Caring, it turns out, is a competitive advantage, and one that takes effort, not money.

 

Like most things that are worth doing, it’s not easy at first and the one who cares isn’t going to get a standing ovation from those that are merely phoning it in. I think it’s this lack of early positive feedback that makes caring in service businesses so rare.

 

Which is precisely what makes it valuable.

“User Experience is more than…

• visual design
• front end development
• websites
• software
• technology
• a piece of the puzzle
• a diagram
• a process
• a set of tasks

It is all of those things and so much more. It is every single detail we take in from the world around us; if our lives were a movie it would be mise en scene. People are constantly experiencing, taking in the world around them through their senses. “An Experience” is those sensations (things seen, smelled, felt, etc.) from a moment in time that were in some way relevant enough to a person that they are recalled when this moment is remembered.

This philosophy is crucial to the success of any business, non-profit, or group of people providing a good or service to others. When the consumers interaction with a product or service is recalled, if the memory is happy and positive then the person will be willing to continue spending money to use the offered product/service, and if they really love it they will even evangelize for the product/service or brand. If they recall a negative experience however, then they will either not return or begrudgingly use the product/service until a competitor comes along and provides a more pleasant experience.

User experience for an organization is any experiential quality that involves the product or service provided. Focusing on delivering a positive experience is critical to the long term success of any organization. 

The Importance of Dog-Fooding

Felton says the main lesson he learned from the experience of designing and iterating Timeline is that “Photoshop lies.” “You can come into a meeting with a very beautiful comp and it’s like, ‘Oh yes, we should do it that way,’” he says. “But you’re never going to know if you can do it that way until you pump in the real data and live with it for days or weeks.”

To make sure they got it right, Facebook released Timeline to its own employees during the development process, to make sure that the paradigms they were developing worked for all users, those with a ton of status updates, for example, as well as those with just a few.

“As a designer, you have your baby that you want to try and sell. To make it saleable, you might pick someone who has really nice photos in their profile and use that to make your mockups,” Felton says. “But you’re ultimately just lying to yourself and the rest of the group if you think everyone’s page is going to look like that.”

• http://www.fastcodesign.com/1665414/designers-behind-facebook-timeline-5-lessons-for-creating-a-ui-with-soul

I remember working on my first graduate school design project, a RSS feed reader for Mozilla firefox. My team worked hard to come up with a really solid design, that fit the aesthetic of firefox and managed RSS feeds in a very clean way. It was not until our presentation however that we realized that though still a good solution, there were many kinks in the design we had not accounted for because we used data that “fit neatly” into our mockups. We had not accounted for links and blog titles that went above our expected average character count nor had we really pushed the boundaries of how our tool would scale.

This is on top of the fact that even if you feel like you consider all of the options, and it still looks great in photoshop, it might end up not working as well as it looks like it should. This just exposes the value of building prototypes, not necessarily fully coded prototypes, but just something to get your hands on to start to evaluate the design as it is used, not just as it looks on the surface.

Dogs in Cars from keith on Vimeo.

But that leads to another one of the most frustrating responses that can be heard ‘it’s good enough’. I understand that constraints are ever present in every design situation. There is never enough time, never enough understanding of who the user is, always just a few more tweaks that can be made to make a design just that much better. I also understand that embracing constraints and reacting to the situation can inspire even more innovative work. But to hear ‘it’s good enough’ is a cop out. It can always be better. You can’t let that stop you from delivering, but to just write off a piece of a design as adequate and ‘good enough’ will never lead to a pleasurable experience for anyone who interacts with the design. The devil is in the details and as a designer it is always disheartening to hear someone involved with a product who does not care enough about the product to always be thinking of ways to iterate on it to make it the best it can be.

The “personalized” touch of them ‘remembering’ you when you provide your phone number is supposed to help them see previous orders and deliver top quality service. Unfortunately the good intentions in this case can have a negative consequence of making the pizza orderer feel fat. “If they remember me I must call too often.”

It would be just as helpful to clarify orders in comparison with previous orders when something does not matchup without coming across as TOO personal for the situation.

The show was real fun to go to, and a really cool way to spend halloween.

Jonathan Ive – Tribute to Steve Jobs

Like any talent, you don’t find a good designer by asking for the one who’ll do it the cheapest or the one who will do it in two weeks instead of four. You find the designer that you trust enough to call an ‘expert.’ A designer makes only the amount of impact as the confidence they are given. – Josh Smith

http://idsgn.org/posts/steve-jobs-and-paul-rand-the-impact-of-confidence/