– What d you expect?

It is said that “there is more than one way to skin a cat”. Whenever I hear this expression, I cannot help picturing whoever is saying it, wielding some sort of sharp instrument, tapping their index finger on their chin as they ponder which one of those m

Wayne Zammit is an Enterprise Architect within the Programme Management Department at MITA. He has over 20 years’ experience in the industry and is passionate about software craftsmanship, software architecture and also user experience A t least I hope it’s sedated because I am pretty certain you would get your face mauled by the cat as soon as it glimpses the evil glint in your eye and reads your intentions. Now, whilst no animal was harmed to write this article, it is uncanny how good an analogy this popular expression is when it comes to services and user experience (UX).

Allow me to explain whilst you regain control of your rapidly lifting eyebrows. Putting it simply, user experience relates to how “good” or “bad” a service makes people feel as they make use of it. The reality however is that it’s not really that simple. In fact, this definition of user experience is at such a high level, that it’s not even a bird’s eye view, unless that bird was on the moon. It is equivalent to defining the universe as simply being a collection of stars, planets, dust and random pockets of life. The subject of user experience is just as vast, complex and unforgiving as the universe. Get it wrong and the user, just like a cornered cat, will quickly and viciously reconfigure your face – metaphorically speaking of course. Call centre agents will bear the brunt of the backlash and more and more end- users are turning to social media to air your dirty laundry - so to speak. Your application or service could be the most innovative, useful, awesome thing to happen since the discovery of the wheel but present it or package it the wrong way and it will quickly follow the way of the Dodo.

People engage with a service to attain a specific goal, and they do so with a lot of expectations on how they will go about attaining it. Now, whilst the goal itself is constant, i.e. all users will share that goal: “I want to put the ball in the opponents’ net”, “I want to declare my taxes online”; the expectations of how to go about it on the other hand vary wildly. This is because expectations are very personal, based on what the individual knows, past experiences, context, background, even mood! Bottom line is that the the cocktail of expectations can be quite unique to the individual.

One can quickly appreciate what a challenge this presents to service designers as they try to figure out the best way to skin the metaphorical cat. Head scratching and chin tapping alone will not cut it. Without the proper resources, services end up being built just to fulfil goals with almost complete disregard for meeting user expectations, and this is where several services miss their mark in terms of user experience. This however is not the only challenge, there is an even bigger, albeit subtler problem to deal with. Services owe their existence to a business need or goal and therefore the primary concern of any service is to attain that business goal. Pretty logical, but – and this may come as a surprise – the goals of the business and those of the end-user are as similar as two twins from different mothers.

Let me elaborate. I earn my living from designing systems for the Office of the Commissioner for Revenue – in other words the business of collecting taxes. Straight from the off, the UX challenge is even steeper than usual because no-one in his right mind finds pleasure in anything remotely associated with tax collection. Still, let’s take the example of providing a service that will allow taxpayers to submit their tax in