The two most important concepts in UX Design
Why great design revolves around Context and Value.
User Experience design nowadays has too many buzzwords, theories and techniques. There are almost as many discoveries as there are products and designers. But they all invariably revolve around two important things to keep in mind. They are all trying to either discover, or validate for these two things. So what are they? Let’s take a look.
1. Context
Know and understand the context. It’s not only generally important, but all the more so in UX. Personas, Scenarios, Workflows, User flows, etc, are all tools to understand or synthesize context.
Let’s consider a problem statement with and without context to compare.
a) Maria wants to contact her family, and send them a message. She wants to do this quickly and efficiently.
Ok. Understood. That problem statement is just a goal. This goal could come from people on the street, stakeholders at a company, a research team, or the Prime Minister. The solution could be an app or any other way to send out a message.
This statement lacks color. Yet this is what many organizations work with. It does not tell us who Maria is, what her abilities are, how she is feeling, what kind of situation she’s in. Now let’s add a little more color, shall we?
b) Maria is 80 year old woman who find it hard to walk. She uses a wheelchair to get around. However, she has fallen off her wheelchair and nobody seems to be home. She wants to contact her family, and send them a message. She wants to do this quickly and efficiently.
There! That’s a whole lot of color. Yes, this reads like a mini story. That’s precisely what we design for. We design our products to fit into people’s stories. It is a whole lot of context to work with. We can imagine what she might be feeling in that moment. We can make an educated guess about what kind of tools she can operate. We can try to picture, if a solution we design fits well here. We can, at the very least, hypothesize how our solution would behave in this situation.
2. Value
Not all products are trying to solve critical problems. There are products of luxury, convenience, value-add, etc. These are products that aren’t needed, but wanted/desired.
Value is a common-sense idea gets lost in trying to hit some mindless numbers. For Instagram, it is probably the “time spent” metric. For someone’s lifestyle blog, “email sign-ups” maybe the metric. All this is good for business. But what about the people who use it?
Let us consider a common practice: doing everything possible just to hit some metrics. CTR for example; many blogs want to get “clicks” for ad-money. The content is second to them, but the click-bringing headline is more important. More often than not, it annoys users. Once people figure out what you’re doing, the clicks fall. But when you add value, people click on links more consistently, sign-up to newsletters willingly, etc. They stick with you.
Let us consider examples of two products adding value.
TurboTax: Intuit’s design team has nailed the value with TurboTax. There are competing products out there that also help people file taxes. But TurboTax is the most delightful one of them all. Not only is it reassuring in its tone, it also makes sure to cover all the bases required for more complex scenarios.
It is probably the most trusted name in tax software. Trusted. The value is in getting from “it works” to “trusted” for this one.
iMessage: It is there and needs no “setup”. It works, and works very reliably. A very simple value proposition for a simple task — communicating with texts and media. iMessage has become so important that people stick with iPhones to avoid becoming “green bubbles”. Surprising what happens when we offer great value.
The tricky thing is - value is context dependent, and context keeps changing
If you notice, the way value is offered between two products is slightly different. That is because value can be a difficult thing to have down. It depends on the overall context of the product. Nowadays there are many products to achieve user goals. So there is a sense of convenience between them already. In that case, it’s no longer enough that the product helps conveniently achieve a goal.
So how to figure out what value even is?
The tricky thing is - value is context dependent, and context keeps changing. If there are other products doing similar things as yours, find out what your target audience values. Earn their trust, and delight them in the process. This is how value works.
In summary, find out the users’ context, focus on key concerns, understand your product’s context, and finally, delight your users. Most of UX Design revolves around this.
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