Why UX Fails: The Critical Importance of Staying Focused on Your Primary Customer
One of my favorite and most impactful products I worked on was Adobe Premiere Elements. This was a video editing program and the consumer version of Adobe’s powerful Premiere Pro. Our small team of engineers, a Product Manager/Marketer, a UXR, and I were all amateur video editors. To better understand the ins and outs of video editing, we all shot lots of footage and made homemade movies. Since Premiere Elements wasn’t released yet we had to use Premiere Pro, and through the process we all became very good at it.
This presented a challenge; we were no longer amateur video editors, and we had to separate ourselves from the product we were building and keep in mind that it wasn’t for us. The primary customers of Premiere Elements were people making movies only a few times a year, like a dad making a movie for their kid’s birthday. The secondary customers were hobbyists making movies more often but who didn’t require Premiere Pro’s power. The third customer was that same dad who wanted to do more and needed more features like the hobbyists.
The foundation of Premiere Elements' success was accurately defining our customers (through market research) and their goals and use cases (through user research) and painstakingly adhering to them throughout multiple versions. We had to ruthlessly prioritize the features and workflows for our primary customer and bravely fend off an occasional VP who would question why we omitted a specific feature that he is used to using in Premiere Pro.
Our opportunity for failure was to design Premiere Elements for ourselves and our VPs by making a simpler version of Premier Pro. We succeeded by designing a vastly different product that was perfect for our customers.
How bad UX happens
Before we dive in, we should define ‘bad’ user experience so we’re not using it subjectively. At its most basic, a bad user experience is when users don’t understand what to do and how to do it (you know you’re here when you start considering adding an ‘onboarding walkthrough’). Let’s discuss how products end up here.
There are three reasons this happens:
1. The product is not defined from the customer’s perspective
Most teams understand the importance of having a clear product definition before beginning development. Still, the real challenge lies in defining the product from the customer’s perspective rather than being influenced by competition, growth, or finance. An even bigger challenge is staying true to this definition throughout the entire design and development process.
At its foundation, product definition involves understanding who the product is for, what problem it solves, and an initial hypothesis on how it will solve that problem. While business rationale, success metrics, and go-to-market strategies are also necessary, they cannot replace the fundamental focus on the customer. It’s not always necessary to run design sprints or UX workshops; the goal is to quickly and accurately answer these essential questions.
2. The primary customer is not well-defined or is misrepresented
Define your primary customers based on their behaviors, not just demographics. Recognize that even if you are a user of the product you’re building, you are not the primary customer, and neither is anyone else on the development team.
It is crucial to keep the primary customer in focus from start to finish and evaluate all product decisions based on them. Too often, teams lose sight of the primary customer shortly after identifying who they are. To succeed, teams must continually prioritize the primary customer, their behavior patterns, and main use cases.
3. Teams fail to make the right UX trade-offs
Products become overwhelming and overly complex when they lose focus on optimizing for the primary users’ main use cases. To create a product that makes a lasting impact, it’s crucial to make these critical use cases as simple and seamless as possible. It requires making difficult trade-offs and consistently deprioritizing less frequent use cases.
Products don’t succeed by having more and more functionality. Products succeed when users feel that the product they are using is the best way to accomplish what they need. Iconic products like the iPod or Nest succeeded not by having more features than their competitors but by being exponentially more enjoyable. Never compromise the product’s primary purpose to accommodate less critical or more advanced features.
“Technology is great until they start adding more features.” — My Mom
What to do differently
Keep your attention on what truly matters: the primary customer and their experience with your product. Stay focused on their goals, needs, and main use cases, which were defined in the early stages of the process.
Continuously create opportunities to observe your primary customers as they use your product to ensure you are solving their most significant problems and keep learning from it to fuel your design intuition.
Keep asking yourself what the right trade-offs are to make the UX simple.
Remember that you and your team are not the primary users—your customers are. Keep their needs at the forefront, and let their experience guide your decisions.
For more on product and design strategy, connect with VC Design Lab.
