Alokananda Chakraborty: In search of a differentiator

Why user experience is driving site architecture and the content strategy of brands

I find the term user experience being tossed around a lot these days. Why are you spending a bomb on a new adaptive web design? Because it improves user experience. Why are you working so hard to crunch the download time of the web documents? Because it enhances user experience. Why do you need a gaggle of reporters and bloggers to write new posts every day? Because it lifts the user experience… and creates engagement. Why are you incorporating images on every page? Because it is good for the user experience… and it is good for search engine rankings too.

Indeed, there are a plethora of user experience-related job listings if you care to search through job sites. They need "chief experience officers" for websites and web apps; they also need user experience specialists for mobile apps, for enterprise applications, on traditional desktop software. The respondents to a recent online survey on user experience have worked on 78 different categories of products, from medical devices to home theatres and power grid systems!

While the job description is not new, the "chief experience officer" is a relatively new title, and the growing number of postings brings into focus an often overlooked connection. As one of the posts elaborates, the role involves liaising between the design teams and the executive teams to ensure that user experience is a chief consideration for all executive decisions.

That's one tough job, to put it mildly. Talk to web designers and they will tell you that while tech businesses understand that user experience is a big deal, engineers, marketing executives and designers speak completely different languages. In a 2013 Forbes interview, Phil Gilbert, general manager of IBM Design, said, these groups need to find a common ground or language. He referred to it as moving away from a "process-orientated engineering mindset to a creative design oriented model".

The move makes immense business sense, Gilbert contended. "When my company got acquired (his company, Lombardi Software, was acquired by IBM in 2009), it was prototypical acquisition. We didn't bring anything new compute capabilities to IBM. What we were known for in the BPM market space was a really thoughtfully designed product that more people could actually use. We applied the same design principles as we had done in Lombardi and turned 40 IBM products into four products and made them in a sense delightful to use."

Gilbert's argument partly explains why there's this sudden interest in the role or function of the user experience designer and why some websites and mobile companies are willing to pay top dollars for design professionals… to be the next Apple. But the question is, we may claim that we're introducing new features or making changes to a website with an eye to improving user experience, but are we actually basing these choices on any data? Does the user experience designer understand the immensity of his role?

Mind you, this is a two-way street. To make this relationship between design and business work, it's important that designers understand the business goals of the organisation, of the scalability of the products they are supposed to create. Once that is clear, it is easier for them to appreciate the co-relation between design decisions and business results.

Some people also suggest that user experience professionals should look at their role in a broad way and think of it as one about designing ecosystems. Actually good user experience designers have thought this way long before the digital era descended upon us. Publishers conceived of newspapers and magazines not just to make them readable, but also to draw potential readers on the newsstand, or leave room for labels for subscribers, to direct readers to premium ads and so on - all while meeting a budget.

What has changed now is that competition has increased manifold, putting severe strain on resources. Enterprises have to meet business goals of making profits and keeping costs down; technical goals of developing products that can multi-task; and user goals to offer easy-to-use products that perform complex tasks. Together these factors have brought design into focus - because it has the power to move the needle that far, in determining what we buy and what we are prepared to pay for what we buy.