From Usability Engineering to Experience Design

A few days ago, while reading a book on a traditional user-centered design (UCD) methodology I caught myself thinking: “This is sooo engineering!.” It was solid UCD, but it felt old fashion. It made me realize how radically my concept of usability has changed in just a few years. It made me also realize that if many people in web and software design have pushed new ideas and evolved, the traditional view of usability and interface design is still very much alive.

The old world of usability used to be about completion rates and time-on-task. It was about task analysis, task flows, and work practices. It was about “systems.” None of these things are irrelevant today: they just shrank to one of the many things we need to get right to create good design.

The world around us has changed. Psychologists have discovered that our brain doesn’t work as a computer. People building software are realizing that humans function very differently than machines. (For me, the groundbreaking experience in understanding the role of human emotions and motivations was reading Alan Cooper’s Inmates.) In his book on emotional design, Don Norman explains how the aesthetic qualities of an interface influence usability. We have discovered that machines can persuade people and that we crave for flow experiences.

Even efficiency and productivity, the most mechanical dimensions of usability, cannot be measured any longer with just a stopwatch and a spreadsheet. Eliminating waste, redundancy, and repetitive tasks is still a very good thing but it’s not enough. We can be much more effective in improving efficiency and productivity if we apply our understanding of human motivation, reward systems, social interactions, and emotions to the design of user interfaces.

Building experiences is much more than building usable applications. It requires an interdisciplinary approach to design and close collaboration among disciplines, because building a good experience means paying attention to all its different dimensions: psychological, aesthetic, emotional, social and more. We need to break the computing system metaphor and start thinking how we can persuade, reassure, motivate, please, even exert peer pressure.

Not convinced? Think about a purchase process. If you are measuring conversion rates, you have probably realized that people bail out less and less frequently because they don’t understand how to operate the interface; your clients bail out because they don’t know enough about the product, they are not sure that is the right one for them, they wonder if they can find a cheaper or better one, or perhaps they don’t trust your company, or just feel that something is not quite right. Any time we ask people to act, or to change their behaviors or opinions we are dealing with the same fragile process of human decision making and satisfaction.

My boss grew up as a print graphic designer and brought his perspective and sensibility to web design. He made us understand that beauty and harmony are as important as completion rates. He also realized that aesthetic is not sufficient, and made sure that when we design we think about usability, interaction, information design, and information structure. More recently, we have discovered that we need to be much more aware of how the interface triggers emotions and social reactions in our users.

Good experiences happen where disciplines converge. We are building better interfaces because diverse disciplines and points of view come together in our design. When we focus on just one aspect, the understanding of the experience for the user point of view falls apart.

Good experiences are also channel-blind: my perception of the company builds up from all my contacts with it, whether by phone, on the web, or in person. If I like the web site but when I call the company I feel treated like scum, I’ll hate the company. My perception of the company (my experience of it) is the lower common denominator of the history of my interactions with them.

Caring about the experience is not just good karma: it directly affects the bottom-line. Apple and Starbucks make a lot of money by selling experiences rather than products and services. Marketing is discovering the extraordinary power of promoters and detractors (people who love or hate your products) in determining the success or failure of a product or service.

The business world is taking note.

Profit margins are much higher on “experiences” than actual products or services. After all, customers aren’t just paying for a cup of coffee at Starbucks or, say, simply doing transactions at Umpqua Bank. They’re paying admission to a club–one that delivers something to satisfy the soul. (Business Week’s Best of 2005)

If you think that this doesn’t apply to you, think again. Even if you are building business applications, people who are using and purchasing them are human beings and have souls to satisfy. In the bottom of you heart, you know it: everybody can use a good experience.

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experience design, usability, design, experience