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13 © Westley Knight 2019 W. Knight, UX for Developers, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4842-4227-8_2

CHAPTER 2

The Importance of User Experience Back in January of 2012, Jakob Nielsen published an article, “Usability 101: Introduction

to Usability”. In it, Nielsen states, “usability is a necessary condition for survival.” If a

user is unable to find what they’re looking for, if they find the product difficult to use, or

simply get lost in trying to achieve their goal, they will leave.

From the launch of the first iPhone back in 2007, there has been an explosion in

terms of internet traffic coming from mobile devices. Statcounter reported that internet

usage by mobile and tablet devices exceeded that from desktop devices for the first time

in October 2016. In September 2016, Google released statistics that 53% of mobile sites

are abandoned after 3 seconds.

With these kinds of figures in mind, it would be fair to extend Nielsen’s statement on

usability to say that a good user experience – or at the very least a better user experience

than your competitors – is now a necessary condition for survival, and usability is now

just one of the steps in creating successful digital products. These days, if two separate

products exist that enable a user to complete the same goal, the one that is more

enjoyable to use, the one that provides a better user experience, will be the one that

succeeds.

As we noted in the previous chapter, user experience design requires us to bring the

user into the heart of the design process. We should always be aiming to improve the

lives of our users – however grand a statement you may feel that is – by making it easier

for them to complete their tasks, achieve their goals, while also making it enjoyable for

them to do so.

Knight, Westley. UX for Developers : How to Integrate User-Centered Design Principles into Your Day-To-Day Development Work, Apress L. P., 2018. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/snhu-ebooks/detail.action?docID=5611444. Created from snhu-ebooks on 2022-03-01 16:46:16.

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Beyond that, there must be an understanding that a good user experience cannot

exist without underlying support from the business. With the continuous advancements

of technology and the increased expectations of our users, there is a constantly

increasing likelihood that if an organization doesn’t consider the user experience

they deliver to be of any importance, they won’t last very long in this age of digital

disruption.

UX from the Business Perspective It’s fair to say that over the past few years the term “User Experience” has become

more and more prominent throughout those organizations that have some level of

investment in digital. The “digital disruptors” of the world, without a doubt, have

encouraged the rise of User Experience in the business world. These “digital disruptors”

are those digitally centered organizations that leverage advances in technology and

the internet in order to make innovative digital services. In combination with a user-

centered design approach, they fundamentally alter the nature of the industry they

operate in. Think Spotify for streaming music instead of buying CDs, Netflix in place of

movie rentals and scheduled TV programming, or Airbnb for unique accommodation

in place of hotels.

All of these brands are now considered as household names, such is their popularity.

In no small part, this can be somewhat attributed to the focus they put on the needs of

their customer. If you give your customers – your users – a better experience, something

that enhances their lives, helps them to get their tasks done and to achieve their goals,

and to align these needs with your business goals, the business will be successful.

Unfortunately, not all of us have the chance to be working for trailblazing companies

such as Netflix, Spotify, Twitter, or any of the other digital disruptors that spring to mind.

The vast majority of businesses in the world that have recognized the need to adapt are

undergoing some kind of digital transformation program. This isn’t only about improving

their apps or websites, but improving all aspects of their current technology- based

infrastructure, giving them the capability to pivot and move in new directions to provide

for the needs of their customers. From my experience, from small- and medium- sized

enterprises (SMEs) to large corporations with household brand names, an integral part of

this digital transformation is to increase the level of UX maturity within the organization.

You may well be aware of this going on around you in your workplace today.

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Before we take a look at how businesses can utilize user-centered design to enhance

the user experience, we have to understand where the organization lies in terms of its

own level of UX maturity.

The Various States of UX Maturity In my experience of working in the United Kingdom with SMEs and larger organizations

that have been around for a decade or more, it is still common to find the business

running on legacy systems that require in-depth knowledge and a significant amount of

time to upgrade. There are also partnerships with third parties that provide a multitude

of digital and product services. These organizations also tend to have a “less than

nimble” approach to design and development of products and services. These are the

organizations that are having the realization that they have to adapt to survive; that

they must deliver not only outstanding products, but outstanding experiences to their

customers.

