Product design and user experience do not always go hand in hand. When it happens, an organization or a company has wasted their money and their time developing a product that users do not want to use.

Every time I am asked about “What is the benefit of measuring UX (user experience) of my product?” I will answer, “It is not about money. It is about how you create more engagement with your customers. It is a part of making your customers happy and turning curiosity into loyalty.”

If you’ve ever depressed when using a digital product — whether that is a mobile app or a website — you’re not alone. I am one among several other researchers and technologists who have a big concern about this. Any product, whether it is aimed to be commercialized or not, should be improving our life, helps us, makes us easier to solve our task at hand, and even better: giving us a new hope for a better life.

An organization — whether for profit or not — should think about creating a product that stimulates more engagement from users while helping users to solve their tasks at hand.

However, many products seem to be developed based on what companies, organizations, or developers think about us. Most of the time, this is a wrong way to develop a product. User experience (UX) research seems to be treated as a second class citizen in a product development stage. There are at least three reasons to justify my argument:

First, the user centered design (UCD) concept is not the first thing to come in mind during planning a product development. On the other hand, a product should be developed for users, or let’s say: customers — not for the developers. Swinscoe (2016) explains that some firms fail because they bring too much attention to their own products or services while they disconnect themselves from their customers. As a result, they waste their money and time developing a product that customers do not want to use.

Organizations that receive money from government and are responsible to develop public services are prone to this problem. Even worse, some organizations are measured by how many KPIs they can achieve within a year. Sadly, the KPIs include development of digital products such as information systems or mobile apps. As a result, they just focus their attention on how to achieve their own KPIs — making as many systems as possible — not to make the whole services work better. KPIs should be used as indicators, not goals. When KPIs are turned into goals, KPIs turn to poison (Marr, 2019).

Second, user experience (UX) is an intangible stuff, not a visible product that you can show off to your stakeholders like a website or a mobile app. You won’t say to your investor that you have created a specific user experience. Yes, you do not create it. You just make a design for a specific user experience. Take a similar analogy, you won’t say to your customer that you create a user experience for them. You WILL say that you have a dedicated product to them.

Since UX is an intangible stuff, it is difficult to define a specific UX criteria and UX measures of a product as success criteria during early stage of product development. In my experience, finding a right design to create specific user experience is an iterative process. You need to dive deeper into the process and you need to bring empathy to what your customers say. Consequently, making this process looks as rigid as possible is not an easy task.

As a practical example, have you ever heard a project proposal that includes a specific UX measure as success criteria during a specific time frame? I will bet, no. If you find out, it is probably 1 out of 1000 proposals. Normally, UX testing is included as a small part in the product evaluation stage, not the whole development process. This is because UX is intangible stuff, so people do not see that user centered design (UCD) is as important as the whole development process itself.

Third, you will find it difficult to directly convert the results of UX research to a measurable profit. If you develop a website or a mobile app, it is very easy to measure how much you will earn from this product or services that are offered by your product. If you create a design for a particular experience and then measure the UX, you won’t know how much you will earn if you achieve a specific target of UX measure. Remember, it is intangible. The results may differ from what you’ve thought before.

What UX research can offer to your organization?

I am an academician as well as a practitioner in UX research. I have worked with more than 60 national and international brands of South East Asian, US, Japanese, and Europeans companies. I helped them to get their digital product better through delicate research on customers’ visual perception. Every time I was asked about “What is the benefit of measuring UX of my product?” I would answer, “It is not about money. It is about how you create more engagement with your customers. It is a part of making your customers happy and turning curiosity into loyalty.”

Some insights that UX research may give you and your business include:

  1. You will know whether improvement in the product design is worth to do.
  2. You will know whether your customers will have more engagement with your product compared with your competitor’s product.
  3. You will know how much cognitive effort that users have to spend to use your product. Bigger means a straight “No” for users.
  4. You will know whether your customers have to invest a steep learning curve to get used to with your product.
  5. Tullis and Albert (2013) also said that UX research is useful to find the most important usability problem in your product. Fixing your usability problem certainly helps your users to solve their tasks faster and improves their productivity.
  6. Finally, you will know whether users will recommend your product to their peers. Remember, the strongest marketing strategy is words-of-mouth. Thus, getting a good recommendation is important to bring more values to your business.

My question is then, “Do you still think that UX research should be treated as a second class citizen in a product development stage?” I’d love to hear your answer!

References:

Marr, B. (2019). Caution: When KPIs Turn to Poison. [Online: https://www.bernardmarr.com/default.asp?contentID=1007]

Swinscoe, A. (2016). How to Wow: 68 Effortless Ways to Make Every Customer Experience Amazing. Pearson: Harlow.

Tullis, T. and Albert, B. (2013). Measuring The User Experience: Collecting, Analyzing, and Presenting Usability Metrics. 2nd Ed. Morgan Kaufmann: Waltham, MA.