View: User Experience for Economic Success and Social Impact
By Keith Instone
Founder, Dexterity User Experience
Organizations that define, design, and deliver the best user experiences create the most successful technology innovations. This can lead to both economic success and improved human conditions.
User experience is an impression someone gets when interacting with technology.
The technology could be a product, like a smartphone, or a service, like video streaming. The product’s user interface, the elements and controls on a screen, are a key part of the user experience. But the buttons and menus that let you complete tasks are not the only things that affect your impression of the system. The appeal of the visual design, the quality of the content, and the meaningfulness of the structure of the information are just a few more of the factors that make up the total user experience.
When technology takes the form of connected devices embedded in the built-environment (“Internet of Things”), it can feel like you are interacting with the space around you. Or, it could be a completely virtual world, experienced through a contraption strapped to your head.
When you interact with a lot of products and services from the same company (such as Amazon), all of your interactions combine into your perception of the brand.
Focusing on the user experience of potential and existing customers is common in the business world, for good reason. As part of digital transformations, companies are also paying attention to the employee experience, to increase productivity, improve job satisfaction and retention, and reduce training costs.
User experience is not only about interacting with for-profit companies. Socially-driven organizations, such as churches, libraries, and government agencies, are using software to mediate their relationships with members, patrons, and residents.
Every type of organization has its own special set of users to innovate for. In a healthcare system, patients, doctors, and nurses are usually the first to be designed with. The really innovative hospitals are carefully crafting experiences for even more groups of people, like the family members of patients and office managers.
User experiences are becoming more important as software is becoming more integrated into “real life”.
Not so long ago, companies only paid a few people to sit at a desk in front of a computer screen as part of their job. Using software is common for most jobs now, at a desk or on a tablet or as part of some device made specifically to enable the work.
With smartphones in the hands of the masses, kids, grandparents and everyone in between, people can now interact with software every second of the day, perhaps to the detriment of their own well-being.
The “intelligence” of the technology is growing exponentially, from devices you can talk with, to software that can analyze huge amounts of data and diagnose a medical condition. That means the next wave of user experiences are novel and increasingly complex, requiring more advanced methodologies and expertise.
As technology has a larger impact on our daily lives, more professional rigor will help us make sure we are building technologies that are ethical and that maintain, or even improve, human dignity.
In Ohio, we should be investing more in defining, designing, and delivering innovative user experiences to grow our economy and to address social needs.
The path to innovative user experiences is different for each organization, depending on culture, industry, sector, business model, size, market forces, and other factors.
The foundation is often a human-centered mindset shift, to balance user goals with business objectives and technological possibilities. Fostering skills such as empathy, critical thinking, customer service, and creativity helps organizations be open to win-win-win solutions.
Adopting design processes, methodologies, and principles as the core way to build technology is definitely required. Carefully- and intentionally-crafted designs serve both to demonstrate to stakeholders you are building the right thing, and to help developers see how to build the thing right. There are many different user-centered and human-centered approaches to choose from, but the common aspects are: including end users throughout the process, diverging and converging on various concepts as you learn, and iterating until you get to the best solution for this moment in time.
Organizational maturity for design often starts with first treating design as only styling, then increasing design’s role to specify how it works. Design can then evolve to become a way of problem solving, and thus a key force for innovation. In the most mature organizations, design is baked into how people think, framing the discussions about goals and driving strategies.
Measuring user experiences is not easy, but once organizations start to use metrics like effectiveness, efficiency, and satisfaction, then they can begin to understand where they are at in terms of delivering quality user experiences and make decisions to improve the most strategic aspects.
As a state, Ohio needs to continue to build our user experience communities of practice so that we have the local talent that startups, corporations, government, and other organizations need. More user experience-related university programs, training, boot camps, and other professional development will enable our workforce to power the economic success and social impact required to be #1 in innovation and secure the future of Ohio.