Justin Maxwell, "Holistic User Experience." BayCHI @ Xerox PARC, 2/8/11

Holistic User Experience Justin Maxwell Director, User Experience and Game
Design, Smule BayCHI Monthly Program Tuesday, February 8, 2011 Personal: http://code404.com Work: http://smule.com Twitter: http://twitter.com/303 Thanks to all of you for coming tonight. And thanks to Christian and Steve, for inviting me and helping with preparation. Moreover, thanks to BayCHI. We are truly fortunate to have an organization like this bringing in such a diverse range of speakers and mentors. I see some familiar faces in the audience tonight, some of you I’ve worked with recently and some many years ago. Thanks a lot for coming. Some of you might be surprised to hear differences in my attitudes or approach than when we worked together. But that gets to the essence of a career in user experience: it is a process of observing, learning, adapting, and applying those techniques over time. We’re going to dig in to that tonight. Being a designer contributing to an excellent user experience is a journey, so i'm going to communicate with you by taking you on a bit of a journey through this concept with me.

So, who am I and why am I standing here?

So, who am I? 6 0 14 21 22 27
32 35 son of a college president and a graphic designer i was playing with letraset at 6 covering every surface possible with typography started using photoshop 1 at 14 went to school for psychology, but i didn’t really know what to do with it at the time. meanwhile i’d been building websites to buy synthesizers and drum machines got out of college, web design -> sony -> studios -> apple -> mint -> smule

in case you aren’t familiar with them, smule was really
the first third party app developer to break down the barrier between device and user with their sonic lighter app, which treated the iphone itself as the lighter, responded to motion, breath, contact. it wasn’t a representation of a lighter on a screen. but that was just the beginning

smule released ocarina, which brought ancient technology -- with a
nod to video games -- to modern technology,

allowing anyone with the app to hear what others around
were playing, see their location, and interact with them through appreciation

with the debut of the ipad, smule’s magic piano found
its way on to one of the most viral videos around the ipad launch

Keynote is crashing so let’s demo in the finder. but
i want to show you their latest application, magic fiddle, which uses gaming dynamics to allow its users to create music. kind of the opposite of rock band, but just as fun, and once you get good at it you can perform your own compositions.

and i knew i had to go work for a
company who announces they used their latest round of funding on buying a big ass chain. you just know that that type of personality is reflected in their products, and their users pick up on it.

So, who am I and why am I standing here?
and why am I standing here? well, most people are familiar with my work at Mint Hired by Mint as "User Experience & Design Guru" i'd never had the words "user experience" in my title before, but i wasn't going to argue.

i mean, a guru! awesome.

