It’s always a user problem (a slight ramble)

I don’t even know where to start on this one.

I recently had a pretty big presenation. It was a magnificent disaster. I’ve decided to regard it as a very successful dada event (Dada on Wikipedia).

From that event, one thing really bugs me. The phrases “We’ll make it look nice later.” and “Well, that group does the user experience when you’re done.”

I’m employed by a technology company. I’ve done all sorts of work, from very straightforward MarCom stuff though all manner of digital marketing. But currently, I am, as my Parisian friend Julien put it “working in the basement.”

As the king of all UX at this place, I’ve been working very hard to get a single, simple point across : Everything we do, is done for the user.

Now, this is ripe for argument from all manner of code geek, account lizard, and those strange animated business suits that wander around.

They will say things like “it’s all about cost reduction for the client” or “the collaboration software enables rapid deployment of robust technologies” or some other bullshit.

Here’s the gist tho.. if all these things are so convoluted and require all manner of help from outside groups, then the client is going about the business wrong and should really just close up the majority of their online presence. It’s obviously too difficult to manage.

But we all know that’s not the real problem. The real problem is that ultimately, we want to keep on communicating with users, we want them to love us and our products, we want new and shiny things on our sites.

So it always ends up back at the user. What we do is for them.

Now, back to my original thought….

In the past few years, I’ve helped develop a few key products for my company. I’ve stressed that all the work we do towards technology is useless unless it results in something amazing when it’s seen by a user.

So I start at the user and work backwards. “What I want to do” is the basis for “How will this work”

Luckily, I have a team of very smart technologists who have similar views of changing the world, or at least having some monument erected in their name at a later date.

So… NO! it doesn’t get pretty after the fact. It gets developed from the lowest point of origin into something that was always designed to be seen, touched, smelled, felt, and used by someone.

One group is not responsible for UX, everyone is. You clients of freakish nature may have forgotten how to think about your users, but I have not.

Object, Action + Method

I was talking with a friend about car configurators, which is a topic I spend a lot of time on.

He was discussing this idea about inline config, having a small window open at specific times and ask the user to add or select an option.

In essence, a very good idea, I have several prototype screens for this sort of thing.

The problem became that the designers were struggling to figure out how the window operated, how it minimized, how the user re-activated it, and so on.

Here’s the root of the problem : They devised a Method that did not support the Object or the Action.

The super-duper Tigerstripe Approach tells us every task-based design problem has three main components. In this case they were The Car (The Object), letting users do partial configs (The Action) and the small floating window (The Method).

When one starts with a method, as many people like to do (”Dude, what if it just popped up there randomly!”), problems usually arrive.

Similar problems arise when a site-based method or set of rules is used inflexibly for all manner of data display or user interaction.

Here’s a tip, go in the right order :
Q: What are we talking about?
A: The Object

Q: What is the user response we want to promote?
A: The Action

Q: What is the best way for the user to interact with the system?
A: The Method

Save yourself some grief, there’s a reason UX is a different discipline that UI.

Hub it out bitch

As a fellow automotive IA, I was on the front lines of this scaling problem. Which asks a larger question, why does everything have to be on the same hub?

Why does a vehicle brand have to organize all the vehicle lines within the same site? It’s logical from a business point of view but too risky to make everything tiered and cumbersome to navigate. The hard part is getting the user experience to match the branding of the vehicle versus the car manufacturer’s holistic brand version of one site fits all.

Car organization should remain at the database level abstracted to the user. Keep the site simple and emphasize a “strong center” which is focused on supporting the user’s interests during the research phase.

Create an engaging (shell) introduction on determining who your user is, invest in an interaction model that is smart, easy and helps users frame guided factors on comparing and evaluating vehicle particulars, if they want more choices they’ll opt for it. Add behind the scenes business logic when referral sites push them to your site. So many ways to drive content into how a site should be organized.

From there you can anticipate and measure these preference-paths into scenarios that inform what categories match users interests. Get crazy and tell these big company cultures to hub it out, bitch!