User Democracy: Obtaining Feedback for Successful UX

Discover the significance of user feedback in optimising new products’ UX.

User democracy. It’s a rather grand term for a very grand concept in user experience (UX). It means treating all users equally when it comes to the development and design of a product. User democracy aims to create a shared and equal space when allowing users to feedback on a product, contributing the overall UX journey of its development.

However, as we’ll discover, this isn’t necessarily the go-to approach to product design. In fact, some surprisingly big names when it comes to tech companies have chosen to cast user democracy into the wind and rely on other means of integrating UX into their development and design processes. Enter Apple…

User democracy is Apple’s paradox.

In the early days of Apple, Steve Jobs transformed people’s lives by designing products we all love, using mostly his gut and his disruptive knowledge and vision about technology.

The Apple way was Jobs picking out, for instance, a specific colour he liked. And that was the colour used on the product — end of story. The product vision was restricted to his own idea about a certain user experience, where no research about the user was done, neither to find the perfect aesthetic for a product nor to find out how to solve real-world problems. In other words, people would be using products that they didn’t even know they would need, let alone have any influence on the final product itself. We can say that user democracy is the antithesis of how Apple operates. Apple, far from being a user democracy, is a user dictatorship.

“Jobs famously told customers what they wanted. He didn’t ask their opinion.” — Inside Apple, Adam Lashinsky

User dictatorship

User dictatorship is the concept of designing and developing a product using neither user research nor user feedback. The design is based only on the assumptions of a couple of people, also known as product-narcissists, who often have an obsessive personality and prefer to cast aspersions about users with their strict and limited perspective on what products should deliver. The design serves only to satisfy their egos instead of focusing on the goal of solving real users’ problems.

Inspired by Jobs’s approach to UX, lots of entrepreneurs are keen to adopt a user dictatorship approach. The difference is: they are not Steve Jobs, and their company is not Apple. Just because these entrepreneurs have years of experience in the industry, in a specific role or market, does not mean they know their users’ mental model or the constraints of how the product can be used. This means lots of money is spent and effort made and, in the end, the product’s time-to-market is slowed down. The lack of demand and interest in the product or services ultimately leads to trust issues.

As well as leading to product failure, the approach can create a vicious circle. The lack of time and money to carry out proper user research spirals out of control: no user research means no results; no results mean no money; no money means no user research, and so on and so forth…

“No user research costs nothing and gets zero results” — Jared Spool

The concept of user democracy

Knowing our users, and designing for them, brings with it many benefits. The engagement of users with the product increases customer loyalty and company revenue, which then reduces development costs and saves us from wasting resources. This avoids project failure and costly redesigns later down the line.

Companies such as Facebook, Amazon, Airbnb, IBM, and GE — just to name a few — understood the value and the return of the investment (ROI) of UX early on. That was a game-changer for some of these companies, some of whom reinvented their products to accommodate new user and market needs. Others were just start-ups that found that, with the right investment in user research and by collecting user feedback, they could engage users and markets in a faster and simpler way.

“In 10 years, a $10,000 investment in design-centric companies would have yielded returns 228% greater than the same investment in the S&P.” —

The concept of user democracy is even more important when designing critical systems. The principle is to avoid user errors when using a system with an interface, allowing users to accomplish their tasks quickly and easily, preventing confusing pathways, and taking both the user’s context and conditions of use into account.

User democracy is the sum of its parts, all of which contribute towards creating better user experiences. Let’s explore some of these.

Contextual design

Exploring the context of use is one of the most important activities of user research, especially when it refers to tragic design. Typically, this has many advantages when exploring the user workplace and environment, but also when considering a wide range of settings and scenarios about the use of the product. These conditions and environment of use should influence the way we design interfaces for critical systems. The research focuses on the use of the product and conversations with users about what is happening, in turn enabling the researcher to discover emotions about constraints and pain-points. There should be a commitment to challenging assumptions, not validating them.

Stakeholder feedback

Many of the reasons why stakeholder feedback is not helpful is because their comments don’t come at the appropriate stage of the design process. Effective stakeholder feedback is key to success, as stakeholders bring their unique perspectives to the project and their comments can help to understand even better the design problem and develop solutions aligned with business objectives. This may cause some delay in the project schedule, so it is important to set specific deadlines to receive this type of feedback because it helps to keep momentum in the ongoing project.

User testing

Often called usability testing, this is the practice of testing a system we have designed within a group of real users, observing the way they use the system to complete specific tasks. At the end, the tests help us to see how well the design works and how much users are enjoying using them. Besides that, they also help us to identify problems and their severity, and to find solutions. This activity reveals facts, and facts trump opinions when reviewing or discussing designs with clients or developers. It is usually conducted repeatedly, from early development until a product’s release so as to ensure the right product is built.

User tests reveals facts, and facts trump opinions.

Continuous user feedback

Absorbing users’ feedback continuously is critical to the product’s success because it involves the users’ real needs. Equally important is ensuring that the product is still easy to use after its first release, due to other improvements and maintenance developments. The most effective ways to adopt a continuous user feedback approach include the use of statistics and user analytics; surveying users to assess the system they are using; contextual feedback to evaluate the experience of a specific task; and holding recurring user testing sessions. Continually analysing all this quantitative and qualitative information and implementing improvements based on what you have discovered and learned is pivotal in facilitating product evolution and growth.

Conclusion

Ensuring proper feedback about products brings us closer to users and convinces them they are being heard, building up engagement. At the same time, the evolution of new user’s and business needs can be tracked. Building the right user feedback culture in the team not only propels the business to a new level, but also helps uncover unexpected opportunities.

The chances of you being like Steve Jobs are slim, and it’s very unlikely that you’re working with the next Apple. With that in mind, embrace user research and feedback from day one. That way, your company will likely prosper and take advantage of the Apple paradox — championing user democracy in a world where user dictatorship is all the rage.

Get in touch

Pedro Duarte, Head of User Experience Design at Critical Software
Designing for critical systems

uxd@criticalsoftware.com