UX: The age of the machine reinvented

Welcome to the era of User Experience (UX). People talk about it, you read about it on the blogs, in the press. It’s everywhere. But what exactly is User Experience? Let’s start with a brief history:

“UX has evolved as a discipline, like most others, through need. Though UX is evolved as a discipline for solving problems, the birth of the discipline itself is a problem solver.”

It all started back in the 1900s — “the age of the machine”, when the factory workers had the problem of operating machines.
And who can blame them? They looked like controls for the mothership. In a need of a solution, the factory owners started thinking about optimisation, for ease of use and efficiency of the machines. After making changes to the machine’s interface and testing process with users, the results were shocking. There was a huge increase in productivity, and in turn, revenue. A small part of UX was born.

What does this story relate to you? How does UX translate to the new, modern practices in apps and websites creation? And more importantly, how does this help you increase revenue and improve your business?

Well, the same way it worked for the factory owners…

Let’s go through a real-life example, which happened in our own Despark studio…

A client approached us this year with a very specific request, to improve the experience users have on their platform. Often we will start from scratch and build solutions step-by-step, but in this case we already had a foundation to build upon and improve.

A good place to start was with our well known Discovery phase. Discovery is a product exploration and definition process we’ve developed at Despark to help our clients solve the challenges associated with launching a new product, or digitally transforming their existing business.

The first steps of the Discovery phase is to carry out a UX review of the current website/platform, where we list all current content to be filtered into content in need of improvement, and areas for adding functionality. After a few discussions, data capture, research and analysis, we agreed changes and began to sketch.

The balance we were striving for was a visual solution that is both beautiful and functional, and that is what we achieved. Using our acquired knowledge through years of practising our Discovery phase, we reshaped the layout in such a simple and intuitive way that for the user it meant they could easily use and engage with the platform.

So what did our reinvention mean for the business? It meant the team could be more productive, and here is how in the clients own words:
“The ideas you developed, the back-end python programmers, who are re-writing the code base on your simpler, more effective UX, tell me the system will now have half as many lines of code, and will be both faster and have fewer things to break.”

That was just the visual part. Following this the team used a controlled process through multiple validations of how the designs would be transformed into code.

This is a simple, yet powerful example of how UX can achieve significant business results. The platform today delivered to initial expectations with:

• Easy-to-use machine interface (new platform layout)
• Less work for the factory workers (less development efforts)
• Increase in factory revenue (less business expenses)

This is just a small part of what we at Despark do within our Discovery phase. Depending on the business needs and variations of the project, the methods we use are different, but the result — always positive. For more information or to schedule a workshop with us, get in touch on contact@despark.com.