User Experience Designer Our product is paramount at Mint.com. As
a company we are maniacally focused on delivering a simple, elegant experience with undeniable value for our users. Mint's Product team is looking for an extremely talented user experience designer (product designer, interface designer, whatever you call yourself). This position requires heavy interaction with the product design team (ixd'ers, visual designers, product designers, coders), marketing team, analytics, and our very talented front-end engineering team. We're a multitalented bunch and all do many things here. Responsibilities In a nutshell, you will design, from concept to typography to pixels to interactions to code, prominent features of Mint.com. You're someone that we can trust to lead projects, not just implement parts of them. • Lead the design and execution of user-facing features and product design, including Mint's support of banks around the world. • Provide coaching and advise collaborators on best practices in your domain. • Focus on simple and clean experiences. The work you produce must be engaging and empowering for novice users, not financial geniuses. • Stay current on browser/platform capabilities (e.g., what can we do with CSS that we don't need to do with photoshop?) and traditional design & engineering disciplines. Maintain and continually expand upon expert knowledge of tools, devices, applications, and the environments in which your audience interacts with your work. • Demonstrate an expert understanding of products, product lines, product development process and the specific markets in which Mint does business. • Validate your design decisions. Know how to measure the efficiency of your interface ideas, whether through web metrics, split testing, or the amount of reuse and modularity it provides to your team. We're not led by testing at all, but we use it to inform and refine our decisions to make us better designers and make a better product for our customers. Requirements • Experience with i18n and l10n. You know the differences and tradeoffs between localization, internationalization, globalization, and translation. • Outstanding portfolio of proven, innovative, solid work, displaying command of HTML + CSS, prototyping, sketching in code, typography, color theory, organization and modularity, grid systems, documentation, development, and layout...and most of all, meticulous pixel-perfect detail. • Passion for Mint's mission and vision, passion for elegant, intuitive user interfaces, and passion for strong, creative brands. • Ability to use Mac OS X-based computer design applications. Which leads us to... • Expertise in the tools required to do your work, and the drive to maintain that expertise and share it with others. • Clear communication, organization, and writing abilities. • Experience writing style guides, sourcing and managing contractors, and building a team. • Demonstrated leadership capability, including ability to inspire, involve, and mentor teammates. • Ability to manage multiple and competing work priorities, demands and changes. • BS/BFA, any discipline. • 5+ years of related experience (7+ years in lieu of a degree) Bonus • Knowledge of the PFM market, loans, mortgages, tuition, taxes, etc. • Creative sensibility. Illustration, audio production, motion graphics, fine art, info viz, flash or flex. If you know Processing, YUI, jQuery, or RaphaelJS, we love you. • Portfolio displaying creative interests outside work • Likes yearly Tahoe trips october 2010 i knew i needed to bring more talent to my team had some really talented designers, and thought ok, i need more. what encompasses what a really talented designer does? "ux designer?" started looking for one, linkedIn, 37signals, mint's twitter feed, the baychi list in a field that puts so much focus on affordance and semantics, i realized it is such a meaningless title! i got everything from ixd students who hadn't graduated to seasoned consultants who haven't opened photoshop in 5 years ok, so i never really got anywhere with that. we met some cool folks, saw some great work, but decided we were really looking for another visual interface designer, and moved on. but that experience stuck with me for a while just lingering in the back of my head... and then came quora

i wasn't the only one looking... This really rubbed me
the wrong way. There are crazy talented people mentioned, but they are graphic designers product designers interaction designers visual interface designers web technologists generalists and specialists Are any of these people really responsible for designing the entire user experience of a product?

The demand for user experience designers is skyrocketing compared to
web designers and interaction designers. http://www.google.com/insights/search/#cat=422&q=user%20experience%20designer%2Cweb%20designer%2Cinteraction%20designer&cmpt=q So, why? what’s going on?

How does one even design a user experience? We should
never talk about "user experience design" — there is no customer or user-facing design that doesn't involve a user's experience. Peter Merholz, 2005 How is that even possible? Is there really such a field as "user experience design?" I don't think there is. And I'm certainly not the first to say this. In 2005, Peter Merholz published that sentiment too: “there is no customer or user-facing design that doesn’t involve a user’s experience” And the usual flamewars and namecalling ensued. So I want to address this and discuss it with you tonight. This question can’t be answered. Instead let’s reframe it a bit.

How do we, as designers, contribute to an excellent experience
for our users? How do we, as designers, contribute to an excellent experience for our users? But when we start to tear the layers off this, it’s not just designers. It’s engineers, researchers, business development, customer service, marketing and branding.

How do we, as designers, excellent experience for our users?
contribute to an It’s everyone.

X things to do Y Tools Framing is good. So
let’s talk about what this is not. This is not a talk on X things to do Y that I hope gets slideshared and gets me twitter followers. There’s one point here, that UX is a company effort, and there’s no magic recipe to follow. And related to that, It’s also not a talk about technical skillsets or specific tools.

User experience is multi-dimensional, evolving, and cannot be “designed.” The
external dynamics of user experience are dependent on the internal dynamics of the system itself. so what is this? well, i want to convince you that user experience is multi-dimensional, a design symphony of sorts. it can’t be designed in the same way a single performer’s contribution isn’t the sole factor in judgment of a symphony’s performance. Since so many of us here are engaged in user experience, interaction design, information architecture, and interface design work, we constantly find ourselves evangelizing user-focused design. and for many of us, it becomes a battle. this is just the wrong approach. So i’m not here to just be grouchy and tell you what things aren’t. in some ways this is discussion is a survey of all the moving parts of a user's experience, what works, what doesn’t, and as we dig in to those, we see that what we produce is interrelated with how we produce it. So what the bigger point is here, is that The external dynamics of user experience are dependent on the internal dynamics of the system itself.

