The Spectrum of User Experience
Here is an interesting article from the Information Architects blog involving three different aspects of product development: how designers, engineers, and businessmen should work together.
I’m sure all of us designers, developers, and business people have all been in this position before where we sometimes feel that we don’t need to communicate with each other. That things will just work out in the end if everybody is assigned a certain task that they’re good at. That meetings are a waste of time. Leave us alone and let us do our job!
But no, as painful inconvenient as it might be, for the overall result to have the best user experience we certainly can’t not talk to each other (yes, that’s a double-negative).
The business folks know best about the market, the competitors, and what the current product needs. But in order to achieve their projected ROI, they have to work together with the engineers to agree on a product definition and work with the designers to make sure that the communication is consistent. Likewise, the designers and the engineers have to work together to make the interface as a nice and simple as possible.
Knowing that, the process gets a little more challenging when everyone is in different places. Freelancers or multi-office companies tend to face this problem where designers can’t just simply walk over to the engineers office to discuss the feasibility of a particular mockup.
In MJA Web Design, email seems to work well since we make it clear to our clients that during the development process, we expect full participation from them (for input, design feedback, requirements, etc.). Clients also understand that delaying feedback will also result in risk that the project may not be completed on the scheduled deadline.
What is a Browser?
Google recently conducted a survey of random passerby’s in New York City with the question “What is a browser?” in order to understand their users better.
Turns out that more than 90% of people surveyed had no idea what a browser is. Most would relate it to search engines, answering with “It’s Google” or internet-related terms such as “broadband”. Very few people actually got it right, only about 8% in fact. (watch the video here)
As people who work with the web everyday, we sometimes take it for granted about how much our users know about the web. We would generalize “Oh sure they know how to look for that button” or “I’m sure our users know to click on that tab to look for their account settings” while maybe in fact, they don’t. And I think this is why the web can feel so disconnected with the rest of the world; and it’s the designer’s job to bridge the gap.