The document discusses the rise of user experience (UX) design and how it is becoming a key differentiator for companies. UX design shifts the focus from products to the interactions between users and products. It is increasingly important as companies compete to create intuitive experiences for customers. The document also discusses how UX design will continue to evolve from designing individual experiences to designing entire customer journeys through the approach of service design.

1. The UX
Factor
User experience design, or UX, is changing
the way brands connect with customers,
and is increasingly becoming the difference
between success and failure.
Words LILLIAN TONG
Illustrations EUNYOUNG LIM/THE ILLUSTRATION ROOM

2. Good UX
Makes
Good
Business
In 1988, systems engineer and consultant Tom Gilb wrote in his
book, Principles of Software Engineering Management, that every
dollar invested in UX yields a return of between $2 and $100.
This observation has never been more relevant. “Good design
is good business,” says Margaret Gould Stewart, director of
product design at Facebook. “Brands are looking to create
long-term relationships with customers. Strong brands
understand that the experiences people have discovering,
purchasing and using their products or services are the critical
foundation to those relationships. Companies that invest in
designing great experiences will be much better positioned
to attract and retain loyal customers.”
Once, a company’s online presence might just have been
a channel for connecting customers to the products. Now, the
user’s digital experience of a brand itself often becomes a key
i
t wasn’t so long ago that design meant logos, posters and furniture — things visually pleasant
and functionally useful. But over the past 10 years, we’ve witnessed the rise of a new kind of
design, one that shifts the focus from ‘products’ to the space between users and products or,
in other words, users’ interactions with products.
We can thank Apple for that shift. Following the staggering success of iPhone (which
helped make Apple the world’s most valuable company), ‘user experience design’, or UX, has
become increasingly important, especially as companies compete to discern, imitate and
hopefully surpass the design elements that have made Apple’s products so successful. Fusing hardware
and software, the iPhone’s touchscreen was revolutionary, fostering an ever-closer relationship between
users and product, and creating an intuitive experience that had never existed before. Simply put, its
success made explicit the power of design and, more specifically, UX.
Thiswasreinforcedrecentlywhentheworld’snumberonejobsite,Indeed.com,receivedmorethan6000
UXjobpostingsinatwo-weekperiod,andwhenMarkRolston,thegame-changingchiefcreativeofficerof
leadingdesignfirmFrog,leftthecompanyafter19yearstostarthisownUXventure,Argodesign.Andthen
there’sthepurchaseofoneofthefirstUSUXdesignagencies,AdaptivePath,byUSbankCapitalOne,making
peoplewonderwhyafinancialinstitutionwouldbeinterestedinaUX-focuseddesignfirm.Whatdoesitmean?
“Itmeanswemadeit—‘we’beingtheuserexperienceindustry,”saysScottSullivan,AdaptivePath’s
experiencedesigner.“Itwasn’tthatlongagothatIwasgrovellingforclientsandtryingtoexplainwhatUXwas
andwhytheyshouldpayustodoit.Codeissomethingyoucanseeandtouch,visualdesignissomethingyou
canseeandtouch,hell,evenusabilityissomethingthat’salotmoretangiblethantheproductstrategywork
weweretryingtosell.Butit’sdifferentnow.We’vecomeupintheworldandgotourselvesaseatatthetable,
provingthatexperiencedesignisimportantenoughtoheavilyinvestinandrelyonasakeydifferentiator.”
130 V I R G I N A U S T R A L I A M A R C H 2 0 1 6