Let’s define a few things Ok, so we’re really going
to dive in to semantics

Holistic Theory The whole is different from the sum of
its parts Aristotle, Metaphysics first, the easy one. holistic theory this is the theory that parts of a whole are in intimate interconnection, and the resulting state of that interconnection is something not measurable in the same dimensions as those parts

Design The art and practice of exploring and implementing ideas
design, as a process the art and practice of implementing ideas

i've seen that written as "solutions" but i feel that's
too confining especially since we're talking about web interfaces and applications. jodi.org, vuk cosic, and alexei shulgin were the first to really bend this concept on the web i don't know if that's a solution. it's awesome, and maybe it's a solution for something in a parallel universe, but let's stick with "ideas". this doesn’t necessarily solve a user’s problems, but it certainly explores how we implement ideas.

Design The art and practice of exploring and implementing ideas
so a designer is a practitioner who explores and implements ideas pretty vague, but gets meaning when given boundaries: graphic-, interaction-, product-, landscape-

User Experience "all aspects of the user’s experience when interacting
with the product, service, environment or facility" i love the International Standards Organisation's definition. It's a mouthful, but it nails it

It is a consequence of Presentation Functionality System Performance Interactive
Behavior Assistive Capabilities ...of the interactive system. It includes all aspects of usability and desirability of a product, system or service from the user’s perspective http://www.iso.org/iso/catalogue_detail.htm?csnumber=52075 When Tom Stewart, chair of the ISO committee responsible for crafting that, announced the draft on his blog, he even cited Apple’s Genius bar as being critical to the experience of owning an Apple product. So this is great. It’s not just the product itself, it’s the marketing around it, it’s the customer service around it, and so on. But for many of you, this is a different way of looking at user experience, even though it’s the definition set by leaders in our field. That’s because some of the most popular texts in the field define user experience as a collection of design techniques

USER EXPERIENCE! NOW AVAILABLE IN PACKAGE FORM! This is an
amazing book. Along with Steve Krug’s Don’t Make Me Think and Peter Morville’s Ambient Findability, The Elements of User Experience brought best practices in web application design to a blossoming industry. But in some ways, this harmless diagram became the blueprint for the term “user experience”. i think that JJG's diagram and the extreme popularity of the book set UX back 5 years. It got people amped on UX, which is great, but it described it as a methodology for the technical layers of web design

http://semanticstudios.com/publications/semantics/000029.php http://www.quora.com/Whats-the-difference-between-interaction-design-and-experience-design Peter Morville Dan Saffer Peter Morville and Dan
Saffer have both produced great diagrams of their own, peter recontextualizes user experience as a honeycomb of measurable values, and dan’s crazy balloon animal shows the intersection of many of the skillsets that contribute to it but something really gets lost in these breakdowns. Maybe if you smashed the two together and extruded it along a continuum we’d start getting somewhere. But this is getting ridiculous, right? We’re trying to wrap a container around something that maybe can’t be held in a container. Oh my god, so many inputs! My eyes are bleeding. Let’s take it down a notch...

Hassenzahl, M. & Tractinsky, N. 2006, User Experience – a
Research Agenda. Behaviour and Information Technology, Vol. 25, No. 2, March-April 2006, pp. 91-97 CONTEXT SYSTEM P ROPERTIES USER’S STA TE this is my favorite diagram of a slice of user experience. it doesn’t define it as a product of technology, nor does it define it as a bunch of emotions. three input categories. ux. is a consequence of user’s state system properties context despite being represented as a nice, tidy 2 dimensional circle, none are static at all, so we can’t approach a design process thinking about them that way. so, let’s get back to the first point

User experience is multi-dimensional, evolving, and cannot be “designed.” back
to the first point --

To provide the best experience possible, we need to understand
how the inputs change over time. To provide the best experience possible, we need to understand how the inputs change over time. I’d like to really dig in to this now to illustrate how complex a user’s experience really is, and give examples of how products have succeeded or failed in addressing the different factors

