10 ways to bake UX into your company culture
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With all the talk about UX these days, it's sometimes easy to get it confused with user-interface (UI) design. For example, someone might say, "Hey, I like X's website better than Y's because it has a better UX". Translation: 'X's website is more visually attractive'.
But here's an important point to consider: User-Experience is everything about your product/brand that a user experiences.
That might seem really obvious and not-too-insightful. Here's what I really mean by it; Your Chief Financial Officer doesn't impact UX whatsoever because customers generally has no idea what the financial status of a company is (excluding publicly traded companies, of course) and even if they do it has to be very poor for it to affect their choice to use your product.
This is what really goes into a user-experience. And it can't be done by one person, your entire team has to live and breath UX. This post isn't meant to explain UX methods, like research or testing. Instead, it's meant to discuss all of the different components of a company that affect the experience a user has with your product.
1. Customer Service
How many times have you signed up for a cable or internet package due to the features and price advertised, and then cancelled it due to shitty customer service? If companies spent half of the time they invest in market research and advertising and reallocate it towards better hiring, training and support policies, they would retain more of their clients.
Everyone on your support team personifies your brand. If the customer has a problem, emails Mary and she is pleasant, helpful and goes that little extra step further in making his life better, all of a sudden the entire company is now viewed in the same light. Conversely, if she is dismissive, unpleasant or simply unhelpful, your customer's entire experience using your product is now tainted.
How to make it better
Firstly, take on only the amount of customers you can realistically support. There's a reason restaurants only have so many chairs. Because if the house if full, they know they need a certain amount of waitstaff who can adequately serve them. If you have more people who need your staffs time than they can properly support, you're either not charging enough or something is seriously wrong with your product.
Secondly, only take on exceptional support staff. Rigorously interview applicants, and fire them the second you think they're damaging your brand. There are certain people that just have it, and others who don't. It's better as an owner to handle customer support yourself until you can hire the right person for the job. Some brands become synonymous with great customer service and it becomes the hallmark of their brand (WestJet, Zappos).
On the other hand, one of the worst experiences I've ever had was with Dropbox and despite their otherwise great product and marketing, it made me hate them forever and switch to a competitor.
2. Design
This is what most people think of when they think "user experience". And yes, the design is incredibly important, but remember that it's not just aesthetics alone. Design is also how something works and flows, and generally, how well thought-out it is. Typography, for example, should be beautiful, but also easily read. Images should be beautiful, but they should also load fast.
UX design is all about testing and iterating. The only way to make sure your product is well-designed in every way is to build something simple, watch people use it, record the findings and design solutions to the problems. And then to do that again with a better product. Rinse and repeat.
But isn't user-testing time consuming and expensive? Yes and sometimes. So is buying a house, but people do it. If it was just one of those nice-to-haves, there wouldn't be much of a reason to do it, but when your entire business is at stake, it's better to take that extra time and money to make sure people actually enjoy what you're building.
Asking for feedback from beta users is good, but it's not the same as in-person user-testing. Sending out customer surveys is probably good too, but it won't tell you how or why someone is incorrectly understanding your interface. The only way is to sit a stranger in a room—yes, a stranger. Friends, families and colleagues don't count, and ideally one who fits your target market—and watch her use your interface, and then ask her why she made the choices she did.
3. Branding
Your brand is how people think and feel about your company when they see it. More importantly, it's how people feel about themselves when they're with their brand. How could branding not influence UX? A great experience will fuel a brand, and a great brand will get the user there - and keep him - in the first place.
Apple is the quintessential example of creating products that make people feel cooler about themselves. Suddenly having a Mac or iPod (I'm going way back here), means that I'm a smart, urban professional with a scarf and skinny jeans, even if I'm a pudgy nerd.
How to make it better
Few of us have the marketing budget that companies like Apple and Nike do. So for most of us, we'll have to apply all of the other points in this post to make any dent in our brand or UX. Having a short, memorable name, professional logo and a slick home page helps though.
4. Price
All of the items on this list have some association or correlation with each other. Consider how what you charge impacts the experience people have with your company.
For example, if you charge more than competitors in your market, you will be perceived as higher-end and offering more than everyone else. The downside of this is that you'll be scrutinized more closely if you fail to live up to your pricing. You'll also naturally have fewer customers, but the ones you have will happily pay more to get more.
Customers think very differently of Versace or Armani than they do of Target or H&M; for clothing, and this changes how they experience your product. I suspect that many fashion amateurs (myself included) would scarcely be able to tell the difference between a pair of jeans from Bluenotes and a pair of $3,000 jeans made by Gucci. But as soon as they know how much the Gucci's costs they suddenly become OHMYGOD THE BEST JEANS EVER.
