VIDEO TRANSCRIPTION
Hi ladies and gentlemen. You’re watching my third video about User Experience Design. Yes. There are two others more already. And two cooking into the oven waiting. If you’ve arrived here maybe that means either you’re enjoying the useful contents or simply you’re intrigued to know who’s the assassin.
In this third part, I would like to response two questions closely related: What’s the User Experience Design final purpose? What happens if I don’t design experiences?
Let me tell you a story. Once upon a time, when most important for marketers and product managers was build a consistent customer relationship, brand was the king. As times goes by, things have changed drastically. Today, markets and products are customer-centric.
This change has provoked marketer’s interest moves progressively from prioritizing brand development strategies and creative campaigns ager to have a strong influence over user culture and opinions, to using user-centered design techniques that builds long-term impact mixed with other visualization and loyalty techniques for the short-term. So, what’s their goal? They always want to cover user needs.
We design the user experience through strategic design of solutions, services or products because we would like to find something technically feasible, economically viable and absolutely desirable by our user. To do this, we place customer-user at the center of everything we do. From that moment, we work intensively to provide coherent solutions that fulfill the rest of the desirable characteristics such as value, usefulness, usability, desirability, accessibility, credibility or findibility. Does this concept exist? Really?
Maybe that’s the most politically correct answer to UX purpose question. But deep down, we design experiences because we love to change entire industries. That’s what everyone who works in User Experience has as secret challenge.
I mentioned at the beginning the importance of User Experience design for organizations. It’s something crucial for anyone who wants to have success in a hyperconnected digital world. So, the best way to understand and quantify the UX weight in your business is explaining a beautiful story. The 300-million-dollar button tale.
Try to imagine an e-commerce online shop at just starting to walk on the web. Some of their computer engineers and programmers decide to create a registration form at the beginning of the entire process. The reason? Have a better customer experience, especially oriented for those who will repeat. If they’re going to do it anyway, why not make them easy?
Wrong. The reality was, those who entered for the first time simply didn’t want to register. At that time customers had thousand reasons to be suspicious of this new purchasing way. I don’t know what they are going to do with my data. I just want to buy a little thing. I’m sure they will call all the time to buy more things. In the other hand, even the braves who completed previously the registration process once were not happy at all because they forgot the password easily. Fifteen different accounts for each user in the customer database and plenty of negative perceptions about the experience. Even for the initial target, frequent customers.
What was the approach to solve the problem? A not complex at all one, thanks to a group of designers contributions. They suggested a simple change: a message instead of the registration button. "It’s not necessary to create an account to make purchases on our site. Simply click on Continue button to continue with the purchase. To make your future purchases even faster, you can create an account during the purchase. "
This change meant a 15 million dollars increase in sales in the first month, and 300 million dollars in the whole year. Amazing. Isn’t it?
The fact is the shitting cost derived from organization user experience bad decisions is extremely high. Because bad decisions based on assumptions are expensive. When we act during the concept phase, the UX error cost is negligible. Doing so in the planning phase is already double. Your UX mistakes during the development phase, once it has been decided to move forward, mean a change cost multiplied by twenty. If you find something wrong during the validation phase with customers and you decide to rectify, the cost is multiplied by fifty, always better than by hundred in launch phase. But, what happens when you realize there’s something wrong in the support phase? What could be the cost? Well, it’s nothing less than 500 times something you could have contemplated during a proper concept phase, applying user-centered design methodologies.
This risk causes a true experience designer hunting in the human resources market. Large organizations under extreme and cutting-edge digital transformation process are searching for these rare specimens. In Silicon Valley, always two steps ahead these seedy organizations, they’re paying real fortunes for the best ones. In fact, and according to latest statistics, the user experience designer is the fourth world most demanded technical profile.
Look at these companies founded by geeks and designers. All of them have succeeded by radically changing their industries experience.
How can you identify a good experience designer? It’s easy. They’re systemic thinkers who love to solve problems. They’ve got a deep prototyping culture. They focus on people and emotions and, above all, create added value. They’re curious, optimistic, expert, empathic, collaborative, experience-oriented and creative guys.
See you in the next video.