3. value of a service or product and also
informs a company’s core business model.
One compelling example is Uber, a
technology company that connects users
with available drivers. The idea of paying
a stranger for a ride isn’t anything new
but, through the app, Uber offers users an
integrated experience, which is precisely
the core value of the product. From
finding a driver, to paying the fee, to rating
the service, each touch point of the
experience is purposefully designed to
deliver what users need at each moment.
As a result, customers rapidly adopted this
innovative model in their daily life — for
securing a car service, of course, but also
to the extent that Uber’s UX design helped
shape consumer demand for similar
experience design in other industries.
According to a report from Walker, a customer intelligence
consulting firm, by 2020 user experience may well overtake
price and product as the key brand differentiator and one
of the most valuable competitive advantages of a business.
From users browsing the site, to physically visiting a store,
to commenting on the customer service on Twitter, every
interaction between a brand and its customers is an opportunity
for UX to better communicate that brand’s value to its audience.
But these opportunities also create great challenges. Sarah
Morris, user experience director at brand consultancy Wolff
Olins, points out: “User experience is the mix of content,
functionality, behaviour and visual design. Brand needs to
influence all of these components, but it doesn’t currently.
There’s still the leftover behaviour of treating a brand as the
visual layer that gets applied at the end. At Wolff Olins we
endeavour to make it a critical influencer right from the start.
We have tools and we create content that helps our clients and
designers get to the strategic heart of the brand. We also help
our clients identify the moments along a customer’s journey
where it’s most appropriate for the brand to come to life.”
In the future, branding will become less about corporate
identity and more about the user experience delivered by
products and services. User experience, indeed, becomes
the brand, while users, through their choices and opinions
(communicated via social media or in person), will take an ever
more prominent role in marketing a brand’s offerings. As Rob
Giampietro, creative lead at Google Design New York, notes:
“A website or app is often the most expansive use of a brand
system. I think down the line it’ll be impossible to think of one
without the other. UX is part of brand and brand is part of UX.”
We can see this with Twitter. Its web and mobile app rewires
users’ daily habits of reading news and becomes a marketing
tool that is indispensable for most companies. By empowering
users with a new channel of communication, Twitter’s user
experience quite simply defines the essence of its brand.
The only issue is that a company’s mission and brand purpose,
which are often big and abstract, can be difficult to incorporate
into user experience design. It requires not only a great design
team, but also tools and guidance for designers to engage with
the brand’s core values.
When asked how Facebook helps its employees understand
and connect more with the people using its product, Stewart
says: “We invest in a variety of ways to cultivate a deeper
ItAll
Starts
From The
Cultural
Level
133M A R C H 2 0 1 6 V I R G I N A U S T R A L I A

4. understanding of what it feels like to
be one of the 1.5 billion people using
Facebook around the world. We
encourage those people who speak a
second language to use our products in
that language to help us ensure that our
translations are intuitive and accurate.
We encourage teams to participate in
international research for the many
countries around the world where the
Facebook community exists. It’s all about
seeing our products through other
people’s eyes, as best we can, so we can
design the best possible experiences for
everyone around the world.”
Ten years ago, it was hard to imagine
everyone would be interacting with their
mobile phones every few minutes. Yet,
the length and frequency with which
we engage with them is increasing, and
advanced portable connected technology
is permeating almost all aspects of life.
The fact we spend more and more time
with our electronic gadgets shows
design’s vast impact on our lives, as digital
architectures and layouts pervasively
influence behaviours and habits.
But this trend has meant we have
fewer direct personal interactions and
has left people feeling less connected to
the world around them. Material Design
is Google’s new project to make the user
experience across its services more
consistent. It studies what happens across
Google screens and apps, and brings
digital interaction into our analogue world
by attempting to imbue the digital
products of UX design with the intuitive
feeling of physical objects.
“We wanted to focus and unify
interface design, especially for mobile
screens, where space is constrained. We
started wondering what our software
products would look like if they were
made under real-world conditions of
light and shadow. We realised the layers
of an interface are a lot like sheets of
paper,” says Giampietro.
Using the natural world as a point
of reference for designing the digital one,
Material Design translates solutions from
mid-century graphic design for print into
a visual design and facilitates interactions
that, at their best, can feel as natural as
gravity. The aim is to create a more
unified experience across all platforms.
ce esign
Service
Design
Becomes
The Next
Design
Imperative
If the past decade moved from focusing on product design
to experience design, then what’s next? As more enlightened
brands strive to craft the entire user experience both on and
offline, from innovating and branding to measuring outcomes,
the focus of design is going beyond discrete products to a
holistic redesign of the entire customer journey. That means
‘service design’ becomes the new discipline to facilitate
a customer experience that is both engaging for users and
rewarding for companies.
“At Capital One we’re shifting away from experience design,
which generally comes with an emphasis on individual digital
touch points, and exclusively working on service design,” says
Sullivan. “Working in service design is advantageous for a
number of reasons, my favourite being that we have access
to end-to-end experiences and more freedom to dig into the
roots of products and services without being [restricted to]
screens and applications.”
As UX aspires to mimic the material feel and emotional
heft of real objects, and informs — and increasingly becomes
— the essence of its brand, service design will push experience
design to live outside our digital screens, potentially leading
to a new standard for the success of businesses.
134 V I R G I N A U S T R A L I A M A R C H 2 0 1 6