Its all about the feels

What is User Experience Design and How Do I Think About It?

Ok, we’ve covered a great deal in the past few weeks. I believe it has brought all to this.

What is User Experience Design and How Do I Think About It?

I know that others will differ with me as to where we go next in the process, but to me, this idea is incredibly important to understand.

From Wikipedia:

“ User Experience (UX) refers to a person’s emotions and attitudes about using a particular product, system or service. It includes the practical, experiential, affective, meaningful and valuable aspects of human-computer interaction and product ownership. Additionally, it includes a person’s perceptions of system aspects such as utility, ease of use and efficiency. User experience may be considered subjective in nature to the degree that it is about individual perception and thought concerning the system. User experience is dynamic as it is constantly modified over time due to changing usage circumstances and changes to individual systems as well as the wider usage context in which they can be found.”

I define it as:

User Experience is the experience that my user has using the ecosystem that exists around the thing that I made.

As makers, we think of the thing that the user is going to use. We think about the problem that is being solved. We think about what that solution is. In my experience, makers often neglect the ecosystem and the user experience.

This ecosystem includes:

• Where is your user when they use this solution?
• How does your user find your solution?
• How does your user talk about your solution?
• How does your user talk to you about your solution?
• How does the user manage their own account or how do they manage ownership?

This is all part of the user experience. I’ll never forget the first time I really got this as a product person and not as a designer or as a developer. I had worked on a goals app in healthcare. We were discussing what the registration emails looked like. I flippantly said that we could add in the copy later. The writer for the project took me to task. Unless the copy was a considered part of the process, you will have a disjointed user experience.

She went on to explain that there was no way to write the copy well if the user experience wasn’t considered as a whole instead of as an afterthought. She was right. A good writer will be able to provide context to the user, but only if they are aware of the user experience and not as an afterthought. For the first time, I saw the whole experience. From beginning to end. Where the user is invited to use the app by a friend all the way to when they complete their goal.

So, how do you think about this? How do you identify what this ecosystem is?

Use a Starfish Exercise

• Get a BUNCH of post-it notes
• Identify what the actual action is that the user needs to complete. In the case of the goals app, they needed to successfully complete the goal that they had picked. This is the endpoint.
• Stick it on the wall. In the center. You are going to need a lot of room.
• Now, pick a user that knows nothing about your solution. How do they find out about you?.
• Write every step in between as detailed as possible.
• Now, pick another user and another path. Keep going till you have 4 to 6 paths.
• That is your ecosystem.
• Now go build it! (As an MVP of course so you can get feedback ASAP!)

Here is one example:

1. The endpoint is completing a goal.
2. Sally sees a friend share post on Facebook saying he had been sleeping better because of your product
3. Sally clicks on the link and is taken to the app’s landing page
4. Sally, watches a video demo of the application to learn more
5. Sally clicks the signup button under the 15 day free trial for the $9.99 a month service
6. Sally enters a username and password and email to signup
7. Sally receives a message that she needs to confirm her email via the email that just went out
8. Sally receives the confirmation email
9. Sally clicks on the link and confirms her email while automatically logging in
10. Now in the app, sally completes the onboarding steps that ask her to decide on some basic settings like when she would like to receive notifications and how
11. Sally chooses TXT message and 1:25 PM each day
12. Sally watches quick welcome messages and looks at some completed goals
13. The next day, Sally receives a TXT message at 1:25 PM with a link to return to the app and track her goal
14. Sally returns to the app and tracks her progress for the day
15. This continues for several days and every few days Sally receives an email with an update on her progress as well as some helpful information about what she is trying to do.
16. After two weeks, Sally completes her goal and is encouraged to share it with her friends.
17. Sally clicks the share to Facebook link and writes a couple fo sentences about how she accomplished her goal
18. Sally clicks send

Repeat with 4 more paths. Start at a Google Ad, an Instagram Post, a magazine ad and text message. Now we have an ecosystem that we know needs to include:

• Social sharing
• Payment processing and subscriptions
• User management
• TXT messaging
• All the design, development and content along the way
• AND your actual solution

Yes, it’s a LOT to think about. But this is the point. Find the user experience. Just completing a goal is not the product. If users can’t find it, be successful with it and share it, you will be all alone with your solution.

Join the Conversation

This is the from the archive of an ongoing series called Making Things That Matter. Each week I will send you an email with another step in the process of building products and launching ideas. Signup here to join the conversation.