The Price of Bad UX
User Experience (UX) has become a mainstream term used to describe how we interface with products in our lives, but many people still don’t understand its relation to business. An analogy I often use to help demonstrate the value of good UX and the cost of bad, is by means of architecture.
Before focusing on my career in digital, I was a designer at an architecture firm where I practiced experience design for complex spaces like stadiums and hospitals. Our process started with the architect designing a new space or remodeling an existing one. My team would then analyze the blueprints and renderings before deciding which signs and branded elements needed to be added in order to complete the experience. Our job was to capture the brand look & feel as well as ensure that visitors knew how to do important things like find concessions near their section or navigate people to the emergency room entrance fast.
For both physical and digital spaces, good UX is usually invisible, as it works like the person thinks it should to help them complete their task. This means it’s typically overlooked. Good UX is also holistic. It involves research, business, and technology working seamlessly together.
Bad user experience, on the other hand, is visible and quantifiable. In the example of a physical stadium design, bad UX can lead to the angry fan who missed kickoff because they got lost trying to find their seat.
For both physical and digital spaces, good UX is usually invisible, as it works like the person thinks it should to help them complete their task…Bad user experience, on the other hand, is visible and quantifiable.
In architecture, the hardest projects involve solving problems that need to be retrofitted into a previously failed designed solution. I once had to design signage for a massive outdoor shopping mall that had earned a notoriously bad reputation after only a few years of being open. Shoppers regularly got lost getting in and out of the parking structure. Once parked, it was difficult for them to navigate to shops and restaurants because the parking lot levels were not aligned to the mall levels. The layout of shopper entrances into the mall was not designed for the proper flow of foot traffic and many store tenants struggled to get discovered. For the most part, the bad parking lot UX was ignored by the mall until it eventually led to the business failing to attract new tenants because of bad reviews. When this connection was made to their bottom line, only then did they begin to notice its importance.
To correct the issues and save their mall, they began adding ad hoc signs as band-aids. Unfortunately, because of their inconsistency, this only added to the confusion. By the time they called us at the architecture firm to help, they had already spent a tremendous amount of internal resources in trying to fix the problem. After several months of my team conducting field studies, research, and design, we came up with several great solutions that finally turned their bad UX into a good one. After implementation, the new user experience had a big positive impact on their business, but at an extraordinarily high cost.
Lesson learned: UX is the foundation upon which everything else is built upon. If you are creating something — whether it be a physical space or a digital product, you must first ALWAYS consider the user experience. If you try to cut corners and jump straight into design and execution, it will be much more difficult and expensive to fix things down the road.
Written by Sam Cabrera at Gallardo Labs
