I was privileged to speak at Tech4Africa 2011 about a topic that I care about a great deal: how our environments and the way we work impact the quality of the software we produce. The talk came out of a question I keep asking myself over and over: why, despite our best efforts, do we still too often produce low quality software? Here’s the talk summary:

Why do we see so many web applications with inferior user experiences? Why do UX designers often get stuck being asked to “make the design pop a little more,” with no room or incentive to innovate? Why do some web developers feel demotivated and unable to break out of doing things the way they’ve always been done?

In this talk I explore some of the main causes of ineffective software development, and discuss practical recommendations on how to improve team structures and development processes to build high quality software that users care about, want to use, and that therefore makes more money for the business.

I discuss how designers and developers can work better together, how to ensure everyone gets input into the roadmap without it becoming chaos, and how to make sure that the business benefits are clearly articulated and communicated.

So here are the slides from my talk - I hope you find it useful. If you’d like to read more about this topic, you can check out a two-part series of articles that I wrote for Smashing Magazine.

Des Traynor wrote an excellent article for .net Magazine called The death and rebirth of customer experience:

Customer service online has been relegated to “handling complaints”. Sites like to boast about how quick they can respond, but it’s rare you’ll hear any boast about what a great shopping experience they had online.

Online businesses are obsessed with user experience, optimisations, page rankings and much more. Yet a thousand of their customers could walk past their offices every morning, and they wouldn’t even recognise them.

In our quest towards total commerce automation, we’ve failed to bring the most important part of commerce with us. The customer experience.

The personal contact and connection that is needed to bring customer experience back to online retail reminds me of Dan Frommer’s thoughts on the intersection of commerce and editorial content. In Commerce as content, shopping through art he writes:

[T]he best wave of new e-commerce companies may also be the ones that are great content producers. That means: Clear writing, attractive photography, and good design. I haven’t done the math, but it seems to me that great content with devoted readers could be a heck of a lot more effective at generating sales than just buying banner ads on random websites.

He goes on to give some great examples of quality editorial content. Both these articles are indicative of a welcome shift away from product-based to context-based e-commerce.

Product-based e-commerce sees the product as the unit of measure, and the user experience is built around presenting products in the best possible light to convince a customer to buy them.

Context-based e-commerce sees the a customer’s unique situation as the unit of measure, and the user experience is built around delighting them based on who they are and how technology can help improve their lives. Quality, personal, context-based content serves as the bridge between product and customer.

Horace Dediu recently wrote about iCloud and, among other things, discussed what happens when “value moves from selling things to ‘getting to know you’”. That phrase is a perfect way to summarize this shift. In getting to know us, e-commerce sites can move away from just selling us stuff, and instead sell us ways to become better people.

Hey Microsoft, I’m sensing that you’re trying to tell me something about updates?

One of the principles of UI design that I always look out for is error prevention. Good design anticipates any errors that a user might make, and then makes it impossible to make those errors.

Apple’s new iCloud settings screen, shown below, is a case in point. It doesn’t allow you to check the box to sync your photo stream until you update iPhoto to the version that supports it. It would have been easy to forget about this detail. They could have allowed users to check the box anyway, and let photo stream syncing just not work until iPhoto is updated somewhere down the line.

This might sound obvious when you see it done right, but it’s not always easy to anticipate errors. Sticking with the Apple/iOS theme, let’s look at the Omnifocus iPhone app. The app now supports location reminders on iOS 5, which means that you can set it to remind you to do something when you arrive at or leave a specific location. I wanted to try it out, so I set up a reminder to go off when I leave work:

The problem is that the iPhone’s GPS location tracking system needs to be turned on for Omnifocus in order for this to work. I didn’t realize that I didn’t have it turned on for this particular app, so nothing happened. The reminder just didn’t go off. I only discovered my mistake later that evening when I played around with the settings some more.

Designing for error prevention would have prompted me to turn GPS location tracking on for the app before allowing me to add a location-based reminder.

Small details matter.

Dhanji Prasanna wrote a great article about his experiences on the Google Wave team, and the difficulties of working in large development teams. He brings a particularly interesting perspective to UI engineering:

To say we should have been better prepared or organized is to miss the point - large teams starting on a new project are inherently dysfunctional. One common consequence of all this chaos is that experienced engineers seclude themselves to their area of expertise. At a company like Google, this generally means infrastructure or backend architecture. A major externality of this is that fresh grads, and junior engineers are shunted to the UI layer. I have seen this happen time and again in a number of organizations, and it is a critical, unrecognized problem.

UI is hard.

You need the same mix of experienced talent working in the UI as you do with traditional “serious” stuff. This is where Apple is simply ahead of everyone else - taking design seriously is not about having a dictator fuss over seams and pixels. It’s about giving it the same consideration that you give any other critical part of the system.

I’ve experienced this first-hand, and I’ve also seen what happens when backend developers are forced to do UI work (which can happen for a variety of reasons). I’ve heard developers say that they don’t like to do UI work because “it’s not real programming”. They prefer to focus on the real stuff, not this fluffy CSS/JavaScript thing.

Whether or not their perception is accurate is only one part of the discussion. What I want to point out is this: If you make backend developers do front-end work that they’re not passionate about (or worse, work they find embarrassing to do), they’re not going to be motivated to expand their knowledge and do a good job. That’s unfair to everyone and disastrous for the product.

It’s essential to have dedicated UI engineers in an organization so that everyone can focus on the technologies that they’re obsessed with.

