The key to creative success is to understand, interpret and execute the idea appropriately in each category. Moving from offline to the online may mean changing the tone of the piece to have more cut-through, or ‘breaking the fourth wall’, letting people interact with the work get involved and share ownership.
A good designer always works to keep the form, function and the aesthetic quality of a design in balance throughout the life of a project. Just because something looks good doesn’t mean its useful. And just because something is useful does not make it beautiful.
More often than we want to admit, we use glitz and glam—or worse, the current popular design trend—to hide the areas where we simply don’t have an elegant solution appropriate to the problem at hand. It is too easy to get caught in the trap of focusing on “making it pretty” without giving consideration to the actual purpose of the design.
At the same time, a designer should understand that even the most utilitarian product can benefit from subtle, refined aesthetic treatments and turn what is a dull and boring, yet necessary, task into something enjoyable and engaging.
The most elegant solution will yield a design that is gracefully tempered with restraint and precision—both useful and beautiful.
We are often led to believe that the more freedom we have the more creative we will be. Full creative license? Sweet. Unlimited budget? Awesome! No timetable? Even better.
Yeah, right.
I say embrace your constraints and draw out of them the very solution that sets you apart from the crowd.
The imposition of constraints can lead to great design decisions. Limitations often force you to view things from a perspective you are not accustomed to and, in turn, can stimulate the clarity and purpose of the design, rather than debilitate and hinder your creative process.
One of the most obvious and currently talked about examples is the iPhone. There are incredible limitations with such a device. So many that people initially speculated it would be a massive failure. However, the team at Apple truly embodies this ethos. Despite physical constraints, technological constraints, time constraints and, of course, the “Steve” constraint, the team was able to unlock innovative solutions that allowed them to create something truly unique.
Are there problems with the iPhone? Yes. Of course there are. The point is if you want to create a truly compelling experience, don’t complain about your constraints; embrace them. And in doing so, set your creativity on fire!
Wireframes, flow diagrams, personas, card sorts, content strategy documents, etc. All of these things are important to design, and designers need some combination of them to synthesize their user research and communicate what they’re doing with the other members of the team.
But too often these deliverables are the last line of contact for designers. Too often these deliverables are what designers prepare and then hand off to implementors. Then they shuffle off to create more deliverables and the cycle is repeated.
In the end deliverables are merely artifacts of the design process. They are not the final design, they are not the artifact of experience. The end user never interacts with them…they interact with the product or service that is actually delivered.
That’s the difference: deliverables are divorced from delivery.
Thus, the task of a UX designer, in order to stay true to our calling, doesn’t stop at any deliverable. Even if our “job” is to create wireframes, we cannot be satisfied with passing off wireframes to other team members. If we are truly concerned with the experience of the people who use our product/service, we will infiltrate their world…we will demand to know the quality of their experience.
Many UX designers are judged on the quality of their deliverables. This is necessary to a point, we must make sure each step is faithfully executed. But to truly be a user experience designer, we must have a longer scope. We can’t stop at deliverables. We must extend through delivery.
Deliverables are diminishing in importance. Sketches, super important to early design synthesis, have fleeting value. They are valuable for a very short period of time. Design, implement, iterate, move on. Record the learning, but don’t judge the sketch, judge the resulting experience.
So, if you’re not involved in the day to day feedback loop of your user’s experience, make sure you get involved. Ask about your feedback channels: support emails, call-center requests, twitter mentions, all of it. Do regular surveys and user testing. Investigate. Demand data. If you don’t, you’re just creating deliverables and missing the forest for the trees.
Experience, in the end, cannot be captured in a deliverable.
“Good design is problem solving.” – Jeffrey Veen
You could say that actually solving the problem is good design in practice.
This rarely boils down to choosing whether or not to apply that “1px inner glow” or rearranging a few blocks of content. Quite often, it means eliminating one’s own assumptions and applying problem-solving techniques in order to truly identify the problem area. Some techniques that can help are:
Kaizen (aka the Five Whys)
The process of asking “Why?” five times exploring cause-and-effect relationships in order to find the root problem
Assumption Reversal
Taking all known assumptions and reversing them in order to trigger innovation
Analogy
Investigating whether a similar problem has been solved in another field
The output of these methods is ideally an actionable problem statement. This will help guide the process of creating an experience that meets or exceeds the target users expectations.
