5 UX Meltdowns and how to avoid them - video and transcript

The user experience field dates back to World War II and standing on the subsequent three generations of experience we should be able to avoid most meltdowns. We can.  But it doesn’t always happen.

And I ‘d like to share with you 5 meltdown stories and how and how you can avoid them.

LETS TALK ABOUT DESIGN

I was meeting with an Asian airline and their developers were very sad.  They were depressed and they seemed resentful.  They told me they had spent 3 Million US Dollars building a new, modern workstation for their agents.  But they felt that the agents were old, and set in their ways, and unappreciative.  The agents would ‘t use the new workstation.  I asked to just peek at it for a minute.

Within my allocated minute I could immediately see that they had built a modern looking workstation that was physically less efficient.  The agents constantly had to switch tiles on the screen by clicking with the mouse.  And we know that people would rather key 3-8 keystrokes then switch from a keyboard to a mouse.  The agents were not really the problem.  The developers just made a modern system that was nice looking, but physically worse.  And that bad design was now fundamental to the whole navigational scheme, so was now hard to change.

So Professional UX staff  understand how to tune the design to the type of usage.  And applications that are used a lot, all day long, have to be physically efficient.

LETS TALK ABOUT RESEARCH

One of our clients makes cell phones. And they made great cell phones.  And we did a lot of research, shadowing customers and interviewing them deeply. The ideas that came out of that made them strong in key markets. Then they got a new manager of user research. We got a request to run a study in India with THREE participants. There are a BILLION people in India and there are 230 different languages.  Which three people should we test?  They told us they just wanted three Indians. And since then the mobile company has steadily lost market share, shed jobs, and failed to innovate. Even successful companies need to keep at UX work and good UX work depends on design that is research based.  Like a quality program, UX and UX research, they never go away.

LETS TALK ABOUT LOCALIZAITION and cross-cultural design.

A major internet financial institution asked us to check if their new ecommerce facility would work well in China.  They had translated it from an American application.  But they did not understand the practicalities of the Chinese ecosystem. People do transactions at convenience stores because they want to check that a product is not fake before handing over their money. And there is a lot of time consuming red tape in banking in China.  We begged them not to release the offering, but they said it was already coded so they would just got ahead.  What was there to lose?  And that company, to date, has never recovered and succeeded in China.  More than a billion people.  No customers. In approaching emerging markets you have to understand the local ecosystem, or expect to lose money and reputation.

LETS TALK ABOUT USER INTERFACE STANDARDS

We’ve done over 400 custom standards to date. We establish nice firm rules about how key types of screens are made.  So a wizard’s buttons say forward and back. Not next and previous. They work great.  But the worst melt down was at a big insurance company in New York. They wanted standards in time to guide their new sales support system.  And we worked nights to deliver it on time. Three weeks after we delivered it, I was there and found the standards still sitting unopened under our client’s desk. Cobwebs were already forming. Today we almost always deliver standards in an online format.  But that is even easier to quietly be ignored.  So there has to be a program of dissemination and support for every standards project.

LET TALK ABOUT INSTITUTIONALIZATION of usability

Today we spend most of our time guiding companies through the treacherous waters of setting up an industrial strength user experience practice. The most interesting train wreak I’ve watched is another mobile phone company.  They hired several top experience design experts, poaching them from Microsoft and Apple.  And they gave one an office next to the CEO.

These designers were certainly smart and they proceeded to try to hire more people like themselves.  But they really did not understand that setting up a practice is different then just headhunting.  They did not know how to set up a sustainable practice.  And in the end the office next to the CEO evaporated and that company’s market share in America is evaporating also. So when setting up a practice in UX; we need to do far more then hire great designers.  We need to have championship, and governance, and methods, and standards, and tools….   And more.  A holistic solution. So I am happy to say today, we know how to avoid meltdowns. We can do user experience right, on an industrial scale. And it’s a truly a joy to find companies around the world moving along the path to user centricity.