How can we improve our products and services?

Every time I go for lunch with my sister and we talk about work, at some point of the conversation she always ends up asking the same thing: “I am sorry, I know you explained me 1,000 times before but I still don´t understand what you do for a living”. 

Let me tell you for those born with a mobile phone under your armpit that´s nothing to do with the fact that we were born before the digital breach irrupted in our lives. A proof of that is my mother got it quickly (pretty likely as she has been working now as a community manager for several years). 

It is for this reason I started putting in place a presentation as a last effort to make her understand. I thought it could be of interest for anyone still in doubt, for those also struggling to explain to their family and friends what we do and for those who have heard the concept before but still want to learn a bit more before deciding if they should go for UX as a professional career.

But, what is UX? There are several different points I like highlighting every time I talk about what I do:

• When I achieve a good UX nobody can notice or remember the hard work behind it. It simply looks like it came out naturally
• UX is the human side of technology, it is the discipline that keeps in mind humans when designing a new system or product
• The main goal of a UXer is to do everyone else´s job or life better and easier
• As UXers we help companies and organizations to create well crafted products which are both usable and delightful

But, none of the above is defining precisely what UX is. 

Is it a technique, a framework a new discipline?

We should start by clarifying UX is not design. UX design is an important part of the experience but UX is actually much more about strategy than about design.

I kind of like the following quote that I stole for my first presentation at my current role  from Kim Lenox (Director of UX design at Linkedin): 

“The storyline is crucial. Being a good storyteller is important for designers in general. UX isn’t about the pixels on the screen, it’s about making sure people are successful in what they want to accomplish and find pleasure in the experience. If you’re not designing for the people, it’s just interface design, not experience design.”

Kim Lenox
(Director of UX Design at Linkedin)

But,  beforehand, I would like you to think for a few minutes: What is UX for you? What do you know about it?

…

 I can tell after many years studying and working on this area what it means for me:

“UX takes care and designs the experience users have with a product or a service, watching out during all the process of design, development and exploitation with those.”

What is the origin of UX?

Initially it may look like UX (User Experience) is a new discipline but it is actually pretty old. There are three key events in the evolution of the discipline: 

• The irruption of computers in the market
• The dotcom bubble
• And press releases which were eco of the stress some of the experts on the discipline made on his importance. 

It was actually Donald Norman the famous cognitive psychologist who coined the term in the early 80´s. 

Since then there are many other terms which have emerged, Usability, User Experience, Product and Service Design and most recently Customer Experience. 

In one occasion I had the chance to join one of the Think Tanks that the Customer Success team was organizing for a very awarded SEO platform. 

We´ve just released the redesign of the platform with great success and our customers were craving for more. At that time we were all as a team discovering CUX and we were very excited to organize and assist this event with the purpose to have the chance to talk to our customers, most of them coming from different digital agencies and big firms based in central London.

I was a bit surprised when one of our customers approach me after talks have finished and while having a beer at the rooftop he said: “It is always the same, they coin a new term and it looks like everything has changed but actually this CUX thing everyone is talking about is what I´ve been doing now since the mid-eighties”. Surprised but not disappointed that comment gave me food for thought that I am still digesting.

We can go backwards as much as we want in history to find good examples of UX, usability and ergonomics. For example, we can find earlier references in history to disciplines with similarities to those such as the Taylorism and the change the Toyota Production System meant when they started gathering operators feedback in order to improve processes but we can go even further backwards in history and find similarities with the ancient discipline of Feng-shui which takes care on how to precisely place objects in the appropriate location in order to improve the flow of Chi (energy). 

But this is my preferred example (sorry I can´t quote the source cause I can´t remember but surely I took it from somewhere, so if someone identify the example, please send me the source). Let´s go back to early humans creating their own tools (and this is easily 2,6 million years ago*, if a man sharpened a stone with a pointy shape then it could easily serve as a spear to hunt or as a knife to cut leather.

If the stone was too blunt it would have been unusable for this purpose, on the other hand it would have done any sort of wonders in the “kitchen” as a hand mill in order to grind grains and cereals. 

It is for this reason that I say that UX, Usability, Ergonomics and whatever new term is coming in the future has its origins in the ability of humans to create their own tools in order to be able to perform old or new tasks in an easier and much more convenient way. 