CONTEXT SYSTEM P ROPERTIES USER’S STA TE so the user’s
state

User’s State Mood Changes Diet Exercise Biorhythm Good news/bad news
Relationships Curses and hexes? http://www.ccs.neu.edu/home/amislove/twittermood/ http://flowingdata.com/2010/11/04/when-people-break-up-according-to-facebook-updates/ Our users moods change as a response to factors far outside our control, but we’re not operating blindly here. The morning coffee routine and the after lunch slump. Lunchtime at the gym. Typical, predictable human cycles — 8 hour cycles, 5 day work week cycles, 28 day cycles, 6 month cycles, 9 month cycles. There are predictable changes in mood if your users are affected by regular paydays or common dates for bills due. What about relationships? As many of us found out our freshman year, college students are most likely to break up before spring break and thanksgiving.

User’s State http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seasonal_affective_disorder Predispositions Color (Physiological) Color (Cultural) General Affectivity
Addictions Your users also have predispositions that affect the ways they interact with your system. In general, red raises metabolism, blue lowers it. Cultural color associations get fun. Let’s say for example your app uses a lot of green. Great! In western society that evokes feelings of freshness, vigor, and wealth. So then you expand eastward. In some middle eastern and asian cultures, green evokes eroticism and has historical ties to prostitution. And what about general affectivity, if your users are predisposed to a disorder? Seasonal affective disorder, “the winter blues” affects nearly 10% of the population in northern states. If your users are largely in New England, a thoughtful design process includes these factors.

User’s State Expectations Existing solutions Competition Brand/Market Users migrated from
Quicken Online to Mint found themselves suddenly without high value features this is a really important one what expectations (or goals) do users have for a product in this category? That’s easy to see how it changes over time. Aside from making calls, what did you expect from your phone five years ago. What do you expect from it now? how are users currently solving a this problem and what are they sensitized to? These expectations change with the technological landscape and with the entities offering the service. When Intuit pulled the plug on Quicken Online, we migrated the users over to Mint. But there was an expectation that Mint would provide the same value QOL did through specific features. It didn’t. Users went ballistic. But existing Mint users hadn’t made much of an issue at all before.

User’s State Education Technical proficiency Language/Lexicon Literacy Intellect Quora’s January
2011 influx of mainstream users did not use the system in the same way as the more technical early-adopters A user’s individual education going to change over time — even within your system you might train them, or if they use your system to augment an activity, the interaction with your system may change. A good example of this is how most complex video games now incorporate a tutorial into beginner levels. But also, the expected values for those inputs may change over time, and your system needs to accomodate. Look at what happened to Quora in 2011. The somewhat anarchic system needed to adapt the influx of users who heard “Quora is the new Twitter” flooded the gates, so the creators have entered a new design phase in responding to this.

User’s State http://www.steveshapiro.com/2008/12/11/interesting-new-years-resolution-statistics/ Motivation New Year’s Resolutions •Money •Weight •Self-Improvement
Marketing Influence •Image •Word-of-Mouth Mint’s targeted advice uses predictable patterns in user motivation as an input to provide dynamic functionality and what about motivation? we know that changes over time. How you handle your money, your weight, your health, user motivation to engage in these activities spikes on New Year’s Eve. Mint’s most financially successful advice campaign so far was related to a New Year’s Resolution. You can give people a great deal on a savings account any time, but why not do it when they’re most likely to appreciate the advice?

The user’s state changes over time. Predispositions Expectations Motivation Needs
Mood

CONTEXT SYSTEM P ROPERTIES USER’S STA TE system properties are
just as dynamic. there are infinite inputs in a system, but i want to provide a few prevalent ones that can have drastic effects on the experience

System Properties Connectivity Cell reception Server load Bandwidth Connectivity wreaks
havoc on user experience. You might have the most amazing phone ever invented, but if you can’t get reception in your home, it’s an expensive paperweight. So location — either yours or the system’s — becomes an input. Twitter’s fail whale is the most recognized “bad news” page in the world because users saw it so frequently. Mint has an amazing server team running adequate hardware, but when Yahoo decided to run a front-page story on us, the resulting traffic ground our service to a halt. Meaning, existing users, the ones who didn’t know or care about that article, had no idea why the service wasn’t working and their experience changed.

