By definition, UX design is about designing for stakeholders, users, clients, customers – not for designers. Our opinions shouldn’t matter.

We start with stakeholder interviews, which give our design team an in-depth understanding of our client’s corporate objectives – or to put it more bluntly, they help us understand what we’re being paid to accomplish.

Discovery

Once we have detailed results from these interviews and create a thorough ‘Statement of Work’ for our client, we begin researching our clients’ users/customers. The time for user experience design strategy to potentially influence – not drive – business strategy comes during what we call the “discovery” phase, when we do qualitative and/or quantitative research and usability testing. This research and testing tells a sharp UX design firm what customers want – not what the customers think they want, but what they actually want.

The insights we get during the research phase can validate core components of a client’s strategy and stakeholders’ hypothesis. On the flip side, these insights can also shake a business strategy to its foundations – what would you do if you found that your customer wants or demands something entirely different than you were expecting? Something different than you were prepared to offer them?

More often than not, as in real life, those cases are the exceptions, and the true insights are gray-area nuances on the original strategic theme. UX design strategy creates value by adding precision – uncovering the exact design elements that will achieve a client’s business objectives by meeting its customers’ needs (see our Clarisonic success story).

Fact-based design strategy

It’s this dovetailing of business strategy and UX design strategy that the savvy design firm relishes – a dialogue grounded in customer data, not opinions, which is what great UX design should spring from.
With any luck, the design is successful from the get-go, but diligent user experience designers are never finished – show them data that can lead to better business outcomes, and they’ll tweak their work every time.

The takeaway

Designers must understand the stakeholders’ position first and then test the assumptions of that strategy with a client’s customers before pushing the first pixel. Too many design firms fail – and waste their client’s time and money – by trying to dazzle a client with beautiful pictures before understanding the basics: the business strategy and the customer.

How many times have you seen a design project, or any project, that was executed without regard for the business strategy. Where the process, design, and results were not at all what the company needed or what the customer required. Share your thoughts.

I was, I realized, a lucky guy – I love my job. Those four words haven’t crossed my lips all that frequently in my career (if ever?).

After giving more thought to why I reached this pinnacle at Produxs, I realized I could sum it up pretty succinctly: Great people, processes and systems lead to great results.

At Produxs, we quip that our approach to design and search marketing is where art and science intersect with finance and marketing. That mix of disciplines probably explains why I love my work.

As the director of business development, I love being able to meet with clients to find out what problems they’re trying to solve or new milestones they want to reach. We then identify a baseline goal and KPI’s that they want to improve and turn our design team loose. Our designers conduct detailed research and come up with the best solution based on that data.

Then, when all of the groundwork is done, they create a design that meets or exceeds our client’s expectations.

It’s exciting to see all of that collaboration, research and expertise come to fruition in the form of an innovative new application or a more sophisticated yet user-friendly web site that sends a company’s sales numbers through the roof.

During the past year we delivered some great successes for our clients, which is the ultimate source of satisfaction for a business development guy like me:

• We started off 2011 with the successful launch of the Clarisonic website redesign. We couldn’t have been more pleased with the results that came from our efforts to make visitors’ “transactional web experience” more intuitive, efficient and likely to lead to purchases.
• We also completed user experience (UX) design and usability testing of a new online experience for Expedia Local Expert; it is currently in development, and we are excited to see it go live this year.
• We designed a new Kindle Troubleshooting Wizard for Amazon, and one of our senior designers worked on elements of the Kindle Fire.
• We got to envision and design some really powerful business intelligence tools for Microsoft Global Marketing Operations (GMO), Windows Phone, MSDN/TechNet and Central Marketing Group (CMG).

And we received client testimonials like this:

“As we conducted our search for a vendor that could envision and design Expedia Local Expert to meet our expectations, we interviewed a number of the top firms in the design industry. We selected Produxs because of its proven results in designing transactional web experiences, its approach to the design process, and the glowing recommendations of its client references. The experience we had with Produxs throughout our project was nothing short of our high expectations.” ~ Will Daugherty, former President of Expedia Destination Services

Measuring happiness and job satisfaction is different for everyone, but here are some of the key questions I ask myself about my work:

• Am I bringing value to my clients and our business?
• Are we making a difference, solving problems and producing results for our clients?
• Are we innovating or just repackaging the same old stuff?
• Are we improving our processes and systems to better serve our clients and create efficiencies for our people?
• Am I working with smart people who work hard and take ownership?
• What do our clients think about us and the value that we provide?
• Am I having fun?

How do you measure satisfaction at your work? And do you love what you do?

The teams behind these sites constantly innovate and deliver cutting-edge technology along with rich, relevant content and a great user experience. They likely lie awake at night wondering what they need to do next in order to stay on this elite list.

However, one of the Top 10 sites doesn’t exactly have a reputation for being on the cutting edge. Despite doing relatively little in the way of innovation, Craigslist continues to be a star of the internet.

For a quick “now and then” comparison, I decided to take a trip on the Internet waybackmachine to the summer of 2000. It looked like this:

Look familiar?

Yep, Craigslist hasn’t changed much in the past 10-plus years. Today there are more categories, more cities and certainly more user-generated content (ads), but it’s pretty much the same old text-based interface.

