If Lewis Carroll’s quote ‘if you don’t know where you’re going, any road will get you there’ is a paraphrase of the exchange between Alice and the Cheshire Cat in the Alice in Wonderland books; it sometimes strikes me as a similar experience bringing UX to enterprises.
I left my last organisation with a compliment from my boss that I won’t forget; ‘You made me stop and think’. I take that as a mark of success. Here’s why:
You can do all the user testing, MVT’s and journey optimisation you like, but that will not guarantee you that will get to meaningful results any quicker. Otherwise you are metaphorically setting at a huge bank of dials and switches flicking them on and off without knowing what you are effecting or what effect you are creating.
What is required is a vision; one that benefits both the user (or customer) and the business. It is also critical that as an organisation you know what is at the core of your business; how you make money. For example, it might be ‘time in an airline seat’ or ‘a home for you to live in’. By understand what is at the core and working out from there are you able to create a worthwhile vision while realising further opportunities for exploration.
But how do you know that you are heading in right direction?
Seeking to find your users’ pain points and where you can create real, tangible ‘magic moments’ is a compelling idea. But what is important is to understand that a vision can evolve, it can change as you know, discover and understand more.
You can continue to do all the testing that we have mentioned already – maybe some day all of your tests will turn out negative and miraculously you will have discovered your current solution’s critical mass; of course, completely by accident.
Maybe there is another more forensic way of being able to establish if you are heading in the right direction? It is one thing knowing where you want to be, it’s another to know how you are going to get there or if you are heading in the right direction. (Of course, that’s not to say that sometimes you may need to take the scenic route.)
Articulating this vision is such a way that it can be refereed and articulated is hard without loosing people along the way. But giving people the framework to make these discoveries in might help. This framework might be a way to ensure that it remains adaptable, changeable and continues to have longevity because it lives and breathes, and more importantly it has value. This could perhaps be described in the following ways:
- A high level view of the tasks that users want to do or achieve during their lifecycle
- A needs matrix which matches the needs of the user to those of the business
- A content matrix to validate what needs to be said when in the journey
- A series of micro strategies or small dials that can be understood to demonstrate what effects they are having on the experience
This is not analysis paralysis (I know what this feels like) but a collection of assumptions that can be validated as more is discovered. It also means that we don’t have to be constrained by thinking about a sequence or consequences of features and gives us the ability to transcend a collection of pages.
User journeys are not the same from user to user; they enter the journeys that we design at different points with different levels of knowledge. Instead a framework like this might allow us to elevate our thinking so that we can start really satisfying user needs in a more meaningful context and understand or attribute value to the user experience.
Frazer Cooper 