System Properties Usability & Complexity Code bloat Refactoring Visible Capabilities
(Hick’s Law) Refactoring resulted in massive performance improvements Interface complexity change created a lower learning curve, but different workflow http://www.macworld.com/article/142425/2009/08/snow_leopard_performance.html The complexity of a system varies as the system evolves. Any enterprise programmer in here is familiar with code bloat. Code bloat, a frequent side-effect of any intensive development environment, reduces the efficiency of a system’s performance. With each update and new version our apps get slower and slower. Conversely, refactoring the systems often has huge impact on performance. One of the most well-known versions of this is Snow Leopard. Snow Leopard cut the times of most system processes like backups, rendering, and encoding in half. Another example, iMovie, had reached a point where its complexity was hindering usability. Apple completely rewrote and redesigned iMovie 08, focusing on the needs of the novice user. And like the Quicken Online example before, the expectations of the upgrading users resulted in a huge backlash. So we can see how these dynamics are inter-related

System Properties Devices Components Form The Android device landscape changes
frequently and abruptly. qVGA meant a lot of unexpected work for designers Anyone who’s ever upgraded a computer from one model to the next knows how changing components — in most cases, the processor — affects their experience. And this is so closely tied with the previous input, complexity. When we designed Mint for Android, we used every bit of available information — the android developer’s guide, existing devices, and feedback from our users. Then Samsung released an android device with a new screen resolution. The screen constraints made the application unusable. Users on other devices were loving it, giving it great reviews, which led to new owners of this samsung downloading the app -- and their experience was quite different.

System Properties Functionality Features Connected Services Dependencies Facebook blocked access
from Ping on the day of its release Functionality changes can be a huge determinant in the value your system brings to its users. How about when Facebook blocked access from Ping on the day of its release? Many people believe the exclusion of this single feature changed users’ motivation for interacting with the system. So Apple adapts. Ping posts to Twitter, twitter posts to facebook. It’s not the same, but the designers and engineers of the system observe the input and respond. With Mint, BofA and ING users are always freaking out. Financial Institutions change the way they interfaced with Mint, affecting millions of users, but those users blame your system, because you’re providing the experience. So how do we adapt and respond? Our designers created tools for our customer service team to push system status messages to those customers. Things like “BofA is having problems with Mint today” or “ING is blocking access from your account right now.”

The system’s properties change over time. Functionality Complexity Usability Purpose

CONTEXT SYSTEM P ROPERTIES USER’S STA TE alright, context. i'm
not going to list them all, we could spend an entire hour talking about the implications of context on user experience, but here are a few key inputs that change over time

Context Environmental (Setting) what is the experience by yourself? with
friends? at a party? with kids around? jeff parker of intuit learned a lot by follow-me- homes watching parents use quicken with kids around. If your users get interrupted every two minutes, can your system help maintain focus on the current task when they return? That’s where we can pull in an interaction designer and a visual designer and say “make the focus more prominent and permanent” Let’s say you’re leading an airline’s mobile app project. What’s the environmental difference between using the airport check- in app on your couch or when a TSA agent is patiently waiting for you to pull up the QR code?

Context Social (Meaningfulness) Relationships to other users Relationships to the
system Brand identification what relationships do you have with other users or the system itself? sure, we know our relationships change over time. but let’s take zynga here. the moment you start playing a zynga game, the significance of your relationships to other facebook friends who play zynga games changes instantly. you may have blocked some dude’s posts and totally forgot he exists, but now he’s your best friend because he has that zoning permit you need, and you’re going to thank him with a +2 energy. do you identify with the brand? do you feel cool when the PBR app posts to your wall or when Lance Armstrong congratulates you for setting a personal record using Nike+ on your iPod?

