Design well, design small, and keep the business needs in mind.
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Design well, design small, and keep the business needs in mind.
Jared Spool was the keynote speaker at the conference (UPA-DC 2007). He is a longtime usability researcher, consultant, and speaker. I am going to do a series of blogs on the talks from the conference – a fair number will come from JS because he was succinct, insightful, and told good stories.
His first point was that good user experience is finally seen as being good for the bottom line with the success of such products as the Ipod and Netflix. He described the Ipod as being a cool piece of HW with usable software and a store where you can buy and service the hardware – a product strategy that took into account the user experience across the entire life cycle of using the product. Netflix has an advertising budget 1/10th that of Blockbuster online and a huge majority of Netflix users say that they joined because friends or family bugged them to. Something like 93% of Netflix users admit to bugging others to join. And he attributes that word of mouth to a user experience that people want to share.
He then contrasted these successes with some huge failures (described but unnamed). One was a complete redesign of a web site that reduced page views by 40%, because the user workflows were optimized. Since the sites business was advertising, the page view reduction was a very bad thing. Another complete overhaul resulted in a 20% reduction in sales the first day.
His conclusions from these stories were three fold:
- A good user experience can translate into huge profits.
- The user experience must be designed in accordance with the business needs.
- Redesign should proceed in as small of chunks as you can get away with to allow testing and feedback between iterations.
From audience discussion, he clarified that when the consumer experiences a redesign it can appear to be a complete overhaul, but before the launch, the actual redesign proceeded in phases with serious beta testing in between iterations.
