What UX designers need to understand about their future

Trip O’Dell clearly didn’t plan on tearing up in front of his fellow user experience designers. Unlike the approach to UX he had been advocating, it just kind of happened.

O’Dell, who works at Amazon.com subsidiary Audible, was addressing the Fluxible 2013 conference that took place last weekend in Kitchener, Ont. He was talking about the power of UX to reach audiences that aren’t often top of mind among designers or their employers. Rather than describe them as “third world” or “developing nations” he used terms like “high agency” and “low agency” users to talk about the kind of education, access and fluency with technology that characterizes certain groups. For low-agency users, O’Dell said, getting a little emotional, UX design should “empower them to do things they never thought themselves capable of doing.”

Over the course of two days, O’Dell and other speakers at Fluxible delivered an even stronger message: that UX design needs to be more adaptive than ever before, and that success lies with increasingly careful consideration of who their audience really is.

For example, O’Dell noted that for much of the digital products and services offered today, the intended audience are high-agency users who are educated, relatively wealthy and owners of multiple devices. In contrast, the emerging wave will be making their first connections on a mobile phone, with lower levels of education and income.

“We are not the user,” he said. “Yet we are designing the first products they are using on the Internet . . . What I know now about how users behave, my heuristic expertise, is going to be completely irrelevant in just a few years. How will this change what we design?”

The answer is to keep a close eye on three forces, O’Dell suggested. These include demographics, education and culture. For instance, while mobile UX design conversations often centre around iOS or Android given their popularity in North America, places like Africa, where mobile subscriptions are growing quickly, may be more pre-disposed to platforms like Windows 8. That’s because Microsoft’s mobile OS uses images and “smart tiles” as alternatives to text to manage information and a typeface that’s more easily localized, he said. Even the hardware of the average smartphone could be better deployed for a low-agency audience.

“The devices have more senses than we do — gestures, orientation, velocity, position,” he said. “They can contextualize the relationships around them, their proximity to other things. They can encourage and reward play and investigation.” UX designers need to harness these features to ensure that literacy isn’t an impediment to digital use but an opportunity for innovation, he added.

The principles of an ‘exceptional’ experience

Whether the user is high-agency or low, however, all UX designers should consider raising the bar to deliver experiences that are not only effective but exceptional, said Diana Wiffin, practice lead of the UX team at Quarry Integrated Communications.

Wiffin defined an exceptional experience as one that begins with relevance — design that clearly understands who the audience is and what they want to accomplish. The next pillar is “resonance,” or an experience that not only helps users achieve something but connects with them on an emotional level so that they enjoy it or would recommend it to a friend.

Perhaps equally critical is the concept of flow: users want a seamless experience that ushers the customer from initial interaction to achievement of a goal without interruption.  They should be thinking, “It was familiar and matched how I thought it would work,” Wiffen said, though she acknowledged some of this was easier said than done.

“It’s not a pinch of Steve Jobs here and a bit of pixie dust there,” she said. “You need to achieve a balance between the three dimensions. Design for someone, not everyone.”

Around-the-clock UX

UX designers also need to recognize that they are almost always going to be creating perpetual works in progress as opposed to finished products, said Josh Seiden, managing partner at Neo’s New York City office and the author of Lean UX: Applying Lean Principles to Improve User Experience. Whereas software designers might once have approached their work like engineers making a bridge — drafting out all the details before the actual building began — they’re now often working on one big, continuously evolving thing.

“Amazon now pushes new updates every 11.6 seconds. While you press save and undo in Photoshop, Amazon pushes software live and pulls it back if it’s a problem,” he said. “We’re not making discrete objects anymore.”

Although agile development and Lean were applied to software development to try and speed up the rate at which products change, Seiden said UX designers still need to build in enough time to iterate thoughtfully and carefully. That means testing early and often, while building in risk assumptions into your planning. The nature of apps is helpful here compared to the monolith programming projects of the past.

“In this new model, you have the opportunity to be nimble because the batch size is so small that you can build it and then figure out if it works,” he said. “In some cases, it’s kind of the only model (you have).”

Seiden recommended UX designers, particularly those managing teams, differentiate between measurements that are relatively easy, like output (creating a new log-in page) vs those like outcomes (does the log-in page drive increased registrations) which are harder. The bottom line, he added, will ultimately come down to impact (does the new login page make the company more profitable?).

“The task of the manager is to find that measurable outcome and task the team with that,” he said, while the manager should focus on impact.

The speakers at Fluxible admitted that some elements will always remain out of a UX designer’s control. Some of these they are familiar with, like unrealistic client expectations or insufficient budget. In the future, others may be more related to infrastructure, like whether the intended audience has access to electrical grids, basic government services, medicine and clean water. O’Dell said it is critical UX designers keep these things in perspective.

“We come with our own strong biases about what’s good and bad, but we can’t change the world through topography and clean, bright aesthetics,” he said, “What technology can do is create the conditions where change is possible.”

Fluxible 2013 ran Sept 14-15.