The User Experience Health Check

THE
USER
EXPERIENCE
HEALTH Quantify
the quality
of your

CHECK user experience

UX RESEARCH & WEB ANALYTICS @ SXSW INTERACTIVE, 2011 • AUSTIN GOVELLA, UX RONIN • AUSTIN@GRAFOFINI.COM • WWW.GRAFOFINI.COM

WE MEASURE
EXPERIENCE BY
COMPARING OUR
EXPECTATIONS
TO SIMILAR
EXPERIENCES.

A STORY ABOUT BLUE CLOWNS


COMMON DESIGN PROBLEMS

✴ No common design language

✴ No common way to evaluate
design decisions

Marty Neumeier, The Designful Company, p26.


THE UX HEALTH CHECK QUANTIFIES THE QUALITATIVE EXPERIENCE

✴ Applicable to any product or
service
✴ Measures detailed feature sets
or very generalized notions of
service.
✴ Introduces a shared language for
teams to discuss elements of an
experience.


A STORY ABOUT
DIFFERENT MOUNTAINS


ANOTHER PROBLEM: DESIGN-DRIVEN INNOVATION

If you’re not on the
right mountain, your
altitude doesn’t matter.


ANOTHER PROBLEM: SCALE

If you don’t have the
thing to measure, you
can’t measure it.


HOW THE HEALTH CHECK WORKS

1. Deconstruct the service
(list and chunk)
2. Choose benchmarks
(your competitors)
3. Establish scoring criteria
(the scale)

DECONSTRUCT THE SERVICE

Break down the parts of the product or service
to a level they can be looked at in isolation
and still be comparable to examples
elsewhere.

1. By product/services in a(n eco)system
2. By user mental model
3. By generic/universal mental models
(consumption and service cycles)


CHOOSE BENCHMARKS

Your competitors are
not always in your
market or your
medium.

SET TARGETS

• Go through each elements and ask the
question “how good do we need to be at this
to meet our business goals and user
expectations?”
• Involve core team of people actively making
decisions about the UX
• Get agreement on the targets through
conversation. Everyone is empowered to
disagree and defend their perspective


SCORE YOURSELF

Score Rating Considerations
< 30
Doesn’t meet core user needs or usability
Problem Area standards: it’s broken!

30 > Meets basic user needs; isn’t broken ; the
Functional bare minimum

50 > Parity with Meets user expectations across industry
Competitors offerings

70 >
Very Good Better than several competitors

80 >
Exceeds the main competitors, almost as
Better Than Most good as the market leader

90 >
Best In Class Market differentiator


SCORE YOURSELF

• Get agreement on the ﬁnal score through
conversation.
• Everyone is empowered to disagree and
defend their perspective
• Everyone should be versed in existing
information to help decision- making
(usability evaluations, user feedback, etc)


TALLY UP AND COMMUNICATE


WHY?

WE WANT
TO BUILD
A BETTER
EXPERIENCE.

THE FIRST PROBLEM

We don’t build a better
experience. Our
organizations build a
better experience.

MARTY NEUMEIER ASKS THE KEY QUESTION IN 2009

“...if design is such a powerful tool...
if economic value is increasingly
derived from intangibles like
knowledge, inspiration, and
creativity, why don’t we hear the
language of design echoing through
the corridors?”


PETER DRUCKER PROVIDES THE ANSWER IN 1967

“Intelligence, imagination, and
knowledge are essential
resources, but only
eﬀectiveness converts them
into results. By themselves,
they only set limits to what can
be attained.” Peter Drucker, The Eﬀective Executive, p 2.


ROGER MARTIN SUGGESTS A SOLUTION

“Organizations will need to
BE designers. They’ll need
to think like designers, feel
like designers, work like
designers.”


WE WANT
TO BUILD
A BETTER
ORGANIZATION.

HOW?

WHY IT’S MAGIC: VISION AND PROGRESS

Communicate progress
and vision in a way
everyone can
understand.

WHY IT’S MAGIC: COMMON DESIGN LANGUAGE

Create a common
design language. Point
back to your service’s
story.

WHY IT’S MAGIC: EVOLVES WITH LANDSCAPE

Be agile, automatically
adjust to changes in the
competitive landscape.


WHY IT’S MAGIC: COST PRIORITY CHANGES

Understand the cost
and beneﬁts of
business decisions.


WHY IT’S MAGIC: OUTBOARD MEMORY

Place design decisions
somewhere you won’t
forget them.


WHY IT’S MAGIC: LEARN

Your learn when you
evaluate prediction
against performance.


PETER DRUCKER SUMS IT UP

“What gets
measured gets
managed.”

The User Experience Health Check

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