Although user experience isn’t a new concept, the discipline of user experience

design can still be found to be immature in the vast majority of the types of organizations

mentioned above. In 2017, I was not only working as the only user experience designer

in a 250-employee strong organization, but I was also the first user experience designer

that they had ever employed. Although we may see the vocal minority leading the way in

user experience design by publishing articles, speaking at conferences, and sharing their

process, it is naïve to think that all organizations now focus on user experience; we must

not lose sight that the majority are still playing catch up.

Those organizations are beginning to truly understand the benefits of good user

experience, and the user-centered design approach that is required in order to deliver

it, but the culture of their organization is in need of a paradigm shift to be able to not

only accommodate this new approach, but to place it at the core of everything the

organization does.

There have been a number of models created against which an organization can

measure itself with regard to their level of UX maturity, the most well-known of which

would be Neilsen’s UX Maturity Model (Figure 2-1). The model outlines eight stages of

maturity ranging from “Hostility Toward Usability” to the “User-Driven Corporation.”

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The Lower Levels of UX Maturity The first three levels of the model focus around the business requirements and IT

constraints, and these are the factors that drive the development of any given product or

feature. The hostility toward usability means that the end users are essentially deemed

irrelevant to the process, and the goal of the development team is to build features and

make them work to the provided specifications. These organizations do not consider

their users to be at the same level of importance as the strategic or financial needs of the

company, as depicted in Figure 2-2.

Stage 2, the Developer-Centered User Experience, is largely an exercise in self-

referential design. The internal project teams will rely on their own intuition and

experience to decide what constitutes good usability, and this approach is only ever

successful when the teams that are working on the project are the end users themselves.

When an organization hits stage 3, Skunkworks User Experience, there is now a

realization that the organization can no longer rely on its internal teams to use their

best judgment on what will constitute a good user experience, or what the most usable

solution for their customers may be. The very beginnings of real user-centered design

work begin to appear, but the efforts to involve users in the design of their products will

still be few and far between.

Figure 2-1. Adapted from Neilsen’s UX Maturity Model

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These lower levels of UX maturity are where many organizations find themselves

today. This can be a somewhat difficult thing to comprehend, as the most vocal

companies springing up in Silicon Valley and other tech bubbles are generally borne

out of the needs of the user and find themselves at the higher levels of UX maturity from

their inception.

As thought leaders in the digital world, in combination with how vocal they

can be within the Silicon Valley bubble, the rhetoric of the digital disruptors can

easily overshadow the millions upon millions of businesses that are still struggling

through their own digital transformation programs with the aim of leveraging the

same advantages that are intrinsic to those organizations that embrace the start-up

culture: devolving responsibilities to product teams; an agile approach that encourages

innovation; and the ability to pivot to suits the needs of the business, and more

importantly, their customers.

The Medium Levels of UX Maturity The medium levels of UX maturity, depicted as levels 4 through 6 in Neilsen’s UX

Maturity Model, begin to manifest an appreciation of the value of UX activities from

the business, enough for them to create a dedicated UX budget. This tends to happen

organically as the work done by the small and loosely structured team during the

Figure 2-2. A depiction of where an organization of low-level UX maturity sits within common driving forces of a business

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Skunkworks User Experience stage has caught the eyes of some of those higher up in the

organization’s hierarchy, and they have become convinced that the company will profit

from further investment into providing a better user experience.

With additional investment, the ability to generate a greater return over time

becomes possible, and more and more success stories of reducing business costs,

increasing productivity, and improving conversion rates help to push the organization to

the 5th stage of UX maturity: Managed Usability.

At this stage, an official UX team or department is created, allowing the business to

reap the benefits of a more consistent approach to research, design, and usability testing

throughout a wider range of projects, as opposed to the scattered funding made available

in levels 3 and 4. Not only will this team be able to create consistency, they will also have

the remit to consider the user experience across the wider organization, as opposed to

the more localized implementation of user experience at a project, or even department

level. The leaders of this team will no longer be focused on the details – designing and

implementing better solutions will be down to the members of the team – but will

be working toward a higher purpose: to increase UX maturity to the levels where it is

considered to be part of the business strategy.

Despite their being both a larger budget and remit than previous levels, it is still

not possible to realize all of the potential user experience design activities for every

project throughout an organization at any given time. Although the direction to create

a more unified and universal approach to user experience design is in place, the

implementation takes a large amount of time to gain traction throughout the business,

meaning that the application of UX activities can still be largely fragmented.

