Patching Broken User Experience

Unless you're building a brand new product from scratch, you'll probably work in a company that has been accumulating years of design files and has a certain amount of research on its products. Even if the project you are doing is brand new, your business will still face the problem of how to unify all the product experiences. Consider upgrading old products to adapt to new products, or getting inspiration from existing products and applying them in new products. Note that a fragmented catalogue often leads to a total collapse of the user experience.

Full understanding of an enterprise and its users, and targeted design of the corresponding interactive, visual system, the need to pay a great deal of effort. And you need to communicate this new system to teams that have designed some that don't match the new system. It's not a simple job. In this article, we will introduce you to a strategy to make up for this type of user experience that has occurred in a fault, which begins with the most superficial improvements, gradually into the structural problems, and concludes with a huge global adjustment.

Many successful large companies have to face the situation: they must maintain dozens of (if not hundreds of thousands) of all applications in the product catalog. These huge packages are the natural form of a large enterprise for different user needs, the content of traditional services and the continuous merging and merging of previous contracts. Sometimes it's reasonable to keep so many product lines, but more often than not, too wide a product line is not a good way to achieve anyone's needs. Because of the huge differences in vision and operation between the associated series of software, users often need to be able to use them after struggling to learn.

Fixing these broken user experiences requires not only ambition, but also a common set of rules, such as "common visual performance and perception", "unified online Experience" and "unified visual representation and sensation". In any case, the so-called generic element represents a means of introducing consistency into a range of products under different development schedules, while allowing an in-house professional team to focus on such work. But in practice the sense of urgency always follows, and we often feel the resistance from within; there are many times when we have to make up for a task that a design office failed to do, and try to design and build a set of design and specifications that users can evolve on their own.

The level of effort required to repair a fractured user experience

One of the most effective methods is to begin with the improvement of the surface layer, and gradually penetrate into the structural problems, and finally to sum up a huge overall adjustment. We start at the bottom of the fruit, and then step deeper at each stage, eventually creating a product that will provide an extraordinary experience. The initial step is not only to ensure that the development team is able to make significant improvements to the software being developed, but also to look at a new version of the future, ensuring that there is no fragmentation in rewriting the code or envisioning the interactive experience.

If your business is creating your own product for the first time, the steps will be completely reversed. But in a large enterprise that has accumulated a thick history and has many products, the steps above will provide you with a short and long term strategy to help you more confidently identify and build a product catalog that is easy to learn and makes your job easier and more efficient.

At the bottom of the pyramid is the part that takes the least effort, so we suggest starting here. True, this seems to be a palliative and not a permanent cure. But just keeping the vision consistent can also be effective in helping you unify multiple different products into a common brand experience.

If you have already made preliminary preparations for an idealized experimental design, the simplest, and certainly controversial, way to do this is to put a new layer of skin in the existing product. Finding ways to simplify and remove unnecessary information, unify information architectures, and adopt standard fonts, colors, and operations are relatively low-cost ways to improve existing products.

Of course it's just the basics. It does not fundamentally solve a poorly designed interactive experience, but it can dramatically enhance the end-user's experience of consistency in performance. A range of products with a consistent visual language can indicate that they belong to the same camp. The advantage of improving the visual system first is that it is much easier to change or adjust the appearance of the software and to change the behavior, and the more low-level elements involved in the redesign of the product and rewriting the software code.

If your business has simplified and unified visual language, the next step is to ensure that the behavior is consistent. This is also the most basic part: to establish the principle of use of various patterns instead of specifying the behavior of a particular pattern in a bunch of plug-ins, and to unify terminology and conceptual framework models. If everything goes well, each individual product will have an inherently consistent pattern block. Failure to do this well is the reason why you will feel a huge difference in the face of a series of software that has been developed by different teams or acquired through mergers.

If the existing design already has a high level of design guidelines and provides a basic set of schema libraries, the primary goal of this phase is to assess each individual product and to identify how much work is required to align them. The content of the work involves making as few replacements as possible for the components in some software. A small amount of code writing and testing is often required to ensure that all revisions are able to achieve a consistent experience. More coordination and communication with the development team is needed to keep pace and understanding consistent.

The consistency of operational behavior makes it easier for the target user to learn to use tools and then transform and apply the skills they have learned to the relevant tools. Users only need to build a set of how the software is the thinking model of how the work can be. This will make them feel confident that they will not need to learn new software and not be bothered by how the goal is achieved.

