Taking a look back at the past several years of User interface design has revealed some interesting insight into trends and techniques. The last few years we have been undergoing a transformation of the user experience. Today I believe this is no longer true, at least at this slice in time.

Cue The Time Machine

Let’s take a trip back to art history. The great artist Rembrandt created many works of art and unlike many artists he was fortunate to be recognized as an expert in his lifetime. This expertise allowed him to take on many jobs, but he wasn’t the best at managing his money.

During his lifetime, he took on several apprentices that wanted to learn and emulate his skill. This masterful imitation was carried on in the works of his apprentices. They took what they learned from their master and produced new works. Think of it as Creative Commons of the Renaissance. Imitation was encouraged, clients expected to have the same level (or better) of artistry as their next door Lord, or Lady.

Hopefully, I still have your attention, if not come back to the light Carol Anne!

The Cloned Experience

Lets fast forward centuries ahead and we discover the same is true with 2009, 2010, and 2011. Everyone wants to imitate the greats – Facebook, Mint, Google. It all depends on who is on top at the time.

This level of expert imitation is in many cases what your client expect at the bare minimum – A term I like to refer to as “The cloned experience.” Make my app work like Google’s “x” or Facebook’s “y”. Where “x” or “y” is a feature or experience.

In essence, we are copying the masters of our time, trying desperately to capture the glory and wealth these masters hold. By copying the styles, techniques, features, and experiences we hope to improve our customer base, application value, etc…

The interesting thing to note is the “what” we copy doesn’t stay the same forever. Take a look back to the 2006-2008 time frame and we were all trying to duplicate features from Yahoo, Myspace and the like. What magic thing happens to push the online design and experience to a new age? Web 2.0 (I hate that term), was really about a transformation in customer experience. In even simple terms, we started designing experiences like we should have been designing them all along. Due to cost, time, and acceptance of the UX field many companies couldn’t accomplish this level of application design. Why justify spending money on the experience when it already has all the features?

Despite this mentality there were a few companies trying to elevate the experience beyond expectation. These companies took the most complex interactions and with the help of faster libraries, better programming tools, faster databases, transformed to a more immediate, less random experience.

At the very core UX’s view was transformed as we struggled to mold how users work with our applications, but beyond the tools we started to break down complexities in new ways. What happened was a digital Renaissance, we thought of experience as more of an emotional connection to the user. We tried to break away from the term user and attempted to make the experience personal.

But wait, you say “didn’t we already do this in the dot.com era”?

Yes, we tried to, we attempted desperately to accomplish a personal connection with our applications. In case you don’t remember the imitated experience of the pre/post dot.com era was to tack “MY” on to everything. “myweb” “myplace” “myspace.” As of the writing of this article, myspace is on the way out. It’s now more about our, but I’ll talk about this more in a future article.

Relation And Location Bring Social Realization

One of the underlying factors of this rapid transformations is relationship and location.
Certainly, the ability to interact faster with our users, clients and customers plays a big factor in these quicker transitions. What used to take centuries, now takes years. In the matter of an hour I can view 10 designs and go hands on with several experiences across the globe. I can try out the latest app in Korea, converse with a friend of twitter, and view a viral video all from the convenience of the IPAD in the bedroom.

I would bet if you took a random sampling of applications in different industries created during this and the past year you would find a large similarity in features, functions and experience. There are reasons “business intelligence people” would like you to believe why this similarity exist.

I’ve heard everything. “Well, X company probably spent billions on user research”, to “Company on Top at the time is doing it or will be doing it”. The simple answer is we conform to the norm of the time. And in many cases regardless of the perceived user experience. This makes it very difficult to move to a transformation of the experience.

This brings us back to the present. We are in the pre-phases of Web New. 0h! (You heard the term here first.) What is the catalyst that brings about a transformation from the common experience to New Design.

If you listen to all the news right now, most people would say the tablet revolution is upon us. After years of research and money the technology has finally caught up to the need, desire and want of the average user. Is this enough to classify this as a transforming experience? Should everyone start jumping to these devices and build custom experiences?

In the next article we will take a look at some factors that contribute to a transforming user experience.

