking, and what their expectations are from such a website. The more users you interview, the better but we recommend you interview at least 10.
Once this is documented, the next step is to see how they use other travel booking websites. You can select websites such as trivago.com, hotels.com or any other similar website. By observing them use such websites, you can uncover their pain-points, identify opportunities where you can add value with your own website and validate what you documented during the interviews.
Note: Keep in mind that even after you are done with the interviews and observations, you will have gaps in understanding all the exact needs of the users. You can fill these gaps only after the test phases (which we will cover shortly).
Ideate
After identifying the needs, pain-points and opportunities, it is time to come up with rough design ideas for your website. Start drafting different ideas on how you might want to satisfy users’ basic needs or expectations and at the same time reduce their pain-points.
It is okay to come up with any number of ideas and even ideas that may be advanced, for example, you could think of adding artificial intelligence to your website to make travel bookings faster and easier.
Next step to filter those ideas based on which ones are the most promising in terms of satisfying the needs and reducing the pain-points. Also include technical feasibility, time constraints and budget available for the projects as filtering criteria. This is where you may want to reconsider the AI option to see if it really fits into these constraints or not. We recommend that you narrow down your ideas to about 3 or 4 (minimum of 2).
Design
When you have a few ideas, its time to sketch them as designs. You can do this on paper or software tools and brainstorm with your team on how to refine them further. Once the team agrees on a few promising sketches, you can directly test (the next step) these with the user.
It is also a common practice to bypass the sketching step and move directly into prototyping with tools such as Axure. These prototypes will then be evaluated with the users.
Our recommendation is to sketch first and then prototype since prototyping is more time consuming and expensive than simple sketching. Sketching can identify potential flaws in your ideas quickly with minimal time and cost. Once you have rough sketches, you can proceed to prototyping and then to the testing phase.
Test
To make sure your ideas which are now in sketches or as prototypes meet the needs of users, you need to test them with a few potential end users. We recommend 3-5 users for this first round of testing. In this round, you can conduct a quick hallway testing or proceed with more formal usability testing.
It is very likely that in the first round you will uncover many flaws in the design including usability issues. You will also being to understand if there are more user requirements than the ones that you documented in the research phase.
It is at this point where you go back to research phase (effectively starting round 2 of the process) and start filling the gaps you may have had with the requirements. So testing corrects not just the design but user needs as well. You will then come up with newer ideas, modify your sketches (or prototypes) and test again.
This cycle should continue until you feel that there is nothing new being learnt after a testing session. This would mean that the prototypes have matured to a point where they can be handed over to the development team. But before you hand it over, there is another important step (not depicted in Figure.1.) that you will need to perform – the debrief.
Debrief
As a UXer, the debrief is probably the one step that’s going to test not just your usability skills but also your communication, negotiation and influencing skills. This could also be the step that you will find the hardest to master. But, worry not, as you gain more experience in your profession, driving a debrief session will become second nature to you.
Having said that, we did not put this step Figure.1. because the debrief session does not need to fit exactly into the process lifecycle. Usually, it is conducted after each testing session or at the end of all the rounds of testing but it can also be done after research or design phases as well.
The idea behind having debrief sessions is to share what you have learnt with the stakeholders, including development team, project management team, project sponsors and so on, and discuss on the next viable steps. So depending on what you want to share and on what you want the stakeholder feedback, the debrief session can be fit anywhere in the cycle.
For now, let’s consider that debrief sessions are held at the end of each testing sessions. During this session that you will be driving, you will share and discuss what you have learnt so far from the testing sessions. In particular, you will go over user feedback, the pain points they had while using the prototypes, opportunities for improvement and next steps.
This is also where you will try to sell your design ideas to the team by highlighting how it can meet the user needs and solve their pain points. You will receive big pluses if you can also highlight how your design ideas can help the overall business in terms of delivering increased customer joy and loyalty.
So, we have covered quite a bit of ground in this quick UX overview but to understand UX better, we need to dig a bit into the concept of usability, the predecessor of UX. Although closely related and almost synonymous, UX has come to be the broader concept that brings together inter-disciplinary fields such as human-computer interaction, ergonomics (or human factors), visual design, psychology, industrial design, analytics, data visualization and more.
Usability to UX – The Evolution
Usability, in the traditional sense focused mostly on the ease of use of a product and uncovering usability issues. However, since the year 2000, massive changes in consumer technologies led to broadening of the scope of usability. It was not just enough to answer if the product is usable but also to evaluate if the product is pleasant, motivating, engaging, fun and delightful to use. Some key dimensions of usability and UX are illustrated below.
Fig.2. A few key dimensions of usability and UX
Usability specialists saw that answers to such questions provided more insights on how to make a product more successful and retain customer loyalty. So to incorporate the broader experience of the product’s users, many companies changed their approach from ‘usability’ to ‘user experience (UX).’
This led to the addition of more dimensions to product development such as aesthetics, user behavior, user emotions, social and business requirements. Because of this, usability specialists now rely on knowledge from different disciplines such as marketing, visual design, psychology, industrial design and literature.
To know about more about UX and it’s different facets, explore the topics on left navigation.
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