What is UX?
User experience (UX) is about more than website design. Steve Cassidy explains why UX is so important for online businesses – and why it’s so easy to get wrong
I’ve heard of this one – it’s to do with badly designed websites. For example, there was this one I wasted hours on trying to...
I don’t mean to interrupt, but yes, to an extent we all know about UX. Pretty much everybody knows the frustration of having to jump through arbitrary hoops. However, while everyone has stories about bad user experiences with websites and apps, the ability to diagnose and remedy such things – or, even better, to anticipate and design around them – is much harder to come by.
But we can do our bit by bringing issues to the attention of the developers, right?
Unfortunately, developers are very rarely looking for external feedback – they answer to their bosses, whose targets are generally focused on budgets and timelines. What’s more, very few users are able to communicate their issues in a useful way. That’s not a criticism, but a sad fact: woeful tales of UX purgatory may be cathartic, but to a developer they’re rarely very informative.
For example, let me share an experience of my own. Recently, I was trying to check in online for a flight to Las Vegas. In light of the bad weather, the airline helpfully overlaid the check-in page with a pop-up asking for my name and phone number, so I could be contacted if my flight was affected. The trouble was, once I had entered my details, the pop-up returned, insisting that I had entered an invalid number. Every legitimate permutation was rejected: I was stuck staring at a modal pop-up, unable to enter my check-in details.
It was tempting to file a complaint that the site’s phone number validation system was broken. Tempting, but useless: it turned out that in fact an overloaded system was taking too long to process my input, timing out and misdiagnosing the error.
How disheartening. If a national airline can’t design a website that works, who can?
The thing is, such problems are very rarely solely to do with website design. You can have a page that shows a two-finger salute to the customer from now until eternity, and it can be beautifully coded, W3C compliant and viewable on any device, from a smartwatch to a yacht spinnaker sail made of OLEDs. That says nothing about the user experience: UX is much more to do with how a site or application anticipates the user’s expectations. Can a visitor easily find the content they’re looking for? Do the buttons do the right thing, quickly and intuitively? Getting it right isn’t just about debugging a few lines of code: often it’s about developers, designers, database managers and others all pulling in the same direction.
It’s beginning to sound like UX is an unattainable ideal.
It doesn’t have to be an impossible target. The complexity of the UX challenge depends on what you’re trying to achieve, and to be fair an airline is quite an extreme example of trying to make many processes and systems work together. The systems-analysis way of saying this would be that UX quality is easier to maintain for simple, linear transactions with a start, finish and a subsequent set of actions invisible to the customer. The real difficulties come when a transaction is uncertain (like my flight), editable or made up of many parts distributed across different systems. Suddenly it becomes necessary to anticipate all sorts of different journeys that the user – and their information – might need to take. Up goes the blood pressure, all round: users and developers alike will have stories about interfaces that work fine in isolation, but don’t add up to a usable process.
Phew. Our website doesn’t do complicated stuff, so our UX should be easy to sort out.
Don’t be over-confident. UX isn’t something you can sprinkle on like magic fairy dust at the end of a website redesign. As we’ve noted, it requires a whole slew of IT entities to work together, towards a common goal of creating something that’s convenient, responsive, transparent, adaptable, legally compliant, insurable – and enjoyable to use. If you’re going to get there, everyone needs to keep an open mind, and to be constantly testing and questioning as they go. Frankly, it’s probably more of an upheaval than Web 2.0, and it’ll keep developers and consultants in work for the foreseeable future. Understanding the depth of UX isn’t the end of the process, but the start.
“Users and developers alike will have stories about interfaces that work fine in isolation, but don’t add up to a usable process”