A few months ago I tweeted that we no longer needed to sell User Experience and our job was now to focus on delivering good user experiences. A few people asked me to expand on my thinking, so this quick post is in reference to that.
It’s surprisingly common for redesigns to cause outrage amongst their users. People complain that they weren’t consulted, criticise the quality and appropriateness of the new solution, and state that “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” However if you leave the site for a while, you often see the most critical detractors become the most vocal supporters. Why is this?
Like most designers and developers we've come to the conclusion that big design up front doesn't work. Six month requirement gathering exercises which result in thousand page specifications don't work. In the time it has taken to produce these requirements the business landscape has almost certainly changed. So new requirements appear and designers and developers are forced to battle scope creep and keep these documents alive while at the same time trying to build something that is ever shifting and changing.
The architect Frank Lloyd Wright famously told a customer to move their table when they complained that water was leaking from the ceiling when they ate dinner. This is almost certainly apocryphal but hints at the ego of the experience designer. W tell our users and customers what experience they are going to have (sometimes based on research) but they have to live with the results.
At Clearleft we're an incredibly business focussed agency. So we work closely with our stakeholders to understand their business needs, and then turn these into Key Performance Indicators to track. In the vast majority of cases, our clients KPIs increase after working with us. However on the rare occasion that things go in the other direction, we take it as a matter of professional pride to rectify the matter.
I recently received a wireframe from a potential client outlining their plans for a new homepage, which in itself was pretty impressive. It showed that the client had knowledge of the industry as well as a good understanding about the importance of planning. To produce this wireframe our prospective client had used a relatively new tool called Balsamiq, which aims to capture the sketchy nature of hand drawn wireframes with the utility of a GUI application. On the surface this seems like a really good idea and it obviously allowed the client to produce something relatively quickly with little or no prior experience. As such, I think a tool like Balsamiq does have a place in the non-professional market. However I think the tool has a number of fairly fundamental problems.