Context Novelty (Meaningfulness) New versus familiar concepts Do we speak
into the screen? The context of novelty is just as variable. Does your system present a new or familiar concept to your users? Would people using this application for the first time expect to speak into the screen? Perhaps someone who didn’t know what that image was would interact with this differently. In the case of Smule’s Ocarina, the system’s designers account for novelty, that this foreign interface brings unfamiliar concepts. The first thing the user sees is an instructive call to action.

Context Novelty (Meaningfulness) New versus familiar concepts The system takes
novelty in to account and tells us what to do The context of novelty is just as variable. Does your system present a new or familiar concept to your users? Would people using this application for the first time expect to speak into the screen? Perhaps someone who didn’t know what that image was would interact with this differently. In the case of Smule’s Ocarina, the system’s designers account for novelty, that this foreign interface brings unfamiliar concepts. The first thing the user sees is an instructive call to action.

Context Voluntariness Health-related Legal Trial periods (“30 days free”) How
voluntary is participation in the system? Is it constant? How will the behavior of your users change when they aren’t forced to use the system? I consulted for a startup working in the health space. As a treatment for their existing conditions, even without our product, our users had to do a daily activity that involved a small amount of discomfort. So a bunch of us collectively -- interface designers, engineers, human factors -- banded together and made the case that the single greatest thing we could do for the users wasn’t in the product we were building, it was in reducing the discomfort associated with the overall experience. By improving that voluntary procedure with a trivial component of our product, it made their overall experience with managing their health even better.

The context in which the system operates changes over time.
Meaningfulness Voluntariness Setting again, you see these all fluctuate with time, they are incredibly dynamic. understanding and factoring in the setting in which your users operate is crucial.

How do we nurture a system that adapts to these
dynamic inputs and create a great user experience? so i’ve hopefully made the case now that user experience cannot be designed. it’s not a deliverable or a quality. but that doesn’t mean all of us in here don’t strive for an amazing user experience at all. we’re still designers and engineers and product managers and so on, trying to deliver awesome products or create innovative work. to make a good user experience organization-wide, you need to focus on responding to the dynamic inputs and ensuring that the responses to every one of these moving parts is as good as possible. it’s how you respond to all of the factors within your sphere of influence that affect that experience what you bring to the process, and how you influence the other moving parts to work in concert

Seeking excellence internally. Communication Collaboration Interaction so to act in
concert, these teams need to interact, and to interact, they need to communicate. and that is really the focus of user experience, the core principle behind good design: optimizing the inputs to the process. And you can only do that through good communication with the other moving parts.

http://jnd.org/dn.mss/do_companies_fail_because_their_technology_is_unusable.html “We’re going to hold off on user experience for
a few months while we focus on revenue” Christian Crumlish gave a talk called "User Experience is everybody's business." It's a company effort. we had a famous meeting at mint where the topic of “holding off on user experience for a few months while we focus on revenue” came up. Somehow we’re going to make money, but we’re going to ignore the needs of the people we’re making money from. neither the design team nor the biz dev team understood that statement -- product design needed them as much as they needed us. and that’s not unique. in so many situations, these stakeholders are positioned in opposition to each other. it’s a familiar scenario for most everyone working in industry. we talk of battles and “fighting for” the user experience. it just doesn’t work that way. if you fight internally, your users will experience it in the product. don norman said it well. read quote

for [a] company to succeed, all aspects of the product
must perform well: the business model, the marketing and sales efforts, the cost structure, the competitiveness, and of course, the product itself, in appearance, function, and usability. Don Norman, 2005 http://jnd.org/dn.mss/do_companies_fail_because_their_technology_is_unusable.html Christian Crumlish gave a talk called "User Experience is everybody's business." It's a company effort. we had a famous meeting at mint where the topic of “holding off on user experience for a few months while we focus on revenue” came up. Somehow we’re going to make money, but we’re going to ignore the needs of the people we’re making money from. neither the design team nor the biz dev team understood that statement -- product design needed them as much as they needed us. and that’s not unique. in so many situations, these stakeholders are positioned in opposition to each other. it’s a familiar scenario for most everyone working in industry. we talk of battles and “fighting for” the user experience. it just doesn’t work that way. if you fight internally, your users will experience it in the product. don norman said it well. read quote

Organizations which design systems are constrained to produce systems which
are copies of the communication structures of these organizations Melvin Conway, 1968 Melvin E. Conway introduced this idea in 1968. Tufte referenced it in his famous essay, the cognitive style of powerpoint, suggesting that the way people bombard others with powerpoint decks creates an environment of dominance, not teaching. some of the most prominent names in agile development expanded on this concept as it applies to application design. it’s not as eloquent, but it’s poignant.

