The UX design dilemma: Pursuing customer love vs. ‘revenue cheese’

There’s user satisfaction, and then there’s the time someone walked up to Larry Cornett and asked, “Can I give you a hug?”

It was at eBay, when Cornett was a director in charge of a design and development team. The user in question was one of the many “sellers” on eBay. In this case, however, the user said, “I lost my job. I was disabled, and eBay made it possible for me to earn a living.”

Cornett, now the founder and design principal at San Francisco-based Brilliant Forge, told the recent Fluxible conference in Kitchener-Waterloo the incident provided him with a key insight that has kept recurring through various stints at Apple, Yahoo and other firms: love can help a company grow.

“A lot of companies do a lot of things to make you hate them,” he said. The ones that truly understand user experience design (UX design), on the other hand, know that it’s worth obsessing over details and small touches and work as a brand to drive customer love and awe. “We need to make sure we consistently solve pain, that we don’t cause it. Be real, be human, be warm. Listen, observe and use data to improve. Make it hard for people to hate you.”

For the love, or the money?

As Cornett points out, UX designers may often feel pulled between doing work they (and their customers) love and doing work that pays the bills. However in most cases, this doesn’t need to be an either-or scenario, he said.

“Love drives engagement, which drives growth, with leads to money and opportunity and back to love,” he said.

Konrad Sauer knows this to be true. A former art director who spent years working at Toronto-based ad agencies, he left that career behind to pursue a vastly different area of UX design: creating hand-crafted handplanes for use in woodworking projects. Sauer, who now runs Sauer and Steiner Toolworks, brought a worktable to Fluxible to show off the similarities between taking pride in pleasing customers in his current role and what should be possible in the traditional UX design profession. The end result means very different kinds of customer relationships.

“The line between client and friend has gotten so blurry over the years, and it’s marvelous. I would not trade it for the world,” he said, adding that customer love demands 100 percent effort, not 80 percent.

“It’s about being able to step back and say, ‘There’s nothing I can add to this to make it better, and nothing I can take away,’” he said. “There is no excuse for ugly, really. The world is full of ugly.”

Beware the revenue cheese

The ugliness isn’t always in the design, however. Cornett said UX professionals need to be wary of adding “revenue cheese” that brings in money just for the sake of it, and sometimes in ways that turn customers off.

‘This isn’t delicious Canadian cheese, it’s American cheese,” he joked, showing the Fluxible audience a slide of a Yahoo page where the company slapped a huge takeover ad on its mail application. “All you want to do is sign into mail, and I can barely find the login,” he said.

Perhaps worse still are “contextual” technologies that cookies to put a user’s name in an ad, which has happened on eBay. “Now I know I’m being tracked across the entire Web. It’s creepy,” Cornett said.

Instead, Cornett suggested UX designers ensure revenue is as much a part of the design experience as possible, so that they own it. “You can then claim that revenue. Companies love sales. They give (people that generate sales) whatever they want,” he said, which in the UX designer’s case should probably be tech talent. “If you don’t get engineering, everything you do is just pixels.”

A good example was in eBay’s registration system, an area that didn’t have clear ownership when Cornett first came to the firm, he said. As his team worked on projects that recovered users who might otherwise drop off somewhere in the process, there was a clear boost to eBay overall. You need to start learning analytics to really measure this kind of impact, Cornett added, and once you do you should communicate it as clearly and as high up in the organization as possible, which he referred to as “showing the candy” to senior management who can help designers get things done.

Once you’ve found the right monetization model, designing in ways that creates customer love largely means loving what you’re doing as well. That’s what Sauer discovered when he began showing other handplane designers some of his products. In some cases they were looking for a mathematical formula to create similarly striking designs, when the reality was much simpler.

“I just hammer it until it’s done,” he said. “That lack of education and training as a machinist as afforded me some room to discover things I wouldn’t have otherwise.”

For Cornett, it’s a matter of moving from merely functional or useful to delightful, even desirable.

“Very few (companies) transition to making a product that you love and you can’t do with out,” he said. “That’s where things really reach a transformational shift, and that’s where you really want to be.”

Previous coverage of Fluxible 2013 on CommerceLab:

Let ‘non-users’ and ‘near-users’ inspire the best UX design

What UX designers need to understand about their future

Fluxible presents a UX conversation that goes to the dogs