Allowing or finding a solution that results in an engaging, delightful experience is the result of careful analysis and the application of the appropriate design elements to support and communicate the desired intent of your product.
As Bertrand Russell said, “The greatest challenge to any thinker [designer] is stating the problem in a way that will allow a solution.”
In our attempt to create amazing user experiences, we often want to push the envelope, to create something new, to show people a bright new future. But too often we fall into the novelty trap. The novelty trap is when, in an attempt to dazzle our clients and our users, we focus too much on the new and not enough on the now.
To create great user experiences we need to focus on the now. In reality the problems of our users are painfully mundane and often obvious. It is our task to ease this pain, and in doing so we might not invent some amazing new thing, but that’s OK. Success is incremental.
Consider the following companies, widely regarded as purveyors of great user experiences:
Netflix
Netflix lets you rent the exact same movies as every other rental service, but they make it easy to do right from your home and they work hard to give you solid movie recommendations. They succeeded by removing the painful problem imposed by nearly all rental companies, the dreaded late fee. Sometimes a good experience results not from addition, but from removal! Netflix did not solve a new problem, they solved an old one.
Zappos
Zappos sells one of the most mundane products imaginable: shoes. But by solving a widespread problem with faceless web-based companies (bad service), they stand out and shine. Service is one of the oldest problems known to business…in any age or time providing great service results in a great user experience.
Jetblue
Jetblue did something simple: they added personal viewing screens to the seat-backs in their airplanes. None of the technology was new, but the experience of being in control of your in-flight entertainment was. Couple that with food that isn’t horrible, and they quickly improved on the user experience of flight.
These companies did not solve future problems, they solved well-known, existing ones. That’s how you provide great user experiences, by alleviating the well-known pain points that already exist in the world.
So, when trying to articulate the problem to be solved, focus on the now, not the new.
The user experience is made up of all the interactions a person has with your brand, company, or organization. This may include interactions with your software, your web site, your call center, an advertisement, with a sticker on someone else’s computer, with a mobile application, with your Twitter account, with you over email, maybe even face-to-face. The sum total of these interactions over time is the user experience.
The interaction designer plans for these moments. Part of their responsibility is to make all interactions positive, and includes aspects of the software, the copy-writing, the graphics, layout, flows, physical experiences. It’s a shame when one part of the experience is top notch and another is dreadful. Cohesion is important.
User experience spans multiple practices. Let’s take an example from architecture. If an architect were hired by a deep-pocketed client to create a great user experience, they wouldn’t stop at the structure in which people live. They would pay attention to the surrounding greenery, the arc of the driveway, the views of the property at each angle…maybe even the way guests are greeted and the table is set. All of these touch-points are important parts of the larger system…the house is merely one piece of the puzzle.
Web designers, traditionally secure in the role of page creators, now have a wider purview. The landscape on which people experience our design is wider than ever before. Thus, we must adapt our ways to include all aspects of experience.
“You cannot not communicate. Every behaviour is a kind of communication. Because behaviour does not have a counterpart (there is no anti-behaviour), it is not possible not to communicate.”—Paul Watzlawick’s First Axiom of Communication
This is the first rule of UX. Everything a designer does affects the user experience. From the purposeful addition of a design element to the negligent omission of crucial messaging, every decision is molding the future of the people we design for.
As such, one of the primary goals of any good designer is communicating the intended message…the one that leads to a positive user experience. The copy-writing, the color of your text, the alignment of form labels, using all-caps or going lowercase on those navigation links—even the absence of a design pattern—are all part of this communication.
Knowing this, we can ask (and hopefully answer) the question, “Does this element support or contradict what I am trying to communicate to the user?” And by asking this you will find yourself refining and improving the little things; the things that often go unsaid or unnoticed, that ultimately make up the user’s experience.
PITY YOU’LL ONLY BE WEARING IT FOR A FEW MINUTES.
JUST THINK OF WHAT YOU WILL SAVE ON HEATING BILLS.