Subscribe to Open Source RSS feed Excellence in User Experience Design is a key differentiating factor when selecting a professional services firm to deliver solutions for your company. Purely technical solutions are fast becoming commoditized. For the same cost, many top firms can deliver something that meets your basic operational needs. One difference will be whether you end up with something that your customers or employees can effectively use.
To see how true this is- you need only to look at Apple Computer. Setting aside any discussions of desktop computer interface innovations- let’s look at the iPod. There are literally hundreds of cheap portable mp3 players on the market today. Why would anyone even buy an iPod? If it’s hard to answer that question, let’s start by answering the question: who makes, by a ridiculous margin, the best-selling mp3 player in the market? Apple. The only real difference in these media players is the interface.
At the beginning, you couldn’t even claim that Apple’s market caché was a factor. The iPod was first released near the bottom of one of Apple’s ever-undulating tides of fortune. It seems clear that the real difference was a simple and elegant user interface that people loved to use. Rolling your thumb around that “wheel” and getting the auditory feedback and peppy response while navigating around an intuitive arrangement of information turned out to be the difference-maker.
" ... if you want to come up with a winner, you cannot insist that your users meet you half way."Interface design (and more broadly, User Experience design) is one of the more exciting things to watch as the opensource phenomenon evolves. While more applications enter the space, we see increasingly overlapping functionality. For example, instead of just one application that can manage your customer relations, there are four or more. Most address the same functionality and do a comparable job of meeting your needs. Where they still differ tremendously is in how they present that functionality to the folks who use the application.
So how do you get a winner? How do you produce an “iPod”? It takes more than luck- what you need is an understanding of your users, then a plan to build something that conforms to them. This sounds so obvious, it shouldn’t need mentioning. Yet time and again businesses start with a technology, a system or information issue and build their solution around *that*. Only later, if at all, does someone try to accommodate the user.
With User-Centered design, you look at the entire problem through the lenses of your user’s eyes. This approach helps ensure that you deliver the right functionality at the right time to the right people. Instead of deciding that your system needs to connect one database to another, you step back and ask, “who exactly will use this system? what is the user trying to do here? What information will they need to accomplish this?” Only when you have complete and clear answers to these questions do you start worrying about things like which database will serve the application. You won't end up with an iPod every time, of course- but you’ll never come up with a great solution if you don’t employ at some level, a user-centered process.
In other words- if you want to come up with a winner, you cannot insist that your users meet you half way. You’ve got to deliver as much of what they want as you possibly can. Having this perspective and development attitude will get you a surprisingly long way toward success.