User Experience Demystified

“User Experience” is everywhere. As an emerging formal discipline, its degree programs, best practices, vocabulary and models have made User Experience (note self-important uppercase) feel terribly significant, but totally inaccessible.  The province of techies and experts.

But before there were “users”, there were customers and consumers—the regular people who bought and used products and services in the market. Customers interacted with and kept or returned a product. If they were satisfied, they may have come back to the same company for more or they might be lured away by an innovation, better price or clever advertising. Similarly, before students became users, they chose a school, a field of study and courses that they took with more or less enthusiasm and/or learning. Ironically, in a field that prides itself on human-centric design, the very word “users” feels less personal, less human.

What’s New?

If the fundamental idea behind user experience (note less arrogant lowercase) is not new, what has changed? Here are five major shifts.

• User experience represents the infusion of a traditionally post-sale idea—the customer is always right—into every phase of product and service development. Instead of addressing dissatisfaction after the fact, design teams work with users to identify the most meaningful problems to solve, generate and test solutions, and improve the results.
• The design process is more nimble. Forget about presenting a final, static product. Think instead about incremental development and frequent revisions that actively seek feedback and take advantage of data.
• People expect excellence. Professors are held to new standards of course delivery. A university’s online offerings are compared not just to other universities, but to the bigger universe of interactions and websites. Members of your community are savvy customers—and you should expect to have a serious dialogue with them, not dictate what they will receive. They are used to making fast judgments and moving on if they are frustrated or dissatisfied. (Going viral is not always a good thing.)
• People expect choices, especially about how and when they want to learn. Students have always had varying priorities: a degree, life balance, career success, relationships and (of course) real skills and knowledge. Now they expect a flexible experience that honors their values. Professors are looking for ways to make their material less formulaic, more personal, and easier to adapt.
• A shared vocabulary and tools—when coupled with a willingness to change—make it possible for a university to start thinking differently and planning for future success. If you are committed to learning, staying current, and being intellectually curious and experimental in the best university tradition, you can play.

In the parlance of product development, user experience is not just customer satisfaction rebranded. It’s truly new and improved.

A Definition

User experience is often unnecessarily narrowed to refer to on-screen interactions, ignoring bigger goals and context. Instead, user experience at a university might be seen as everything and everyone a student (or parent) interacts with from the first visit to a website to an on-campus visit to a phone call about financial aid. It includes online (marketing, enrollment, delivery of education), books, physical materials, and—most important—contact with real people. Good user experience allows students to manage their own education and achieve their goals.

Faculty members also enjoy or despair of a user experience. In their quest to help students learn and share their passion for a subject, they feel that their knowledge, abilities and time are valued to a greater or lesser extent. Good user experience allows faculty members to use a variety of techniques to deliver content, talk with students, set up meaningful collaboration and create and test new models of learning.

The institution has its own goals: attracting and retaining students and faculty, providing education, improving its reputation, and meeting financial expectations. Good user experience can help a university stay competitive, raise standards, manage risk, and use resources effectively.

Why User Experience?

Providing a great user experience is a challenge and an opportunity. If you’re looking for reasons to focus on user experience, here’s a short list.

• Taking time to examine the experience and not just create a product or service helps your institution, learners, professors and administrators achieve their goals. In fact, one of the most illuminating parts of designing the user experience is the systematic articulation of institutional goals and the goals of different user groups.
• Incremental design in collaboration with users allows you to test your assumptions.  Every design project begins with hidden assumptions about what people want, need or like. As humans, we jump to conclusions about the problems we need to solve and, even more quickly, to the solutions. Working with real people reveals what’s valid, where team members have differing opinions, and where there are gaps in information.​  
• Engaging in a purposeful design process ensures a good reception by your audiences and gives you the information you need to succeed in the marketplace.  You no longer need to guess or rely on personal opinion or anecdotal information.
• User experience design is an investment in what you already know can be an arduous and expensive process.  You’ll save time and money by getting it right the first time.
• Users love to be asked about what they need and want and doing that expands the number of creative brains applied to difficult problems. Along the way, you’ll create satisfaction and loyalty through communication and responsiveness.

User Experience Questions

A good user experience results from asking lots of questions—broad and tightly focused—listening carefully to the answers and pursuing new lines of inquiry. A by-no-means comprehensive list of questions includes:

• Who are our users? Do we know about their goals, tastes, preferences, needs or constraints? Are we sure?
• How can we learn more?  Through interviews? Data? Observation? Collaboration?
• Are we focused on the most important problems?
• Are we missing an easy opportunity to solve real problems?
• Are we creating problems?
• What specific tasks do people want to accomplish? Why?
• How will they know if they are successful?
• What would make those tasks easy? Can we simplify them?
• What is the perceived value of various solutions?

Intrigued?

User experience work is totally accessible, so there’s no need to be intimidated.  Like all disciplines, a good guide can help you get smarter fast.  JenEd Consulting can work with you to clarify your goals, understand your audiences, and create a process to meet their needs.  We practice what we preach—lots of questions, careful listening, advocating on behalf of users, with better results through relationships and collaboration.

Virginia Rice
Senior Consultant, User Experience
JenEd Consulting, LLC

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