Sookio spoke to Dom Reed, Founder of UX Doctor, to find out how good content is crucial in creating a positive experience for your users.
Hello Dom. So you knew this would be our first question: what does UX actually mean?
User Experience is a very broad discipline, but a definition I like is from the Nielsen Norman Group, which describes UX as ‘all aspects of the end-user’s interaction with the company, its services and its products’.
In practical terms, that means us UX people will attempt to make improvements in the usability, usefulness, aesthetics, brand, tone of device, delightfulness, and quality of a product. That’s a broad set of skills, so UX is really a team sport.
And how did you become an expert in UX? Tell us a bit about your background.
I took a degree in ergonomics because I loved the scientific approach to designing tools that better match human capabilities.
In the early years I focused more on the physical ergonomics of products, working at NCR on automated teller machines, and then mobile phones for Nokia over in Finland.
I suppose it became easier to work in software with the boom in the internet and digital products, so I found myself increasingly working for software companies like Redgate here in Cambridge.
I’ve spent about 20 years now as a UX practitioner. Most frequently working on technically feisty B2B applications, but equally working on some consumer products too.
I’ve run my own UX consultancy for the last three years helping a wide variety of companies nudge their UX up a notch or two.
What are the common problems that you come up against?
The biggest by far is simply not involving users in the product development process.
Many companies don’t conduct any, enough, or the right type of user research and they’re probably not doing any kind of usability testing either. Without an ever-present way to understand the user’s needs, experience and environment, bad products get built.
Most likely as a consequence of not involving users, the second most-common problem I see are products crammed full of features users don’t need or know how to use.
There’s normally a well-meaning product manager of developer somewhere who’s adding more functionality thinking they’re helping the user; or worse, hoping that adding this one additional feature will be what finally makes our product succeed.
It can be a similar story with content and websites, where a lack of empathy or understanding of what your user needs leads to poor experiences.
Do people realise there is a need for UX?
We ask this because often people know they need a new website, but don’t appreciate at first the difference between the design and the content that goes on it…do people understand what you mean by user experience and why it’s so important?
It’s a pretty rare thing to find a company that has UX baked into its genes, so people only tend to realise they need to improve their UX when they have some kind of problem.
They might notice that people aren’t getting all the way through a process, or that they’re receiving too many support requests. They might also hear the sales team complaining that the product is too complicated, or more generally, that the company is losing market share to newer, shinier competitors.
With websites, you might see people leaving the site quickly or not navigating where you expect them to. Ultimately, it might just be very quiet with your users never achieving what they came to do.
There’s certainly a lack of understanding about how you improve a UX, and many companies think it’s something they can simply sprinkle over their product. Whilst you can make improvements by tightening up the aesthetics, copy and fixing some usability bugs, the problems are often rooted in overly-complicated workflows, missing functionality, or unnecessary functionality.
How do you pinpoint which issue is causing a problem?
For example, is the wording putting people off or is it really that the website is so slow to load?
Testing with users is the simplest way to identify where the problems are. Find a small number of representative users, set them some tasks to complete with your website or product, and observe where they trip up. It’s the most amazing thing.
You’ll learn so much you’ll wonder why you haven’t been doing it forever. There are a few things to be mindful of, but tests are remarkably simple to carry out and you only need about 5-7 users to uncover your most serious problems.
Seasoned UX people will often be able to spot some of the problems without testing if they’ve seen them many times before. There are also systematic processes you can follow to uncover usability problems, like heuristic analyses.
What are the main elements of design that make for a good – or a bad – user experience?
In most user interfaces, the main goal is clarity. It needs to be very clear where you are, what you can do, and how you go about it.
To achieve clarity you need a relentless focus on stripping away what’s unnecessary so that the important stuff isn’t hidden. That means simple, unambiguous language and a good use of empty space and contrast so your eye lands where it needs to.
If you achieve that clarity, a user feels in control of their task and isn’t made to feel stupid by misinterpreting what they’re seeing. The interface appears informative, simple, and quick to take in.
Read the rest of this post over on the Sookio blog.
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