*(I do love this example 🙂 , but I stopped studying history at the age of 16 so I may well be wrong. Please send me through your comments or better examples you find). 

UX disciplines and profiles

So, let´s go back to the subject. Why such a fuss, why so many new terms and buzzwords flooding the market with huge amounts of expensive training programmes, books which look more and more specialized in new techniques and props that you have to learn how to use every few months?

Fear not. Let’s go back to the very basics. Let’s focus in all different disciplines that you can find in the UX field: 

As we mentioned earlier the UX is about providing usable, delightful products in order to improve people´s life but what does it mean when we talk about digital products. 

Everyone within the team is responsible for the experience, but we need at least one person or a team which is highly specialized in some of the fields within the UX to be in charge in order to coordinate and put in place the experience. 

The most relevant fields when it comes about digital products are the ones in the image above: 

• Information architecture
• Usability
• Accessibility
• User Research
• Interaction Design
• Content Strategy 
• Graphic/Visual Design

I don´t want to get into the detail of defining each of those as we could go on into a philosophical conversation for ages and not reach any conclusion, as usually there is not one single person which is specialized in just one of those fields. 

What it tends to happen is that people coming from different backgrounds start specializing in one or more of them and getting skills from some others, making impossible to define a clear border in between one and the other. But we will come back to that. 

There is an additional field which is included in the picture: should we include SEO as a field of study in the UX?. Why SEO should or shouldn´t be added to this list as  relevant.

This is an interesting topic we were discussing at UPF (Barcelona) while I was studying my masters in UX. There were a wide range of opinions in there varying from those thinking SEO should be taken into account for the UX up to those which thought that it could be counterproductive to keep it in mind. 

I kept as usual with this question in my head until early this year. I was in the search for a new project or a new client I could feel enthusiastic about when I discovered the latest new discipline: UX writing. At that time I was a bit less bussy than usual and I got the chance to assist to some meetups about UX writing just enough to discover an UX writer is someone taking care of the content and the wording of a website: “the traditional copy” someone told me there. To me again and looking backward to the break down we did above: a mix in between content strategist and information architect with some knowledge of usability! 

What it really bothered me this time was the answer to the question one of the assistants asked: should we consider SEO for the UX? I was totally shocked when one of the speakers answered pretty much: listen to SEO´s and then ignore them or at least not keep them much into account. This is why SEO is part of the UX from my perspective:  

• if you are a public site, then in most cases and specially as the search paradigm evolves most users performing informational queries won´t ever reach your site, do you still want them to reach your content right? 
• I said informational queries, but with the latest developments of giants in the market such as Google also transactional queries and eventually other query types will get satisfy in the SERP
• More often than not, SEO doesn´t solely means optimization for big search engines, SEO also applies to platforms (content optimization for Amazon). 
• If your main business is not content, still surely your product or your platform counts with a search functionality you need that is usable, specially since content and data starts growing massively in your system, and surely it will if you want to be sucesfull.
• … 

Sure there are one thousand different reasons to consider it in and out, please do submit and text me yours. I would be more than happy to think about it with a cup of coffee and include them in this page. 

UX Profiles

When either deciding which sort of UXer you want to be (or even deciding which profile to recruit) you need to keep several things in mind: 

• Your level of UX maturity (or the organization). 
• Your current skill set
• Your interests and passions

There are several different profiles independently on which subdiscipline(s) you decide: generalist, specialist and t-shaped.

As per the chart below (undercover UX), you can hopefully quickly identify what those profiles are about. The first one tends to have a overall idea of other sub disciples but they have a better knowledge of at least one of them (this would match with a Junior UXer). In my case and coming from engineering I was very keen on Usability and Interaction Design). 

An specialist has a much higher knowledge of that one single discipline whereas a T-Shaped profile might have chosen not to specialized in any subdiscipline in general but rather having an overall knowledge of all of them. 

In the most recent years a new profile has emerged: the expert. This is my preferred one. Even though still with a higher preferences towards one or a few of them the expert has a good knowledge in almost all or all. 

In my approach and when working within an UX team, I tend to cultivate and promote this sort of profile not just for me but also for all my colleagues. From my perspective, even though the three first types of profile gives you a good based to work with it, still gives you a very partial view of the project or product you are working at with everything that entails.