Using a Web site for the first time is an awful lot like going on a first date. It's a one-on-one interaction, and it doesn't always go as planned. Consider the difference between these two first dates: Bachelor #1 spent most of the night talking about things that he thought were important, asked a lot of prying questions for no apparent reason, and kept forgetting your name. Bachelor #2 tried to anticipate your needs, seemed interested in your perspective, and helped you decipher the menu at the French restaurant. Which bachelor would you prefer to date a second time?

February 12, 2003
URL:http://www.drdobbs.com/all-those-opposed/184411634

In any commercial enterprise, Web sites exist for one of two reasons: to help the organization save money, or to help it make money. In both cases, the user experience can make the difference between a successful site and a failure. An intranet can save you money—but only to the extent that it helps employees find information and perform tasks more easily and more efficiently than they can through other means. Putting detailed product support information on your site can save you money by reducing the burden on your customer service department—but only if users can find the information they need.

Providing a positive user experience on a public Web site can help a company make money even if the company doesn't sell its products directly over the Web. Good experiences encourage customer loyalty; sites that are structured to anticipate user needs and facilitate user tasks convince customers that your organization is interested in, and concerned with, their satisfaction and success.

User-Centered Design

Whether your site is for your customers, your business partners, or your employees, you will always be more successful when you take user needs into account. Fortunately, the process of accounting for user needs is a lot more straightforward than the dating process. In fact, the tools and techniques involved in designing Web sites with users in mind—user research, persona and scenario development, and usability testing, among others, have proven remarkably effective.

We have seen, in a few short years, the rise of user-centered design as the leading solution to the problems involved in creating successful Web sites. A growing number of books, articles, and seminars have educated Web designers and developers about the importance of user experience. So why aren't Web sites getting any better?

Obstacles

Most Web sites are not designed. They are, at best, contrived—roughly patched together using a mix of half-understood guidelines, imitations of approaches taken by other sites, and personal preferences masquerading as "common sense." It seems as if, for every Web developer who "gets it," there are ten other people—managers, engineers, even other designers—who don't get it.

The main problem with these "undesigned" sites is that their strategic value to the business is never clearly defined. Too many companies are on the Web because they're afraid of being seen as out-of-step; or they're excited about newfound possibilities, but they don't know what they have to gain from employing Web technologies. In the absence of a defined strategy, every possible application for the site becomes equally important, and the overall user experience becomes a blurry mess.

Whether providing a good user experience saves you money or makes you money, the result is the same: an essential competitive advantage. When the strategy of your site is closely aligned with your business strategy, making the site successful helps make the business successful. If your competitors are investing in user-centered design while you continue doing things the way you always have, you'll soon find yourself falling behind: in customers, in productivity, and in revenue.

Refuting Common Objections

Introducing a user-centered design approach can sometimes be difficult for an organization. Objections inevitably come up as the organization wrestles with the best way to create a successful user experience. Let's take a closer look at some of the most common objections.

"We know our users—they're just like us." It's easy to fall into the trap of thinking that what works for you will also work for your users. But, as much as you might have in common with your users, their needs, circumstances, and behaviors will differ from yours in crucial ways. It's not a question of whether the site works for you. After all, as the site's developers, you know more about the site than anyone. The question is whether the site works for your users.

"We know our users—we've done all this market research." Market research is great, and it can be an undeniably valuable tool in the user experience design process. But it won't do you any good if there is no user experience design process that determines how to apply your research. Relying on your engineer's ability to recall relevant research findings while he's in the middle of coding the interface is a very poor substitute for explicitly planning the user experience of your site.

"All we have to do is follow this list of guidelines." The demand for easy shortcuts that solve difficult problems seems insatiable. Selling lists of such rules of thumb has proven a profitable enterprise for a number of self-appointed gurus. But the promise of a secret formula offered by these guidelines is rarely fulfilled. The variety of problems and solutions in Web user experience design is so broad that general rules invariably fall short. Checklists are fine for inspecting a finished product; they're nearly useless for designing one from scratch.

"The interface is trivial compared to the technical work we need to do." Technical problems can certainly seem complicated when you're planning a Web project. But even the most difficult technical problems yield to analysis and careful consideration. The same level of consideration is necessary to crack user experience problems. In the case of user experience, you have to contend with many factors that are not so easily identified or even named as the factors involved in a technical problem—simply because user experience problems fundamentally come down to human cognition and human behavior. Figuring out technology is easy compared to trying to figure out people.

"It takes experts to understand user behavior. We don't have that kind of money." It's true that you can spend a fortune on research and analysis of user behavior if you are so inclined: field studies, ethnographic research, and contextual inquiry methods can require some pretty rarefied expertise. But adopting a user-centered approach doesn't require such lavish expenditures. Taking a day to talk with a few users over the phone can provide a wealth of useful insights into their attitudes and expectations. And you don't have to have any specialized equipment or an advanced academic degree to be successful.

"It doesn't take experts to understand user behavior. We'll figure it out as we go." Successful user experience design calls for understanding the nature of the problem before you set about constructing a solution. If you don't understand the problem, the only way you can solve it is by accident. User experience problems tend to be so complex that the odds are against you from the start if you expect to stumble upon the solution. It doesn't take experts, but it does take a willingness to plan your approach. Common sense alone isn't enough to guide you to the correct answer.

"We'll fix it in QA." When there are problems with the user experience of a site, they often aren't as easy to isolate as the kind of coding errors that the quality assurance process is designed to catch. User experience issues are frequently more systemic, requiring rethinking of fundamental aspects of the entire site. And because QA comes near the end of the overall development process, there's rarely time to undertake the kind of large-scale design reworking that's often needed. (Besides, your QA team has plenty to do as it is, without trying to identify user experience issues.)

"We can't make room for it in the schedule." In the heat of development, it's easy to forget that the launch of the site is not the end of the process—it's the beginning. Your attentiveness to the calendar is unlikely to mean very much when the resulting site isn't meeting user expectations. The amount of time you spend on user experience at the beginning of the project is nowhere near the amount you'll spend retooling the site and taking another blind stab at meeting user needs. The ultimate success of the project is not about getting to launch. It's about what happens after that.

Reaching Accord

Creating a successful user experience isn't simple common sense, but it isn't rocket science either. User-centered design isn't a methodology or a collection of tools and techniques. It's a way of thinking about how you design the site so that your decisions are rooted in an understanding of the underlying strategy. It's a philosophy that seeks to remind us: If you're only looking at the problem from your own point of view, you're only going to be, at best, half right.

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