Let’s get into it.

Delight

In a post for Treehouse Blog, Aarron Walter compared web design to psychologist Abraham Maslow’s famous Hierarchy of Needs. While the validity of Maslow’s model has come into question in recent times, Walter’s comparison is an interesting one.

The bottom of the pyramid – the fundamentals of human life such as food and shelter – was represented by functionality and usability. The top – more intangible factors like esteem and actualization – was represented by delightful design.

There is no question that delight pales into insignificance when compared to usability, which in turn can’t hold a candle to usefulness, but if you’re talking about great UX design, you need  all three.

The Power of Delight

Delight (and in turn, desirability) is the x-factor that keeps people coming back. Stefan Klocek calls it a “passive magic”, when everything feels completely intuitive and effortless. As the most abstract of the three elements that we’ve examined, delight is be the hardest to apply, but the rewards make figuring out how well worth it.

As Don Norman points out, we humans are not the logical creatures we like to think we are. Studies have shown that emotional responses are one of the most important determining factors in how we make decisions — often surpassing logic. This is likely due to the fact that our ancestors often needed to make split-second life-or-death decisions.

Perhaps this explains why users perceive more pleasing products as more usable, as is demonstrated in this study by Masaaki Kurosu and Kaori Kashimura. Researchers tested two Automatic Teller Machines (ATMs) that functioned in an identical fashion, but looked noticeably different. Testers cited the more attractive ATM as more functional, proving that a delightful design can, in a way, improve usability.

When people are enjoying themselves, they’re more relaxed. When the brain is relaxed, it functions more effectively, which means that learning new concepts, recalling past data, and fine motor skills occur more fluidly.

Elements of Delight

Explaining why delight is important is the easy part – making it happen is not so easy! Dr. Charles B. Kreitzberg recommends engaging the user with stimulating visuals. Certainly aesthetics have a lot to do with desirability, though they shouldn’t be the only consideration.

As explained in Interaction Design Best Practices, small gifts and surprises will also engage your users. A reward-based system can help generate trust and build a relationship. At the same time, small discoverables like a quirky error message or a surprise animation (that communicates meaning) can also keep your users interested.

Desirability can be tested right alongside of usability, with a few select questions during the post-test interview. Microsoft even have a downloadable Desirability Toolkit, with information and examples to help you get started.

Duolingo: A case study in pulling it all together

The language learning site Duolingo applies all three of the our UX facets in an exemplary way.

First up, the idea is useful. The desire to learn another language is a common one, yet only a fraction of people actually make the effort. A free site utilising gamification methods for teaching is a fun alternative to more traditional language-learning methods.

Usability wise, Duolingo delivers what it promises — an efficient method of learning another language. The use of language games distracts the user from the arduousness of rote learning, and features like timed quizzes and progression checks help move the user along their journey seamlessly.

Lastly, the site is enjoyable (which, in this particular case, is synonymous with usable). Even outside of the learning elements, Duolingo goes above and beyond to provide a satisfying experience. An array of colors and a cartoonish environment — complete with owl mascot — make visiting the site pleasing and enjoyable.

In conclusion

By drawing on all three of the UX design facets, Duolingo, Treehouse and Buffer (to name just a few) earn the advantage over their competitors by giving their users something more.

It all starts with an idea, a useful service that’s lacking in your users’ lives. Add to that an interface that’s as effective as it is understandable, making the product easily usable. Last comes the icing on the cake, those little extra features that lend a magic to the product, making it delightful.

The post 3 Facets of Great UX Design: Part 3 appeared first on UX Mastery.

So let’s dig in.

Usability

So you have a product that solves someone’s problem? Take a moment to pat yourself on the back, but make it quick — there’s still a lot of work ahead of you. As the saying goes, build the right thing, then build the thing right.

Usability defines how well a product performs the purpose for which it is intended. It refers to the quality of a person’s experience when using a product, and encompasses a variety of elements, from function to learning curve, to overall complexity.

The Nielsen Norman Group defines five core components to usability:

• Learnability — The ease with which the user can figure out how to use the product for the first time.

• Efficiency — The ease with which users can accomplish tasks.

• Memorability — How well a user can recall the system after a period without using it.

• Errors — The amount and severity of errors both from the system and the user.

• Satisfaction — The pleasure a user gets from using the product.

With the exception of satisfaction (which is in a class all of its own), these factors are pretty mechanical. Usability is the nitty-gritty of design, where you roll up your sleeves and smooth everything out.

