2. Base on the article
Winning in the Marketplace: How Much User
Experience Effort Does It Take?
UX Matters, November 22, 2010
http://www.uxmatters.com/mt/archives/2010/11/w
3. Put Your Customers First!
• User experience encompasses all aspects
of your users’ interactions with your
company, its services, and its products
• Prioritizing user advocacy from the
beginning of your product design process
ensures their needs are foremost in all
design decisions.
4. Deliver on Your Promise
To meet your customers’ needs and deliver
simple, elegant solutions that are a joy to use,
you must:
– Deliver more than a checklist of features
– Have a deep understanding of your target users
– Have business objectives that provide clear metrics
for your product’s design
– Know what motivates your users and manage their
expectations
– Consistently representing your organization’s brand
and message
5. Today’s Marketplace
• Solutions need to be easy to use
• Technology is ubiquitous or invisible
• Solutions increase customer effectiveness
and efficiency and reduce the need for
training and support
• Solutions increase customer adoption and
retention and increased market share and
revenue
6. How Much?
• But how much research, design, and
usability testing does it take to ensure your
product wins in the marketplace and
meets your business objectives?
• Every company has different needs,
depending on its size, the maturity of its
market, and the lifecycles of particular
products.
7. Large Companies
• Many large technology companies like Apple have
invested heavily in user experience for many years
• Successful companies have well-established UX
departments and have set the standard for ease of use
• Such companies have defined many aspects of the user-
centered design process we follow today
• These companies have the capital to make big
investments in user experience and reap the benefits.
They can attract the best talent, invest in resources, and
take as much time as they need to develop elegant
solutions
8. Small-to-Medium Businesses
• Must balance your user experience investment against
other company needs
• Some companies have made user experience a part of
their core corporate strategy and it has paid off for them.
But you need to answer these questions:
– Where does user experience fit in your corporate strategy?
– Where does it belong in your organization?
– How does user experience integrate with your product’s overall
lifecycle?
• You must ask yourself: Is our marketplace mature,
commoditized, and moving at the speed of large
institutions, or is it new, innovative, and moving at the
speed of the Internet?
9. Mature Markets
• Technology solutions in mature markets become
commodities
• Consumers take such products’ basic features and
performance for granted and look at price, value,
appearance, and convenience as distinguishing factors
• Winning in mature markets requires a company to view
user experience as a distinct and important corporate
competence
• To win in a mature marketplace, you must get the basics
right—the right price, value, and convenience—along
with providing an elegant solution that is effective,
efficient, and exceeds customers’ expectations
10. New Markets
• New markets are fast and innovative
• You must be agile and adapt to rapid
changes in your market space
• This is where having a strong
understanding of your product’s market
and the needs of its target users are
essential for you to have a chance at
success
11. Understand Your Market,
Customers, and End-users
The first step in developing solutions that are easy-
to-use is to understand your customers’ and
users’ needs in context of your market and
competition:
– Define the problem your product must solve and
design an optimal solution
– Understand the strengths and weaknesses of
competitors’ solutions in comparison to your own
– Determine how various customers’ workflows and
users’ tasks are similar and different from one another
12. Short and Long-Term Product
Strategies
• For mature markets, you have more time to consider
your strategy
• In fast-moving, new markets you execute to your short-
term strategy as it evolves
• Companies who have been in a market for a while—and
may have several offerings in their product portfolio—
should consider several factors when defining their
strategy:
– Is this a first-to-market product?
– Is it a major release for a mature product?
– Is your goal just to gain a foothold in the market with your current
product, then replace it with your next version or even make it a
component of a larger solution?
– Will your new product cannibalize another product in your portfolio?
13. User Research
• User research may include:
– surveying customers and users
– interviewing customers and users
– observing users using their current solution
• Develop diagrams of various users’ workflows,
noting where they are similar or different
• Based on your findings, group your customer
and user types by similar roles, and create
profiles or personas that synthesize users’ skills,
patterns, and goals to better understand their
needs
14. User Research for Mature and
New Markets
• Companies in mature markets may not need to conduct
user research to better understand their users. They may
already have a good understanding of them
– However, when they do conduct this type of research, they
typically can take their time, be thorough, and use the data they
obtain to create a roadmap for many years ahead
• Companies in new markets must be more agile,
conducting just enough generative research to come up
with good design concepts and get their product
solutions to market quickly. They should understand that
their market data will most likely change, perhaps
requiring them to take measures to rapidly modify their
design solutions during product development
15. Design
• Developing prototypes and reviewing them with
target customers and users is key to designing
easy-to-use solutions
• You must spend some time validating workflow,
navigation, information grouping, information
hierarchy, terminology, labels, and interactions
to ensure they meet the needs of the market and
your users
• Your understanding of various customers’
needs, users’ workflows, and content overlaps
and differences determines your design direction
16. Involve Engineers Early
• Share user research with the technology
architects and engineers on your product team
• Confirm the feasibility of your user interface
prototypes with Engineering as early as possible
to enable them to provide the best technical
solution. Many times, engineers know of
components or pieces of technology that can
reduce or eliminate the need to develop a new
component or screen—enhancing a workflow’s
ease of use.
17. Low-Fidelity Prototypes and
Information Architecture
• Develop low-fidelity prototypes such as paper
prototypes or wireframes to facilitate content
layout
• Their focus should be on a product’s information
architecture and information design—
determining the correct labels, content
groupings, hierarchies, and navigation
• These early, rapid prototypes should be devoid
of graphics and color to narrow the focus to
information design
18. Visual Design and
Interaction Design
• Once you’ve completed the information design,
add visual elements such as color, fonts, icons,
buttons, and other graphic elements, creating
medium-fidelity prototypes to explore your
solution’s interaction design
• Interaction Design defines the behavior of how
your customers and users interact with your
solution. Interaction design is focused on making
products more useful, usable, and desirable
19. Rapid Prototyping with
Customers and Users
• Work with your customers and users to conduct reviews
of your prototypes to obtain their feedback
• If you are in a mature market, with a longer product
release cycle, you can wash, rinse, and repeat as
necessary
• But if you need to move quickly through your
development cycle, do as much as you can to facilitate
development, and do as much as you can in parallel for
the next release
• There is always a next release, and you have the
opportunity to learn things now that you can apply to
later releases.
20. Usability Evaluation
• Usability evaluation assesses the degree to which users
can operate a system and their efficiency and
satisfaction
• Such evaluations validate that tasks are easy to
complete—and test an application’s ease of use, not the
intelligence of users
• If tasks are difficult or impossible to complete, a system
is not easy to use
• Large companies in mature markets may have several
usability labs and teams of specialists who are constantly
testing design solutions with users
• Smaller, more agile companies may have someone who
is doing usability testing, but not with the same rigor or
formality as a larger, well-established company would
21. Effort by Release Type
Type Release UCD Recommendations
New 1.0 • Substantial market, customer, competitive, and user research
• Substantial validation of workflows with customers
• Substantial user interface design
• Substantial usability testing with users
Major X.x • Market, customer, competitive, and user research, as necessary
• Validation of workflows with customers
• User interface design
• Usability testing with users
Minor x.X • No market, customer, competitive, or user research unless absolutely
necessary
• Minimal validation of workflows with customers
• Minor user interface design
• Minor usability testing with users
Update x.x.X • No market, customer, competitive, or user research
• No validation of user interface workflows with customers unless
absolutely necessary
• Minimal user interface design
• Minimal usability testing with users
