Achieving a Great User Experience Starts with An Organization’s Goals

Why Is Team Integration Relevant to User Experience?

We must eliminate the barriers that lie between people in different roles, as well as those between users and their goals. When team members work in silos, everyone may claim that they know what users want and are working for users’ benefit. However, instead of team members’ sharing the same understanding of what users want, everyone sees things from a different perspective. Some might say that users want a lower price, while others might argue that it’s the number of features that matters—the value for the money—or a product’s color and finishing materials, shape and feel, size, or simplicity. While all of these viewpoints may be right in their own way, they don’t tell a coherent story about the product the team needs to develop.

Conversely, when a team is truly working together as a team, they’ll develop a shared vision for a product that addresses users’ goals and needs. When a team has a shared mindset, it’s possible to successfully accomplish work either as a team or individually, because everyone is striving toward one vision. This is very different from typical discussions in which we hear us and them viewpoints. When we hear “We do this…” and “They do that…,” we’ll know that people are not working together as an integrated team.

When a team is focused on what users want to achieve, doing a task analysis can enable them to identify the steps users would need to take to achieve their goals. This is what every product team should be doing. The more diverse a team, the better they’re able to identify users’ tasks. This is the responsibility of every team member, from the business person to the UX designer; from the engineer to the marketer and salesman. Identify all of the actions users need to take to achieve their goals, think in depth about what steps are truly essential, and devise a solution that minimizes the number of steps users must take. Taking this approach increases the likelihood that users will remember an experience and, thus, talk about it with others. To achieve the design and development of a great user experience, a team must remove the barriers that lie between users and their desired results. Let me give you two examples.

All portable music players can play music, but often, their developers don’t pay enough attention to how users get to their goals. They don’t help users to eliminate music management, which is an unnecessary hurdle that users need to overcome before they can listen to music. Many companies even ignore users’ ultimate goals altogether and allocate UX design resources to designing what’s in between—the stuff that users don’t want. Many companies focus on creating fancy-looking players, with flashy user interfaces and loads of functionality instead of providing a great user experience.

Only one enterprise has successfully minimized the barriers that previously existed between users and their goals, providing solutions that enable users to listen to music without worrying about buying songs, organizing them, or copying them onto their devices. This company is Apple. iTunes manages everything for users, letting them focus on enjoying their music—whether on an iPod, iPhone, iPad, personal computer, or television. On the iPhone, cover-flow navigation makes it fun to look for albums. Downloading a podcast to listen to it is easy. iTunes automatically downloads podcasts whenever users connect their devices to iTunes. Now users need not even do that, because all of this happens automatically via Wi-Fi or the Apple iCloud service. This is not to claim that Apple has a perfect system, but it does provide a great example that shows what user centeredness means.

Another example of a user goal is communicating with others. Google enables users to focus on communication via chat, email, and documents, while handling the content for them. They provide a search engine so users can find their latest communications and continue where they left off. It’s possible to apply the same approach to users’ file systems. The alternative is that users need to figure out the best way to organize their files, so end up spending a lot of time managing files—from creating the right folders, to making backups, to sorting out files they’ve left on their desktop or received via email.

When all team members bring together their various perspectives and focus on how to help users achieve their goals, they can reduce the number of steps that users must take. User experience is about enabling users to reach their goals in a satisfying way. These are merely problems that remain to be solved—problems to which we must give our attention.

Some teams rely on a UX design lead or manager to lead all such efforts. In other cases, different team members take responsibility for leading the team in specific activities. Every team is different. The important thing is to have shared goals that keep the team motivated. In an article about creativity, Robert Fabricant of Frog Design uses the cartoon characters Wile E. Coyote and the Road Runner to show that, with the right motivation, anyone can be creative. Fabricant points out that “[Coyote’s] relationship with Road Runner is a dynamic that constantly pushes him farther, faster, and (unfortunately in most cases) higher than he imagined.”

The main role of a team’s leader should be to ignite everyone’s creativity when solving design problems. For me, the filmmaking duo of the director and the producer presents a perfect example of effective team leadership. Brad Bird, the director of two of Pixar's Academy Award-winning animated features, has described this well. [3]

Why Does an Organization’s Mindset Matter?

The idea for this article came to me while I was reading about the work of Stafford Beer. [4] He was a pioneer in operational research, whose extensive studies have focused on companies and governments around the world. One of his conclusions from decades of studying organizations, was that “the purpose of a system is what it does.”