As with usefulness, you shouldn’t go in blindly to create a product that you think your users will like. Your design’s usability should be determined through more reliable and structured methods, involving the users themselves.

Here is the method that UXPin finds the most effective:

1. Wireframe. This is the preliminary stage of the design, where you solidify the structure, layout, and information architecture. It’s important to set aside time for these details before moving on to graphic and interface decisions.

The wireframe acts as a skeleton and helps with addressing efficiency as you prioritise what goes where. Some designers go even more basic, sketching and fleshing out ideas even before the wireframing stage.

2. Prototype and test. Build a workable prototype, then test it with an absolute minimum of 5 users. Even with a rough prototype you should be able to test for most usability factors – all except satisfaction.

When testing, elicit both quantitative and qualitative feedback. Observing how users complete tasks and how long it takes will cover the quantitative side of things — count the number of clicks or pages visited. As users run through your app, encourage them to think aloud and record their qualitative feedback.

3. Continue prototyping until ready. The rapid prototyping cycle is design, test, elicit and implement feedback, then start the cycle over. You’ll want to repeat the testing stage over and over again until your product is getting reliably excellent feedback. Build and test progressively better and/or more elaborate prototypes until you have something that resembles your final product.

Following this process should support you to build a reliably usable product, which means you’re ready to tackle the third facet of great UX design – delight. We’ll tackle that one next week in the last of our three part series.

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I’m talking about usefulness, usability, and delight.

In this series of 3 articles we’ll examine these facets, and how they are applied to real life products in case studies from Buffer, UXPin and Duolingo.

Let’s get started.

Usefulness

The first and most important requirement: your product must be useful. It doesn’t matter how usable or desirable it is if it doesn’t serve some purpose in your user’s life. Some studies suggest that usefulness is 1.5 times as important as usability.

So, how exactly do we define usefulness?

Painkillers & Vitamins

According to Jon Burgstone and Bill Murphy, Jr. in an article for Fast Company, customers buy products for two reasons:

• To ease pain
• To provide pleasure

Interestingly, customers will more readily invest in a product which alleviates pain over one that gives them pleasure. If you offer a service that no one else provides — or features lacking in the competition — customers will appreciate it more than if your product merely entertains. Ideally though, it will do both.

Designing a useful product relies on your understanding of the problems that your users face. The quickest route to that understanding is usability research and testing. Qualitative research such as user interviews, surveys, or diary studies allow users to explain what they need (or don’t like) in their own words. Quantitative research, such as analytics or A/B testing, will concretely demonstrate where users are having difficulties and what their preferences are.

Testing for Relevancy With an MVP

At what point should you start to test your assumptions? The answer lies in the MVP (minimum viable product).

By starting small, gathering user feedback, and iterating incrementally, you ensure the product is always useful (and therefore relevant).

You can build an affordable MVP in several ways

• Create a landing page – Set up a landing page for the product concept that you wish to test, explaining to potential customers that they will get an email when it’s ready. Run paid Adwords campaigns to drive traffic to the page, and then check how many visits and emails you capture.

• Plain manual labor – Nick Swinmurn, co-founder of Zappos, actually fronted the online retail giant before any infrastructure existed. He listed shoes for sale, then fulfilled them by buying the shoes locally and shipping them out. It required his full-time dedication, but was a cheap and low-tech way of testing his idea.

• Start a fundraising campaign – You can sell a product before it exists. If you get enough funding on a site like Kickstarter or Indiegogo, it’s a strong signal that your product is relevant to people’s lives. As you build the product, keep in touch with your supporters for feedback and ideas.

Buffer: A case study in Usefulness

Buffer is a great example of a startup that used an MVP to test for (and successfully prove) relevancy. They went from an idea to a profitable product in 7 weeks. Joel Gascoigne started with a concept for a social media scheduling app.

Following the principles of Eric Ries’s lean startup, Joel’s first step was an extremely minimal release to test user interest: a landing page with a call-to-action that explained what the app did (under the pretence that it already existed). If users clicked the call-to-action, they were taken to an apologetic page explaining that the “finishing touches” were still being applied.

Joel then personally contacted those “earlyvangelists”, asking for feedback and ideas for shaping the product. The response was so positive that Buffer was born – it’s usefulness proven before a line of code was written.

And useful it is — as of June 2015, the company brings in $6.4M per year (and growing).  

Next week we’ll examine another important facet of UX design – usability. We’ll talk about why it’s so important and work through the method that UXPin use to test for it.

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