It’s simple, it’s fast, and it’s familiar. I successfully used Craigslist last week to very quickly unload a dusty treadmill from my basement for a pretty sweet stack of Benjamin’s.

I love you Craigslist. But we need to talk.

Lately, I’ve been wondering how long the site can maintain its popularity, and I’m not the only one; a report recently published by the University of Alabama predicts the demise of Craigslist in 2012.

While I believe that prediction is too aggressive, I do think the end is in sight if Craigslist doesn’t change. There’s no question that Craigslist is ugly by today’s design standards, and it suffers from a number of usability shortcomings, including these:

• It lacks consistent navigation.
• Creating and responding to ads is a generally clunky process.
• Most ad data is not well structured (making for limited searchability).
• There is no social media integration.

Among other things.

Craigslist’s bare-bones simplicity is a significant part of its brand identity, and it has achieved a staggering critical mass of users, making it the de facto place to sell your ping-pong table or find a roommate. How long can Craigslist survive without evolving its user interface (UI)? And how quickly should Craigslist evolve to avoid alienating users and damaging the brand?

A big opportunity exists to displace it with an alternative consumer marketplace experience that blends the simplicity of Craigslist with superior information architecture and navigation – not to mention well-designed tools to support easier account management; more refined search capability; user credibility and reputation scoring; enhanced mobile device support; and social media integration. Much like Facebook stole the spotlight from MySpace, it can happen here, too.

Craigslist can solve its problems without sacrificing its signature simple façade. In fact, I say leave the overall look and feel largely untouched. But addressing usability is do-or-die. To stay relevant in the face of competitive threats, Craigslist needs to take serious measures to improve its overall usability while protecting its familiar brand image.

Any business with a web presence needs to be concerned not just with how visually appealing its website is, but with how effectively it enables users to easily accomplish whatever it is you want them to do. The most successful websites never stop gathering information on what their users need and how they interact with their sites.

What is your favorite thing about Craigslist? Your least favorite? Should it modernize the look and feel of its site?

So when I heard that Siri, perhaps the most ambitious, high-profile voice interaction system ever, was coming to an Apple store near me, I was anxious to see if she could take my daily drive time and finish the transformation that my iPhone 3GS had started.

The 3GS was the first device that gave me everything I wanted for my commute:

• Car stereo integration
• Music
• Audiobooks
• Pandora
• Hands free calling
• One-touch, voice-controlled dialing
• GPS with driving directions

This was a big improvement on the old-school experience of limited listening options; iffy, blind shuffling around for CDs to switch out; glancing with lightning speed at maps or directions scrawled on paper; or hoping for a stoplight to have time to dial a 10-digit phone number.

With the iPhone 3G, I still needed to look at the device to launch most apps before I got on the road, but sending and receiving phone calls was completely eyes-off.

So I was intrigued by the idea that Siri might revolutionize my daily commute. Would she be my ideal co-pilot?
Sadly, no. Not yet, anyway.

The Siri technology is a cool new twist in iPhone’s evolution, but my (literal) test drive left me disappointed.
Siri’s advance billing promised she would make my commute even better and more productive:

• Hands-free text and email
• Hands-free reminders
• Location-based reminders (“Remember to pick up milk when I leave work”)
• A single touch to launch most functions
• Web search for businesses and phone numbers

But it turns out Siri and I are not a UX match.

She solves some problems quite elegantly, but doesn’t address my user needs in the context of driving a car. She fails my “eyes-off” test, meaning my driving experience isn’t an improvement over the voice commands in the iPhone 3GS.

• Long texts and email are so likely to contain errors that messages need to be reviewed before sending.
• Reminders also need visual confirmation.
• Siri is not yet savvy enough to make location-based reminders based on locations not listed in contacts – i.e., “remind me to pick up milk when I’m near the grocery store.”
• Siri’s searches usually returns multiple hits, requiring the user to read and select the correct item.

When I’m designing user interactions for a client project, I zone in on the needs of the person who will be using a product — what will they use it for? What problems will they solve with it? What is the context? What’s the environment they’ll be working within?
So when I’m in the market for a personal gadget, you can bet that I’m putting it through the same paces. In the end, my decision to buy or not to buy comes down to whether I’ve decided a gadget will be an improvement on what my existing product is capable of doing.
Here’s the UX bump I’d hoped to gain via Siri:

• Touch-free activation mode (Siri actively listening for commands while I am driving)
• Integration with a turn-by-turn navigation system (“I need driving directions to the nearest gas station”)
• When presented with multiple options, Siri would read them out loud and accept voice commands for selection.

• “Call Domino’s Pizza”
• Voice prompt for selection from the list
• Dial #

In the end, Siri is a powerful voice command system … but it is a hybrid system, meaning it isn’t possible to use the device with only voice interaction. Sight and touch are still required.

That being said, I get that Siri is still at the ‘beta,’ or test phase, even if it isn’t being advertised that way. Bugs are still being worked out, features are being enhanced. Once that happens, it will likely become everything I could hope for in a traveling companion

Bottom line: Siri is not yet fulfilling its potential or the promise of its advertising.
It is very cool now, but when it fully enables true voice interaction it will be revolutionary.

Has Siri changed the way you use your iPhone?