Moving to level 6, Systematic User-Centered Design, we find that the organization

looks to utilize user research before approaching design on their more important

projects. The business also looks to measure the impact of user experience utilizing

key performance indicators, along with other familiar methods used to measure the

performance of other areas of the business. With the ability for the business to monitor

the performance of each release, an iterative design process becomes more common as

the business realizes that the best solution is hardly ever created at the first attempt, but

that continuous improvements can be made over time, constantly improving the user

experience, iteration after iteration.

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The Higher Levels of UX Maturity Upon reaching stage 7, Integrated User-Centered Design, everything within a project is

driven by user data that comes from the now commonplace, and far more prominent,

user research activities at project inception. The foundations laid in stage 6 for

monitoring the user experience evolves to be able to produce valuable quantitative data

that can be used to measure against usability goals based on user data. By Neilsen’s

definition, this is the “UX nirvana as far as interaction design goes,” so why is there

another stage beyond this?

The answer is that user experience doesn’t have to be just part of the design domain

but can influence the business in ways that completely transform how strategic decisions

are made. User research doesn’t just influence the direction of a project, it influences

what projects the company should give the greenlight, what their priorities are, as well

as the overarching strategic direction. User Experience becomes Customer Experience,

covering larger aspects of service design for all touchpoints that customers have with the

organization.

As of 2018, there are a relatively miniscule number of organizations in the world that

have reached the highest levels of UX maturity. Although we are able to talk through

the different levels of UX maturity in just a few pages of this book, the reality is that this

process can take years, and more likely decades, depending on where your organization

currently resides in this scale. The path to the higher levels of UX maturity is a long,

winding, arduous journey, in which, eventually, pretty much everybody within an

organization will require at least a basic understanding of the UX process since it will

be part of their day-to-day way of working, engrained in the culture of the business. The

result of this is that the users are seen as equal importance to the business as the strategic

and financial elements of the business equation, as depicted in Figure 2-3 below.

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Although it may not necessarily be the main goal when it comes to the digital

transformation of an organization, the advancement through the stages of UX maturity is

one of the most important advancements for the business. As the experience of the user

becomes more central to organizational goals, the more engrained it becomes in their

day-to-day operations.

The Costs Due to Lack of a User-Centered Design Process Many organizations that haven’t done much in the way of user-centered design, or even

lent much thought to the user experience of their digital products, will often question the

amount of work required in implementing a design process, let alone one that involves

the users.

There will always be pressure applied from other business priorities, such as being

first to market, or to hit internal deadlines for release windows. More often than not, with

Figure 2-3. A depiction of where a user-driven organization sits within equal driving forces of strategy, finance, and users

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a less mature level of UX understanding, this design process can be under increasing

pressure to legitimize its inclusion within the chain of delivery.

Ultimately the business will ask whether investing in user experience design is worth it.

“If you think good design is expensive, you should look at the cost of bad design.”

– Ralf Speth

The business world is very much focused on numbers: profit margins, average order values,

recurring revenues, customer lifetime values, et cetera. And so they should be. Without

measuring the success and failures of past projects, how can they possibly learn from

their mistakes, and in doing so, avoid repeating the same type of mistakes in the future?

The value of good design, however, can be much more difficulty to quantify in those

terms, so we have to look to the business world to borrow models on which we can

provide evidence that spending time and resources on design will reap the benefits in

the longer term.

In organizations where design is not truly valued, it can be perceived as something

that is more of an expense, and a costly one at that. This is also a reflection of the level of

maturity in the field of UX that a business has.

A Real-World Example When I joined an organization as their first and only UX Designer, there were a number

of multipage forms that constituted different user journeys for each of the products or

services that were being sold to their potential customers: a typical sales funnel for a

business website selling their products to their potential customers.

One of the particular journeys that I got to work on was an out-of-the-box, white

label solution for home insurance. In terms of design, the only changes that had been

made to a fairly basic multipage form was the addition of the company logo, along with

a change in color palette to reflect the brand. This particular online journey performed

terribly. There were dropout rates of around 40% at every step of the journey, meaning

that for every 100 visitors to our quote journey, only 8 would make it to the screen where

they could buy an insurance policy.

The business was acutely aware that work needed to be done, so a project team was

formed with the aim of creating a new front end that we would have more control over as

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a company, and no longer rely on a third party to deliver the digital journey on our behalf.

However, this project did not initially contain any design phase at all as it was purely

focused on re-creating the existing journey, but to be in our own domain of control.