Seeing a company as a system enables us to understand that its reason for existence is what it actually does. Great products that provide excellent user experiences are the result of a company’s intention—its core values. A company’s role is to enable its teams to fulfill its true purpose. Some believe that an organization just needs to hire great UX professionals to produce great design solutions. But it’s the other way around: UX professionals need to work for companies that exist to create great user experiences.

When a company’s products don’t provide great user experiences, we know that user experience is not truly part of that company’s purpose. When user experience matters to a company, it focuses on achieving great user experiences. When its purpose is something else, the company focuses on that. There are plenty of examples of companies whose focus is on profit, market share, creating copy-cat products, being a market follower, gaining publicity, and so forth. They put these goals ahead of user experience. The nature of a company’s business dictates the user experience of its products.

So, instead of merely thinking that a company’s processes are wrong, question the company’s purpose. Then change the processes, because they represent the company’s purpose. If a company intends to create great user experiences, its role should be to reduce the complexity of the way product teams work—and remove bureaucracy, too—so everyone can focus on its true purpose: creating great products.

UX Processes and Models Link the Goals of an Organization, Product Team, and Its Users

User experience is what people remember about using a product and, thus, what they tell other people about it. Great user experiences happen when organizations enable their product teams to create products that empower people—their users—to achieve their goals in a desirable way. How they achieve these goals is pretty flexible. How do we define desirable? That depends on users’ objectives. For example, this might be

• pleasant—when people listen to music or create a photo album
• fast—when people search
• smooth—when people wake up in the morning
• challenging—when people are playing games
• exciting—when people can see their parents in a live video from the other side of the planet

It is crucial to note that, in all of these examples, I’m talking about not just products, but goals that people want to achieve in different ways. Users who want to achieve the same goal may have different preferences for how they actually accomplish that goal. The steps or actions they need to take might differ according to their desired way of achieving their goal.

There is often too great a focus on creating objects, which stops product teams from looking beyond their preconceptions to see what users really want. Once teams understand this, they can craft systems that enable users to reach their goals.

Users create the experience of satisfaction that they remember—and the stories that they tell others about the products and services that they’ve used. For example, even getting a vaccination can become a positive experience. To replace the typical syringe, IDEO has designed a needle-free product. [5] After experiencing it, someone might say, “I didn't even feel it! Can you believe that there was no needle?” This is the type of result people would talk about. The story describes the users’ experience and expresses their satisfaction in achieving their goal, not a product’s features.

Conclusion

“The responsibility of leadership is not to come up with all the ideas, but to create an environment in which great ideas can happen.”—Simon Sinek

What I’m suggesting is that, without our considering both the personalities and skills of our product team members and our organization’s purpose, our understanding of how we can successfully design great products that solve people’s problems is likely to be incomplete. To inform the process of creating great user experiences, we must understand both our product teams and our organizations. Think of UX management as a closed-loop system, in which the organization influences the product team, the team members influence the solution they create, which then influences the organization, determining what new solutions they’ll create.

A company’s market positioning sets boundaries for its product user experiences. If a company’s purpose is create best-in-class products, it can produce great user experiences. On the other hand, if a company’s purpose is to create mass-market products for the average consumer, it will never achieve great user experiences, no matter what UX professionals it employs, because design always gets pushed toward the business goal of a mass-market, average product.

To be successful, a UX design process needs to consider a company’s purpose, a product team’s skills, and users’ expectations and goals. A UX team’s role is to make this information visible to the company. A product team’s role is to eliminate as many barriers that stop users from achieving their goals as possible. This is a systems-thinking perspective on achieving great user experiences. 

References

[1] Kahneman, Daniel. “The Riddle of Experience vs. Memory.” TED, March, 2010. Retrieved February 27, 2012.

[2] Gabriel-Petit, Pabini. “Specialists Versus Generalists: A False Dichotomy?” UXmatters, February 9, 2009. Retrieved February 27, 2012.

[3] Rao, H., R. Sutton, and A. P. Webb. “Innovation Lessons from Pixar: An Interview with Oscar-Winning Director Brad Bird.” The McKinsey Quarterly, 2008.

[4] Beer, Stafford. “What Is Cybernetics?” Kybernetes, 2002.

[5] IDEO, “Transcutaneous Immunization Delivery Method for Intercell.” IDEO, 2008. Retrieved February 27, 2012.