Stop Creating Awesome UX (Make awesome users instead)

STOP CREATING AWESOME UX
(make awesome [bad@$$] users instead)

What’s on tap today?
• How do we do user experience at DE?
• How do we create great UX at DE?
• How do we know it’s great?
• What are the limitations of this approach?
• What are we supposed to be doing?
• What are the limitations of this model for our
businesses?
• A better approach for our businesses: make your users
awesome

Write your
ideal review
1. Amazon has upgraded
Reviews. Our users can review
our stuff. Write the ideal review. What would you love
to hear your customers say about your product?
-OR-
2. Think back to a time when you had a great user
experience. What did you want to say to tell other
people how great a product was? Write that review.

There’s no new Amazon Review product
It was a heuristic device to get us talking

Why did I do that?
1. To model a UX technique: scenario and role
playing
• You are not your user
2. To model a UX technique: Indirect questioning
• People tell you what they think you want to hear
• To elicit adjectives and descriptions of feelings
3. Use this as your own team exercise for
rethinking product design

How do we do UX at DE?
UX happens

Principles-practices-patterns
• Write great design principles
• Distill to the team
• Create pattern libraries
• Police and enforce infractions

Design patterns solve problems

An Example: feedback
Give good feedback
Visibility of system status
Offer informative feedback.
Feedback

An Example: basic problem for the Web

click here
A design (solution) pattern

What are the best practices for designing a link:
• blue
• Underlined
• appearance changes (states)
• response times
• progress indicator
• …
Practices

How do we know it’s good UX?

Too late: when it’s done
• QA testing
• UAT
• Beta testing
• Customer feedback
• Usability testing
• A/B testing

Users are in the principles (abstractly)

Principle-based  User-centered

UX goodness is
Asking what users ask:
1. Can I use it?
2. Should I use it?
3. Do I want to use it?
4. Do I value using it?

People trust they can use it to accomplish task(s)

People want to use it more than other products

Usability heuristics (checklists)
Analytics
A/B tests
Usability testing
PRE-totyping
Contextual inquiry
User testing (lean UX acid tests)
Ethographic research
Personas
User centered designing thinking
Competitive usability tests
Field research / Journey mapping
Diary studies
NPS surveys
Satisfaction surveys
TACTICAL UX
STRATEGIC UX
Good UX = research + process

The D word problem
This? Desirable? Delightful?

1. Too squishy for the C Suite
• When there’s no competition
–Internal tools
• When delightful design undermines trust
–Rounded corners and delightful messaging in a
tax app
• When too squishy for the C suite

Internal tools
When there’s no competition
Enterprise UX (internal tools)

When stereotypically “delightful”
design undermines trust
• Rounded corners
• Delightful messaging

No one wants
to master
your app

This is the UX
Images from Kathy Sierra, BadAss: Making Users Awesome

This is the post-UX UX

You want sustainable growth, honest
product reviews – which should your users
be thinking?

Secret answer is D

Product is amazing = I’m amazing

Why are people promoters?
When people think they are
amazing, they promote your
product.

Why do they tell their friends?

This is the UX
Dashboard ux
Our amazing Connect app

No one wants
to master
Homes Connect

They want to be excellent at the
bigger
context

Dashboard ux
Selling the American Dream!
Connect is awesome.
I can turn leads into
sellers and buyers like
no one’s business.

Product design the new way

Post UX drives our success
• Users who are successful in their
motivating context will recommend us
• Success in their motivating context is why
they start using your product
• Making sure they are successful is what
keeps them using it.

Users don’t get up in the morning
thinking, I wonder…
No one wants to
master search

When the clicking’s over (post UX)
• What did the product enable?
• What does it empower them to do?
• What can they now show others?
• What will they now say to others?
• How are they more powerful after the
clicking’s over?

Marketing / SEO team wants to know:
Is there a gift giving gap around Mother’s and
Father’s Day?
(They’re producing “fun” content for our users)
Product team and UX researchers wonder: Is
there a gender gap between what Moms want and
what Dads want?
(Us? We’re just curious: are users are people, so
let’s get to know them as people who do more than
search for homes)
So, users, we were wondering:

What users tell us: Who they want to be

• The poll interrupted them while they did
something that was part of their bigger,
motivating context
• They don’t stop caring about their context
just because we ask them a question
• What’s important to them: achieve bigger
goals (not the mechanics of searching for
listings)
• What they are doing with our “tools” is
crucially tied to their identity, who they are,
why they get up in the morning
Why?

Another example:
Marketing / Search team wants to know:

Product team wants to know
1. What did you come here to do today?
2. Did you accomplish that task?
3. Is there anything we could have done to
help you accomplish that task?

What the team wanted to know:What the team wanted to know:
• What’s broken?
• Any other features you want?
• Are the forms right?
• Are there too many banner
ads?
• Are the photos big enough?
• Can you navigate?
• Can you find the stuff we
made for you?
(We’re really asking: how do we get you to
fill out a lead form?)

What did users tell us instead?
Any guesses?

They didn’t want better search
They want to get rid of the
problems in their bigger context:

They want these things:
• Get a loan
• Get prequalified
• Save up for down payments or deposits
• Find rent to own options
• Get credit checked / fix their credit
• Understand the home buying process
• Know how they compare to others – where
they stand financially (income, debt,
savings)

We don’t need superhero UXers

The product isn’t a superheroWe don’t need superhero apps

Stop focusing on making great UX
Instead:
• Help people become successful at their bigger
context
• Look for the attributes our successful users share
(and stop looking for the attributes that
successful products share. It’s an unsustainable
feature war)

For more research-based insights
about Homes.com users, check out the
UX insights portal:
http://insights.homes.com
Thoughts? Questions?

Stop Creating Awesome UX (Make awesome users instead)

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