After a few conversations and compromises with the project team and the senior

management, we were able to integrate a four-week design phase into the project. This

would consist of a great deal of analysis on the questions that comprised the journey and

how they were organized, with three rounds of design, prototyping, and usability testing

with real customers. Armed with the figures that the white label solution had generated

for the business over the past years, in combination with some internal guerrilla testing

of a very early prototype, the project team was able to create a set of objectives, key

performance indicators, and targets that the business could sign off on.

Before the introduction of this design phase, there was no additional benefit to be

gained from the first minimum viable product, other than having direct control over

the journey to improve the turnaround for future iterations of the user journey. With

the introduction of a user-centered design phase, we were able to propose a return on

investment with our first release of a new user journey.

Within the first month of release of this new home insurance journey, we had

smashed all of our projected targets out of the park. The number of policies sold went up

201% compared to the same period in the previous year, and the profit margin went up

by more than 325%.

With just the introduction of a four-week design phase, we were able to create a huge

benefit for the business, and all from a minimum viable product that we could launch for

our customers.

User Experience Is No Longer an Optional Extra The less concerned the organization is with the user experience, the more common it is

for the design process to be brushed aside as an optional extra. Something that is not a

core component of what the organization delivers to its customers.

In 2005, the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) published a

report entitled “Why Software Fails.” The report contained a list of the 12 most common

factors that contribute toward the failure of software projects:

• Unrealistic or unarticulated project goals

• Inaccurate estimates of needed resources

• Badly defined system requirements

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• Poor reporting of the project’s status

• Unmanaged risks

• Poor communication among customers, developers, and users

• Use of immature technology

• Inability to handle the project’s complexity

• Sloppy development practices

• Poor project management

• Stakeholder politics

• Commercial pressures

The report estimated that organizations and governments would have spent $1

trillion that year on IT hardware, software, and services across the globe. Of the IT

projects that were initiated, between 5 to 15% of them would be abandoned before or

shortly after delivery, as they would have been deemed hopelessly inadequate.

Beyond that, it was estimated that 50% of a developer’s time is spent reworking

avoidable issues. Literally half of a developer’s time was spent doing work that

shouldn’t be needed due to some of those factors listed above. The cost of fixing an

error after development has been completed is 100 times that of fixing the error before

development has been completed.

The CHAOS Report – an annual report generated from research by The Standish

Group – stated in 2016 that 31.1% of projects were cancelled before they were completed,

and 52.7% of projects would cost 189% of their original estimates.

Three of those factors listed in the IEEE report – specifically badly defined system

requirements, poor communication among customers, developers, and users, and

stakeholder politics – can be avoided by implementing some of the techniques that are

common practice within user-centered design, such as user research, usability testing,

and stakeholder interviews. Although these user-centered design activities can be of

great benefit in these areas, they are not a magic wand that can be waved when things

start to go awry; instead they must be utilized from the very beginning of a project in

order to be effective.

By implementing user-centered design, we can help to prevent these issues that

can cause immense frustration for developers (as well as the wider project team), we

can negate some of the contributing factors, as well as the excessive associated costs to

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the business by reducing the risk of project failure. Not only can a user-centered design

approach limit the risk for the business, and reduce costs, but it can also have a huge

positive impact in terms of return on investment (ROI), effectively removing the barrier

of increased costs up front to fund a user-centered design approach within a project.

The ROI of UX Design “Usability goals are business goals. Websites that are hard to use frustrate customers, forfeit revenue, and erode brands.”

– Forrester Research

The justification of the amount of work that needs to be undertaken through a user-

centered design process can be difficult to measure in a way that the business can utilize

effectively. As we mentioned earlier, business decisions revolve around numbers. The

methodologies within user-centered design provides us with all kinds of data that proves

what customers like and don’t like, what they find easy to use, and whether the product

helped them to complete their task or reach their goal.

But these facts and figures on their own don’t relate to the concerns of the business.

They need to be converted into a language that is understood and respected in the

business world. They need to be converted into a metric: increase in conversion rate,

reduction in abandonment, reduction in calls to the support staff, decrease in the

amount of required training, increased product usage, reduction in development time,

or a reduction in errors – all of which can be indicators of a successful UX design process

that the business can measure.

Whatever the metric, there is a distinct business need to show that return on

investment.