"If the parts of an organization do not closely reflect
the essential parts of the product, or if the relationship between organizations do not reflect the relationships between product parts, then the project will be in trouble.” Coplien & Harrison, 2004 James O. Coplien, Neil B. Harrison (July 2004). Organizational Patterns of Agile Software Development. ISBN 978-0131467408.

Design on the outside reflects design on the inside. The
way your teams interact will be reflected in what you produce. ok, so where am i going with this? Design on the outside reflects design on the inside. The way your teams interact will be reflected in what you produce. and this is so evident today. look around for influences.

Companies with recognized industry-leading user experience are also known for
unique internal cultures and processes. Apple’s internal culture is the stuff of legend. It’s a strategically secretive environment that pushes some of the best talent harder than they’ve been pushed in any job before. Zappos’ core values include "be humble" and "create fun and a little weirdness." Find me someone who didn’t like their experience with Zappos. Everyone gushes about ordering three sizes and sending back two, getting lighthearted emails from the customer service team, getting things for free if something went wrong with the order. This outward personality is a result of the same care and nurturing inside the company. What about southwest? Southwest has both some of the highest customer satisfaction and employee satisfaction. Queuing for a flight is awful. The environment creates anxiety and conflict, and that affects the relationships the customers have with the employees. Southwest re-engineered the entire boarding process to be better for not just their customers, but really for their employees.

Design on the outside reflects design on the inside. The
way your teams interact will be reflected in what you produce. back to this guy. by this principle, if we strive for the best, most excellent user experience for our customers and users, if we want that in our product, if we want that, we need to develop and foster that internally so to foster it internally, let's take a few minutes reexamining the components of user experience, but this time do it introspectively. and don’t worry, i’m not going to explode each facet here.

CONTEXT SYSTEM P ROPERTIES USER’S STA TE

User’s State Intelligence & Skill Set Personality Health Motivation Attitudes
Predisposition Experience & Education Intelligence & Skill Set Personality Health Motivation Attitudes Predisposition Experience & Education every single one of those is related to how a person communicates and interacts. so it’s in the best interest of the individual to not be a lazy slob and of the organization to be concerned with the well-being of the employees. A huge element of both Mint’s success and Smule’s is the motivation and attitudes of the forces behind the organizations.

CONTEXT SYSTEM P ROPERTIES USER’S STA TE the organization has
system properties

System Properties Technologies Languages, Platforms, Methods Tools Software, Hardware, Whiteboards,
etc. Technologies If you’re designing for Android, are you an android user in daily life, or did you just get one for this project? How does choosing Java or Ruby affect the way your team approaches design tasks, and how do you need to communicate with them about it? Tools Look at all the mac-inspired UI everywhere on the web. It’s no coincidence that the market share has risen among creative professionals. They use OS X apps all day, and it affects the work they produce.

etc. Physical Location Remote Teams/Telecommuters Physical Location At mint we had a remote team. We used campfire and videoconferencing to try to bridge a 500-mile gap between mountain view and san diego. That had its advantages and disadvantages. By traveling between the offices, our team bonded and found inspiration in the different environments. But at the same time, that gap made collaboration difficult sometimes, and you can see casualties of it in the ideas we executed. When one of our interaction designers was overseas, he shifted his work schedule to overlap with ours, created a positive input to our collaboration, and it was like he was just working at home -- the time difference was erased. At Smule we have a one guy in Bulgaria and one in North Carolina. So if different parts of the organization are located in different places, we need to plan for how they will interact effectively if we want cohesion in the outward system.

etc. Physical Location Remote Teams/Telecommuters Processes Internal tools (Expense Reports, Procurement), HR, Chat Processes Apple’s internal tools reflect the same attention to detail as their external tools. The people working on them write better code than I will ever be able to. On-site tech support are some of the best people you’ll encounter there. I’ve been at another company where the intranet was a disconnected series of third-party products each requiring individual credentials, and their help desk was an overseas call center. When you are dealing with such fundamental aspects of performing your job, these experiences you have must influence the ways you solve problems yourself and the ideas you explore for your users. Frame it in any way you need for this to soak in -- think of it as immersion or resonance maybe, or that one time you dreamed about Halo after playing it for 14 hours straight.