How to make it better
Charge based on the value your provide, and as much as the market is willing to pay. I suggest veering on the side of too expensive because you'll know quickly if you can't get any customers and can lower the price accordingly. On the other hand, starting as the cheap alternative only weakens your brand and tells users to expect less from you. Or you may get too many customers and then be faced with problem #1 - more customers than you can handle.
5. Simplicity/Ease
If a user has to pick between feature rich and complicated versus simple and easy, they will go with the latter, hands down, every time. And yet cutting features is so hard for entrepreneurs to do because we want to out-feature the competition, handing their ass to them with Flickr, Salesforce AND Google Plus integration (I'm not sure how that would work in practice).
How to make it better
See points #1 and #2. Talk to customers and test new features and designs to see what people actually want. Veer on the side of simpler if you have to choose. See this great post from the founder of Wesabe about why he lost to competing company, Mint. It's from 2010 but the lessons contained are timeless. In particular, this quote:
A domain name doesn’t win you a market; launching second or fifth or tenth doesn’t lose you a market. You can’t blame your competitors or your board or the lack of or excess of investment. Focus on what really matters: making users happy with your product as quickly as you can, and helping them as much as you can after that. If you do those better than anyone else out there you’ll win.
Notice the words "make users happy with your product as quickly as you can". You will never have 90 days or a year to give your users that "aha" moment. It has to deliver value immediately after the on boarding process or they just won't come back. I know this first hand, as my product, Pitch Perfect suffered from this early on and we are only in the process now of turning it around. As it turns out, adding powerful customization options almost always complicates a product, and leaning towards simplicity, ease and value is always better.
6. Features/Functionality
This is rightly related to #5, but on the opposite side of the spectrum. While it's never a good idea to compete based on features, your user still needs to experience something that is different or better than what they currently use, otherwise why bother?
How to make it better
Think about the top 3 pain points your target market experiences (Make it only 1 if you can). Then think about the 3 features your product solves, and emphasize the benefit rather than just describing what it does or how it works.
For example, I love the headline on KISSMetrics' website:
"Google Analytics tells you what happened, KISSmetrics tells you who did it."
KISSMetrics accomplishes so much with this line without ever resorting to cliched salesman speak: "With our patented formula, we break down data into distinct indexes and..." none of that shit.
The headline line is great because it says:
- They're an analytics company
- They're kind of like Google Analytics
- But they're better for people who need data about the individuals who use the customers websites.
They follow it up with this line: "Finally, you'll know who your most valuable customers are and how to get more of them." Again, this illustrates the value of why their product is great without any sort of feature list.
I realize my examples were more about marketing than product development, but they were meant to show you how companies that focus on building the most feature-packed products usually fail. A big part of UX is about learning from real users which features people truly care about, and then focusing excruciatingly on making those features awesome instead of throwing more at the wall to see what sticks.
7. Speed
Something rarely considered when talking about UX is performance. Some of the biggest online brands in the world, Google, Amazon and Facebook all emphasize speed and performance. If you have the interest, there's a fantastic post explaining how much effort Facebook puts into their performance, and all of the open-source tools they've built to make their social network fast and zippy.
How to make it better
First of all, consider the visual design of your site. Are there unnecessary bells and whistles going on that don't serve the content and only slow down the site? Installing a tool like YSlow can help diagnose the speed problem and collaborating with your designers and engineers will help correct the issue. For example, it could be an inefficient peice of code your developer wrote that's making unnecessary database queries. Maybe dynamically caching pages could help improve things. There could be a variety of technical ways to make the site faster. There are also enterprise-level services like RUM Analytics that can help improve the speed of websites and apps.
8. Copywriting
If you run an online company, it's very likely your customers will never hear your voice. And yet 90% of what they'll be doing when engaged with your product is looking at words on a page. Investing time and effort into copywriting is worth it, because it's what will give your brand a voice.
Groupon and Mailchimp are two good examples of how playful 'in-app' copy goes a long way towards making your brand feel friendly and helpful.
Notice I say 'in-app', because the tone of your copy can vary slightly between leads and customers. Do you talk to leads differently than a customer you've had for 5 years? Of course you do. When you are trying to get interest and convert a visitor on a landing page it's all about getting the users attention and clearly articulating what you do very quickly. Being overly clever and cute doesn't work as well as just being straight-forward about what you do.
But after a user is engaged with your product you can get away with a little bit more tongue-in-cheek humour, as Mailchimp exemplifies. A client you've had for 5 years can be spoken to like a trusted partner or even a friend, whereas that may be out-of-place if you're talking to a lead who barely knows you.
Hopefully this post helps break down all the various components of UX and why careful attention to each contributes to the bigger whole. Did I miss anything? Let me know in the comments below.
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