A Scenario for Calculating ROI Let’s imagine that our business is an insurance broker that has a call center with 200

sales staff. Every day, the sales staff collectively makes a number of errors when inputting

the details of their customers into the system, throughout the working day. From this, in

conjunction with some other data that we are already aware of, we can calculate the cost

of these errors to the business.

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(# of errors) ⨯ (Avg. repair time) ⨯ (Employee cost) ⨯ (# of employees) = Cost savings

On average every user makes 2 errors per day when entering a customer’s contact

details, which equates to 10 errors per week, per employee. The average time for the

employee to rectify each of those errors is 10 minutes. The employee cost, or the hourly

rate that a member of the sales staff is paid, is $10, and we already know that we have

200 employees. So our calculation looks like this:

(10 errors/week) ⨯ (0.1666 hours) ⨯ ($10/hour) ⨯ 200 employees)

= $3,332/week

= $39,984/year

Now the business is aware of the cost of the problem, and how much can be saved

if the problem is corrected. Against this, we can now measure the cost of using a user-

centered design approach to resolve the problem. In order to remove the possibility

of these errors occurring when an employee is entering these details, a designer will

create a possible solution as a prototype, test this with users, and iterate on the proposed

solution until a usable and successful solution is found.

This work for the designer is estimated at 40 hours, at the hourly rate of $20, which

creates a total design cost of $800. We will also require some time from the sales staff for

testing. For 3 rounds of testing with 6 users, with each test taking 30 minutes, the cost

for these participants would total $90 for the 9 hours required. For the developers to

implement this solution, work is estimated at 8 hours at an hourly rate of $15, creating a

development cost of $120.

Therefore, the estimated total cost to remove the possibility of this error occurring

for the sales staff is just $1,010. By implementing this change, the business can realize its

investment in just over 1.5 days following implementation, which means the cost savings

to the business over a year for this particular solution would be $38,974.

UX Is Everyone’s Responsibility One thing that is clear from the example above is that the input of both designers

and developers was required to deliver a solution to a problem in order to benefit the

business. The design team are not the only ones in a product or feature team who

influence the user experience. People outside of the design team, or those that don’t

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have the word “designer” in their job titles, make significant design choices, whether

consciously or otherwise, that affect the resulting customer experience in a huge variety

of ways.

Much has been said in the design community about what actually constitutes

a designer. There are conflicting opinions from both sides of the argument, specific

examples from a wide variety of experiences, and criteria banded around about what

skills make a designer. I don’t particularly want to get involved in that debate – although

this book may have already committed me to a particular position on that front – but

more importantly, I don’t want developers to be drawn into that debate, nor anyone

outside of what is considered the “design profession,” for lack of a better categorization.

Regardless of whatever position you may take in this kind of debate, it doesn’t

change the fact that anyone who makes a decision on how something works within a

digital product ultimately affects the resulting user experience.

Developers are at the sharp end when it comes to delivering a digital product.

Almost every choice they make will have some kind of bearing on the resulting user

experience; from big decisions on what architecture or framework to employ, down

to the properties of individual elements on a screen such as how they handle micro-

interactions, animations, accessibility, feedback mechanisms, and more. They are at the

last point in the process where creative decisions are made that come together with all of

the previous decisions that culminate in the resulting user experience.

The relevance of having the user in mind while making everyday decisions is just as

important here as it is when we are defining what we are to build. If we don’t consider

the user at every stage, for every decision, and neglect to consider the needs of the user

from inception to completion, there is nobody who can come along after the fact, wave a

magic wand, and fix the resulting problems. There are so many factors to consider, such

as accessibility issues, methods by which the user can interact with the product, how we

set a user’s expectation for what will happen next, to how we provide feedback so they

know what has just happened; these, and many, many more considerations must be

constantly contemplated to avoid the pitfalls that can result in a poorer user experience.

No one, at any given point in the project life cycle, should be exempt from

considering the user; the importance of user experience is ubiquitous.

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Summary In this chapter we have touched on how user experience is viewed from a business

perspective, and how this perception changes as the level of UX maturity grows within

an organiz ation. We walked through these levels of maturity, illustrating how the role of

user experience as a discipline, and its associated activities help to further the continued

integration of a user-centered design approach.

We examined the costs where there is a lack of UX design along with a range of

factors that lead to project failure and explored the return on investment that it can

provide with some real-world and theoretical examples. Finally, we touched on why user

experience is not just the responsibility of a “designer,” and that anyone who makes a

decision on how something works has an impact on the resulting user experience.

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