Cennydd Bowles makes a good point about the intangible benefits of user-centred design in “Why aren’t we converting?”:

I do suggest seeing user-centred design as something wider than just a means of optimising a conversion rate. While there may not be a noticeable uplift in any specific metric, the raw material of design is frequently intangible: trust, loyalty, engagement, etc. These things are much harder to measure, but they still make themselves felt indirectly in other metrics: support costs, referral rates, customer retention, and so on. Separating the effect of design from these long-term figures is, of course, pretty much impossible, but the long-term aggregated data makes it clear that the effect is genuine (see Apple, etc).

It’s a real shame that the results of UX can’t always be measured in a direct uplift in revenue and/or conversion metrics. But it shouldn’t be an excuse not to invest in good design, or worse, to resort to dark patterns.

In Beauty Is Free, Mimi Zou argues that quality has become a given in most products, so beautiful design is one of the primary ways to differentiate in a crowded market:

In a time when products outlast their reliability expectations, has aesthetic longevity become the new expiration date? While it’s not viable to design for changing tastes, it remains that the aesthetics of a product should always be given great emphasis: be it physical, digital or a manifestation of both. Keeping vitality in mind, the aesthetics of a good product should complement its functionality and be made with full intent. The most insightful designs are those which are not only competitive in quality and cost, but also uncompromising in aesthetics.

I’ve always defended aesthetics in web design in particular by arguing that it builds trust, increases engagement, and elicits the appropriate emotional responses to the brand (i.e., consistent with the brand promise).

This article gives us another reason to push for a relentless focus on good aesthetics: since most products now have a baseline quality that is good enough, users expect beautiful products.

Also, this.

In a recent episode of The Talk Show, John Gruber and Dan Benjamin pointed out something interesting about the Windows 8 redesign of Microsoft’s well-known “blue screen of death”. First, here’s an example of what this screen currently looks like:

Notice how Windows essentially accepts the blame in this situation. The title of the page says “Windows”, and they give you the cold, hard facts: An exception occurred. The application will be terminated, and you have to restart. Sucks to be you.

Compare that to the redesigned screen for Windows 8:

Notice all the subtle differences here. The emoticon to put you at ease. The nice font. The assurance that they will restart the computer - you don’t have to do it yourself like in the previous version. But most of all, notice the copy changes.

“Your PC ran into a problem that it couldn’t handle and now it needs to restart.” In this version Windows isn’t the culprit any more - your PC is. Your computer did something it shouldn’t be doing so it broke. “But hey,” they say, “don’t worry, Windows has your back and is swooping in to save the day!”

It’s a subtle change in design and copy, but credit where it’s due: this is pretty clever.

Jennifer Fraser brings up an interesting point in What I Bring to UX From ”¦ Architecture:

As an architect, the implicit permanence of designing a building carries with it a sense of responsibility”¦ I can’t help but wonder if we would have better designed products if some of that responsibility and sense of permanence of architecture found its way into what we do as user experience designers.

We live in an environment where most web design is seen as variable. With A/B testing, Minimum Viable Products, and the prevalence of Content Management Systems, nothing is set in stone. If something doesn’t work, we change it immediately - and see the results of those changes immediately as well. This is a very good thing; optimizing user experiences is, after all, what we do.

But I do wonder what would happen if we felt the weight of responsibility a little more when we’re designing. What if we go into a project as if the design we come up with might be around for 100 years or more? Would we make it fit into the web environment better, give it a timeless aesthetic, and spend more time considering the consequences of our design decisions?

Kyle Baxter in The Age of Insight, responding to a fantastic essay by Seth Godin called The forever recession (and the coming revolution):

We have to think about completely disparate fields””say, manufacturing, software development, design, and psychology””and combine them to make products that conform themselves to humans, rather than making humans contort themselves to the product in order to use it. We must think about big ideas””ideas that will change society and how people interact””and the little ideas that merely improve peopl’s lives just a little.

We have to think. This is an age where all of our gains will come from insights into what make products, services, processes, and structures fundamentally better for us. Whereas the twentieth century was about standardization and following a series of steps in a well-defined process, in this new century, there are no defined processes. Everything is to be questioned, re-thought, re-made, or even thrown out altogether.

I completely agree with Kyle’s view that we’re shifting from a world where users have to conform to products and services, to a world where those products and services go extinct quickly unless they conform to the needs of users. I further believe that the field of user experience design needs to be a central player in this shift. The theory, psychology, tools, techniques, and practice of user experience align perfectly with the type of thinking that’s needed to make things that work better for us.

One of the biggest issues holding us back from taking a leadership role in this space is the term itself: user experience design. There is so much not to like about it. “User” has a sterile, detached, almost robotic feel. “Experience” can mean absolutely anything, and opposition to the word is growing (and not just from Merlin Mann). And then there is “Design”, a word everyone wants to own - and despite some fantastic definitions out there, no one can completely agree on what it is.

But for better or worse, this is the term we’re stuck with. So we have a predicament. The UX community is fighting over semantics and who should be allowed to call themselves a UX designer. If we could just step out of that for a while and think about the larger implications we’d be able to see how perfectly positioned we are to drive this fundamental shift to better products and services.

We borrow from social sciences to bring ethnography to design so we can uncover needs by observing users in their natural environments. We borrow from psychology to design experiences that follow the principles of visual perception and emotion. We build on a very long tradition of graphic design. We use design thinking, product discovery, and all the tools and techniques that go along with that to come up with appropriate solutions to problems. The list goes on and on.

My wish is that, as a user experience community, we would move beyond the argument over what to call ourselves.  And that we would move beyond our focus on web design and take ownership of our ability to bring our skills to physical products as well as “services, process, and structures” (in Kyle’s words). Let’s be a big part of the coming revolution.