CONTEXT SYSTEM P ROPERTIES USER’S STA TE

Context In the office Perceived physical environment (Habitability) Psychological and
social climate Hierarchy/Group/Team structure Organizational Norms and core values is it a comfortable, ergonomic place that inspires creativity or a cubicle farm with bad lighting and line-of-sight to other employees? what relationships do you have with other users or the system itself? It sounds silly, but how intimate are those relationships? Can you argue productively with a coworker or give valuable constructive criticism? What’s the overall mood...do people enjoy each other’s company? well this is going to effect how you work together, how your teams work together, how your business units work together, meaning...how the parts of your product work together

Context Outside the office Brand perception/sociocultural environment External physical environment
Backcountry’s employees work 15 minutes from the lifts in Park City what does it mean to be working for this company. The impact your context has on how you approach design would significantly vary if you worked for BP or the Red Cross. backcountry.com is located in park city, utah. employees catch a few hours of freshies on powder days in the winter or train for triathlons before work in the summer. and they are an ecommerce/lifestyle company that sells outdoor goods. the experiences those employees have outside the office are a significant input to the experience they provide their customers.

User experience is multi-dimensional, evolving, and cannot be “designed.” The
external dynamics of user experience are dependent on the internal dynamics of the system itself. User experience is multi-dimensional, evolving, and cannot be “designed.” The external dynamics of user experience are dependent on the internal dynamics of the system itself. ok so we’ve established ux is an ongoing, time-dependent process that cannot be designed by an individual and what's outside comes from what's inside

To maintain excellence in user experience, we can strategically monitor
all the inputs and continually refine and influence the quality of our responses to those inputs. so unless you're the founder and build this system from the ground up, your role as a designer is to watch the inputs and the company's responses to all these aspects, internal and external, that affect user experience, to monitor those, and where you can, contribute to improving the quality of the responses across the board.

Internal experience creates external experience. complexity simplicity disconnection cohesion complexity
simplicity disconnection cohesion it's a fairly simple point. internal complexity leads to external complexity but internal cohesion leads to external cohesion good things on the inside lead to good things on the outside. that’s the experience you give to your users. and not one person is going to design it. if you’re a designer, your job is to be one who monitors and designs for an excellent external experience, but it is critical to your job to focus on the internal experience as well. this manifests itself as attitude and intention towards collaboration, influence, and personal responsibility. so that’s really my conclusion here, really, we squash the two into one. ux is a continuum of all aspects of a system, not a bunch of skills or technologies, and the way we function in the system determines whether that experience is good or bad, easy or confusing. maybe the conclusion is a little ambiguous, but like i said, this was more about taking you on a journey to reframe the way we think about designing for user experience.

Which employee skills and roles have the most impact towards
a good user experience? How do our motivations behind career choices affect how we design for our users? How do we conduct ourselves internally to nurture the best UX for our whole system? open questions... but it leaves us with some interesting things to think about Which employee skills and roles have the most impact towards a good user experience on our specific systems, not in general? Do you need a project manager to free your designers from time-based inputs, or do you hire people who manage themselves? Which is more appropriate for your product and your users? How do our motivations behind career choices affect how we design for our users? If we choose jobs we are or are not passionate about, how will that be reflected in the systems we design. It’s the prime reason I went to Smule. How do we conduct ourselves internally to nurture the best UX for our whole system? when you see something like nikeplus, can we extrapolate that a competitive, but encouraging and supportive environment produced it?

Thanks! Any questions?

Justin Maxwell, "Holistic User Experience." Bay...

Justin Maxwell, "Holistic User Experience." BayCHI @ Xerox PARC, 2/8/11

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