Sharing and communicating are key
(flickr tag: experience)
In the latest article on UXmatters, Pabini Gabriel-Petit of Spirit Softworks writes about the importance of UX design, product management, and engineering sharing the ownership of UX:
Product management defines products that customers need and, therefore, have value to both customers and the product development company. By defining product requirements, product management provides the input the UX team needs to design products that are usable, useful, and desirable. UX design specifications provide the input engineering needs to create real products. Engineering both constrains and realizes product requirements and UX design—what is possible and what’s not.
According to the author, a marketing-driven or engineering-driven culture in a company can be very detrimental to user experience because the other disciplines often suffer from it.
In marketing-driven cultures where marketing, product management, and sales concerns dominate, there is often a desire to satisfy the wants and needs of customers. In a company that does the user research and analysis that is necessary to truly understand users’ needs, this can create a culture that is sympathetic to and supportive of UX.
This has been very true of Inxight. The drive toward more user-centered design has not met with much resistance. The main difficulties have been in the practicalities of setting up a usability-driven process, not in convincing people that more usable products are an important factor to success.
Unfortunately, marketing-driven cultures often engage in feature wars with competitors. Sales demands the addition of features that will help them to close specific sales deals—perhaps to satisfy the demands of just one customer. Some product managers prioritize adding new features above all else, and the user experiences of their products fall prey to featuritis.
This is also very true, but in some ways it is understandable. I think people make buying decisions based on features and only later realize that usability is an important factor too. When you have a choice between two ovens — one which cleans itself and another that doesn’t — you’ll probably choose the self-cleaning one. Ease-of-use would not even cross your mind — it’s just an oven, after all. How hard can it be? So even if the self-cleaning oven is harder to use, you make the choice to buy it based purely on its features.
Ideally, you want to create products with the perfect balance of usability and features, but time constraints make that quite difficult to accomplish.
Click here to read the full article.