The previous steps are primarily in unifying the behavior of different products. And really want to optimize the behavior, and make the software more powerful, easier to use, we still need to do some deeper work.

This step further rewrites the product. It means improving existing products to fit the needs and goals of users, and the view looks for ways to reduce workloads and simplify patterns. This requires us to estimate in advance the amount of work required for the design and to identify the areas where efforts can be maximized. This means that the user-centric product design, to carry out related research, to build the character model and scene settings. Without these, you cannot determine which patterns are simplified, what can be omitted, and which user needs to be carefully considered and properly addressed.

The optimized experience allows users to accomplish their tasks with less effort (or more). Any work that has been done should be captured in some way and no longer requires repeated user execution. Providing a smart default setting allows task flow to work faster. If possible, let the computer to do the work of computing, people only need to be responsible for judgment. Accumulate data to detect more general patterns and to achieve the desired function before the system is created.

This is the stage where you should do whatever it takes to get the best of every piece of software. It takes time to introduce new forms of interaction and rewrite a lot of code. You need to be prepared to devote a large d amount of time and energy.

The previous round of iterations will produce a range of products that have the best performance in their range of functional categories. The iteration goal of this round is to rethink how the entire suite works together. This often means a rethink of product strategy.

Designing a unified experience requires us to broaden our horizons, reassess the location of internal product data islands across the enterprise, and reconsider the ideal workflow for individuals and different roles. This is likely to lead to multiple products being merged, or developing new products to fill the gaps in the product, or eliminating functional duplication, lengthy portions, or a renewed focus on services. Such work requires in-depth communication and authorization within the organization. Need long-term rather than short-term plans. This job cannot be completed quickly, so it is best to have all the honesty and effort.

The ultimate beneficiary of these efforts will be the ultimate user, because such a product development strategy is user-centric. Companies realize that the product is meant to help users do their jobs better, and they realize that users may also use other tools and services to accomplish their tasks. Performance on a single task is not a measure of its success, and should be concerned with its ability to navigate a range of people, data, equipment, and services. When a company promotes their product line to this level, both the enterprise itself and the product line have undergone great changes.

All previous steps have focused on repairing the fractured user experience. By using them as an iterative basis, it is entirely possible for us to greatly enhance the user experience that has occurred in the fault. If you want to avoid repeating this series of steps after a few years, the business itself needs to change. Software development and service delivery is based on a specific corporate culture, the concept and development, which has a far-reaching impact on the product itself. A product produced by an industrial-driven company will show a 0 tolerance for errors, focusing on technical matters; services that focus on sales will focus on their features, and an enterprise that focuses on the user experience will inevitably focus on how to provide a good user experience.

If you want to continue to provide a good user experience, you need to do more than the visual design for the surface depth. Your business needs to understand and always consider the user experience as the primary core value. Executives need to support and vigorously advocate the unique perspective of design; designers need to be user-centric in their design; a user-centric approach needs to permeate the enterprise.

An outstanding user experience never falls from the sky. Understand users and always use their needs as your first priority in the design process, and then make every effort to implement them during the development phase. Products and services rely on the cooperation of all members of the team to make the idea a reality. The final product will be subject to the most important factors recognized, the way in which the work is achieved, and the criteria by which the pros and cons are judged. The change in corporate culture requires the greatest effort and the longest time, but it will eventually lead to the most dramatic, most pervasive and most influential changes, not just for businesses and products, but for those who will use them.

"But wait a minute," You may be thinking, "Is this not putting the cart before the horse?" Should you not first design the whole system according to the correct work flow, optimize the behavior of the system, ensure the consistency with other products, and finally confirm that it looks simple and clear? "Yes, yes, you should, especially when you're building a brand new product."

But again and again we see that few big companies can do everything to zero and build a brand new product from a clear point of view. More often, the starting point will be an essential product line. Companies have lots of software, teams from around the world support them, and perhaps ownership will belong to different subsidiaries. Maybe you can design an ideal experience, but you just can't achieve it. It takes multiple iterations to implement an effect that a design really wants to show. It's not comfortable, but it's reality. When you find yourself in reality, you can't go against the sky. You must start with reality. In our experience, starting at the bottom is a very operable approach.

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This article link: http://www.socialbeta.cn/articles/repair-fracture-user-experience-2012.html

Original link: http://uxdesign.smashingmagazine.com/2012/09/27/fixing-broken-user-experience/