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About the Good Experience Worldview
Jun 14, 2005
I've been thinking recently about the holistic "good experience" worldview espoused by this newsletter.
Despite last week's column about irritating tactical mistakes, I'm not a fan of describing design rules to be followed rigidly. To be sure, there are some user experience experts who assert "the 205 rules of proper design," as though being a good practitioner merely means memorizing the tactical rules and methods. Call these the "gurus"; there are plenty of followers who want, and demand, what they're offering.
I can't offer anything of the sort. Sure, occasionally there are tactical dos and don'ts that are so obvious that they bear pointing out; but just memorizing these would get one nowhere. So for all intents and purposes, I have a grand total of zero "rigid rules of proper design" to offer.
Even so, I do offer something - just one thing - that I advocate. It's a single idea, one that I call "customer experience" and can be described in any number of ways. Focus on the other person's needs. Listen to customers. Be open to data that comes from the outside. Create a good experience for someone other than yourself. See the pattern? It takes a certain mindset - that of empathy - to do this work.
What's essential here is the ability to seek the best interests of someone other than yourself. It happens to make good business sense; in fact I believe that this is the mindset that will define the winners throughout the next several decades of business.
But keep in mind that customer experience at its heart is a posture, an attitude, a single core belief - and not a long set of rules, methods, tactics, or pseudo-academic frameworks. This core belief - that the customers' needs should drive the company's direction - is the "hook" on which everything else hangs: the methods you use, the tactics you learn and apply.
Note the pronoun there: it's up to you. I can share my experience as a customer experience practitioner, but yours will be different. I can tell you some tactics that I've seen work, but they may not be immediately applicable to the work you do. The disadvantage of this method is that it's harder to learn; the advantage is that you can make it your own and apply it anywhere.
This advantage outweighs anything else and, in my opinion, recommends this method above all others. If you accept this attitude and apply the principles to your work, you can improve any business; you can improve any customer experience; you can work on any site, any business model, any tool, any technology, any design, and make a difference in the lives of the users and in the measurable business results of the company. You might even find that you "create good" for yourself, and the people around you, in ways that you never expected.
Isn't that the kind of invitation you'd like to accept?
What does everyone think?
You just reminded me of Dale Carnegie's book 'How to make friends and influence people'. Same principle applied to a concrete situation.
Excellent! Right on the money!
Mark, have you thought about writing patterns? I have a beginning collection but I know you could add a lot to it!
The work of the good experience advocate involves (1) juggling the need of users to find information and accomplish tasks with (2) the need of the business to be successful.
I've worked with people in this field whom I think are not tempermentally capable of being empathetic, yet they create decent enough work. Their goal isn't so much to improve user experiences, but to get inside people's heads so as to best figure out how to herd them. These folks take (2) above as their premise, and approach (1) from that perspective.
I'm primarily a (1) worker; my approach is to make the case that if you create an experience users value, they will return for more business later.
A few years back I was consulting with an outfit that got its funding based on the number of registered users; to that end, a senior exec wanted to remove all global nav on child pages except the link back to the registration page. "Your users won't care for that," I suggested; "Screw the users" was the reply. I got the VP to back off for tactical reasons, but the mindset was entrenched. That company is now out of business -- one of the many dotcoms washed out to sea for ignoring genuine user concerns.
Using asterisks to emphasize words is just as annoying as gray on white:
*any* business; you can improve *any* customer experience; you can work on
*any* site, *any* business model, *any* tool, *any* technology,
*any* design,
aaargh!
Our discussions (or collecting around a conversation just to listen) are Communities of Practice. As we exchange stories we are effectively engaging the method of teaching that was first adopted by Harvard Business School when it first opened its doors in 1908: the case study (http://www.hbs.edu/corporate/enterprise/case.html).
While sharing experiences is not a 'formal' case study, the effectiveness of case study methods to prepare MBAs is just as effective to prepare us for various situations.
In fact, it disturbs me when interviewing for new roles that distinctions are not made for those who participate in professional Communities of Practice and those who don't (for me, participation in 'global' communities of practice is a measure of an individual's commitment to their own practice as a professional). While 'reading about' or evaluating post-event the experiences of others can in no way prepare us in the same way that having the experience can, but the study of such events has proven the test of value by the credibility of Harvard's approach to preparing their people.
Capturing the perspectives with the shared analysis (as is done by blogs) adds more value (allowing value to be repeatedly tapped into at future points in time...perhaps, on an as-needed basis).
My personal disappointment is that the collective 'we' are too busy with life to truly engage deeply in the analysis on a regular basis. So something you post today may never be given the full in-depth evaluation that it deserves. I see this as a method/activity that deserves direct attention as part of the times that we gather together at events/conferences -- moments when our attention is more focused.
The latter is something that you can directly influence, Mark. We appreciate all your efforts on our behalf.
Guess I've been too busy over the past 11 years to learn the rules. Feeling the fool, I googled "205 rules of proper design' and got zilch.
Since my marketing and design techniques have developed from doing, as opposed to reading about them, can you provide a reference?
I figure I'll either discover I know nothing, or that I've been doing it right by luck.
I agree that adhering to any *dogma of design* can lead an individual or group down a dangerous (or worse, a predictable) path. However, I find so many organizations begging to learn the process of creativity, and creativity's persnickety step-sister, design.
It is easy to say that no rules is good rules [sic] when one has experience. Now, what if I wanted to learn another complex art form or practice, like, say, Kung Fu. When I was ten-years-old, my friends and I were convinced we knew all about this martial art from watching Bruce Lee's "Enter the Dragon". God help us if we ever did battle with a real evil genius!
I often see the same phenomenon after a group of MBAs watch the episode of Nightline in which Ted Copple profiles IDEO's ideation process.
Perhaps the best "toolkit" includes fewer rules and more guidance on appropriate questions to ask, for example:
- What is the need?
- Where can we find inspiration?
- Have we defined the problem?
- Are we asking the appropriate questions?
An excellent expression of an ancient, universal principle--sometimes just called "love," though that seems so unbusinesslike.
It reminds me of these words penned in the first century: "Do nothing out of selfish ambition or vain conceit, but in humility consider others better than yourselves. Think not only of your own interests, but also of the interests of others." (The Bible, Philippians 2:3-4, NIV)
There's a diagram that pops up in various fields, from technical writing to speech to fire dispatching to computer networking. It typically shows a sender, who sends a message to the reciever via a medium which contains noise and/or filters, and FEEDBACK. Successful practitioners in all these fields emphasize that it's the feedback which is the key to success, because it allows the sender to adjust their tactics to produce the "customer experience" at the other end. Feedback is also the element of the model which is most often neglected.
Does anyone have thoughts on why other-centeredness is so unnatural that we keep having to be reminded of it?
thought I'd lift this from UIE/Jared Spool regarding the other-centerdness issue you speak of - I believe there are useful methods and frameworks to get from zero to prototype - the learn/look/ask and try framework with all of it's underlying techiques and tools is pretty common - but for sure, you've got to have humility/open mind/ empathy and maybe an art history degree ;-) to avoid being the center of your universe
Psychologists call this 'grounding'—the natural behavior of initially finding a known reference point in a foreign information space. Once the person has grounded themselves, they can then use the starting point to understand the rest of the space.
While grounding helps people adjust to complex situations, it can be detrimental when it happens during the design process. If, while conjuring up an interface, designers ground themselves in the design, they run the serious risk of creating an interface that only they can use.