Rembrandt: wikipedia

All I wanted was gas, and I was in hurry. I’m pretty sure when I drove up I wasn’t holding a sign asking these kiosks to show me products. Nonetheless, I was molested and ask to partake of a product I had no desire to see.

What was I to do?

• A. Say no thank you politely?
• B. Hide and hope I wasn’t seen? 
• C. Say I have already seen the demo?

Since I had seen this demonstration two times already I was in no mood to even speak to the demonstrators.  I just kept silent and thought to myself.

“Yes, you have a great product. Awesome, but I’m not interested in your cross-sell.”

Every One Surrender We Have You Surrounded

Here I was as were many other patrons, a captive audience to a product experience. I felt all dirty inside, and almost ashamed for not buying the product. Is this how a user should feel? Should a user experience ever be forced? Are there sometimes when it is forced?

Admit it! You are a user experience  pusher. Over the course of many years I have come face to face with applications consisting of three tiers. The front-end (for users), the back end admin (for internal people, employees, etc..), and believe it or not Admin interfaces that admin the admin.  In many of these cases the users of the front-end were treated to the golden carpet . The internal people received the  tin carpet . The admin of the admins probably had no carpet.

The truth is application design takes time and when your audience is captive we very quickly remove features that improve the experience. This tends to happen much quicker and much easier on the internal side of things then it does for the end-user of an application.

Imagine you are one of those souls forgotten in the internal world. Your pleas for external quality software are often unheard and ignored. 

I Hear You Crying but I Don’t Care

Over the course of many, many, years. I’ve heard a lot of horror stories from internal users. 

“Why can’t our tool do this like it does for our customers?”
“Why do we have to use x system when it’s so slow?”

In many shops internal users are just not regarded as the highest priority.  Typical internal applications developed for these types of groups are shoddy, buggy, poorly constructed, confusing, repetitive, and scattered. They are the Frankenstein brand-child of quick whims, crazy ideas, and unreasonable deadlines.

A Web Application Only by Name

Imagine a cluster of  “dissimilar” reports:

These reports track customer information, data gathering, and user retention. Despite the different end results there should still be some commonality among these reports. The problem is the commonality is not properly identified. What happens is a person not trained in usability or any user centric process, has made the decision to lump these all into one system.

Why would such a thing happen? Usually, because it’s fastest way to just put “something” together.  They are internal users and not as important right? Wrong, just because a user is internal should you ignore the cries for competent, excellent software?

Hell No!  Poor applications can easily slow productivity, especially when an app is directly servicing front end clients.

Oh No You Didn’t Just Tell Us To Build Better Internal Apps

The hardest part about getting the same quality built into internal software as external software is getting buy-in from those in charge. Depending on the company there may be several layers of people involved – Managers, Bosses, Mafia. So what can be done to illustrate the power of providing a superior experience for a captive audience?

1.  Analyze your existing applications and identify existing and expected commonalities – This is especially true when you are presented with the opportunity to build enhancements, features, or even bug fixes to an existing application. How will you know there is a problem unless you can point it out in detail?
2. Use actual “working” applications and do a side by side comparison of proposed benefits for the new enhancements. Simply put, illustrate by using the current system why it is bad and then turn back around with multiple solutions to fix the “badity” (new word copyrighted).
3.  Cost V.S. Efficiency Improvement. This is a hard one to illustrate, but the suits (managers, mafia, etc) will expect to see predicted numbers. These numbers are most likely going to be way out of alignment with reality. It would be much better to show estimated time for current task completion with the old application process and then follow that up with your best guest estimate of the new functionality.

For example: We don’t have to go back to this 1 tool to generate the immediate on call reports for a customer on the phone. Now we can simply click this button and display all that information in the same interface. 

And another example: By isolating all of these commonalities in reports A – Z I’ve determined a logical grouping order and how we can provide one dashboard and a single input to access and run each report.

If none of the above works QUIT, or  build out the functionality in your own spare time. We all have pet projects going on in the background  and practice makes perfect!

Experience Cleanup Isle 5 Please Come Again

Fortunately, I can change my gas pumping experience by switching brands, stores, etc.  Generally, captive audiences don’t have that luxury. It’s your job to make sure the tools used external and internal are bult to exceptional levels of quality. Who else can champion the cause but the User Experience Guru?