What is the power of this UX?
Let's start with the basics - let's see what is UX. Another sect that with the help of beautiful pictures and magic spells can double the sales of any product or the scientific methodology of managing human masses? Effective transformation of any person into a commodity buyer, or a way to cast shadows in a graphic editor? Who are the employers looking for and why does business need only superheroes? And most importantly - how to get rid of aggressive gopnik? Fill the power of the true ux!
Google gives the term UX a very simple definition: it is the general experience of a person using a product, such as a website or computer application, in terms of simplicity and comfort of its use. Ok, now let's see what definition UX specialists are given by the Russian owners of studios and agencies that create these very information products:
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Strange really. It feels like UX designers are always mistaken for someone else, justifying it with a desire to save a budget. Agree, it would be extremely strange in order to save, to treat treating the prostate not to an experienced doctor, but to a poet who beautifully rhymes the lines. None of you would probably also get on the plane, knowing that in order to save money, instead of an experienced pilot, a florist was planted at the helm, who knows how to make very beautiful bouquets. However, the tendency to replace the deep analysis of UX with beautiful illustrations is now so popular that it forces us to show by examples with what monstrous consequences such mindless following of fashion and imaginary economy of the budget can bring to monstrous consequences.
Would you believe if I tell you that tens of millions of users all over the world are happy to buy certain specific goods with a margin of three hundred or more times; goods that cause obvious harm to their health? Would you believe if you find out that these same millions of buyers spit on the possible danger of criminal prosecution, moral condemnation of society, even on the loss of a family or career? Wouldn't it seem incredible to you that the giant sales of this product are provided not by a new-fashioned material design from a well-known guru, but by the opportunity to rummage through a garbage can in search of a “bookmark” for a couple of hours on the other side of the city? And the army of fans of this specific product is more than the army of Apple, Tesla and Uber fans combined. But, frankly speaking, the owner of each online store dreams of the same level of mass dependence and involvement in their distribution network, ordering a logo for 10 thousand euros. In no case do I propagandize the dark side of business, just trying to show that where there is a real demand not sucked from the finger by well-groomed marketers - no design or analyst is needed at all, no matter how immoral or illegal it is.
Well, what then does a UX expert do in any successful company (where there is already a well-established demand), if it doesn't draw pictures?
Consider the most typical problem, which is 146% related to the problem of the end-user experience, and we will evaluate which solutions will be proposed by real Russian UX experts. And the real “combat” task will be put to us by the owner of the Dodo-pizza, dear Fyodor Ovchinnikov ( link to the discussion of the problem in the UX club ).
I must say at once that I have been following the blog of this unconditionally talented businessman for a very long time, and I sincerely would like to help his problem with my article. It was all the more sad to read all the advice that the Russian gurus and experts gave him with salaries of 200 thousand per month and more. I conditionally divided the entire array of recommendations received into three groups:
1. Homophobic approach. For some reason, the first thing that immediately comes to mind about dozens of “living usability icons” is to make Dodo-pizza as gay as possible, hire the most wretched waiters there and hang portraits of Conchita Wurst everywhere. In their opinion, such a rebranding will immediately solve all the problems of the pizzeria network and will give the business a new twist to success. About 50% of all experts.
2. Lazy approach. The authors of such advice as a rule insisted that any company that regularly loses money on its problem must necessarily lose even more. For example, if there are not enough security guards at the entrance, you need to triple the cost of security. If the institution loses money from too small checks - you need to raise prices even further in the menu. In general, such experts have made every effort to at least double the cost item of the company, most effectively to scare away all the other decent visitors of pizzerias without the slightest guarantee of success. This approach accounts for approximately 30% of the total UX market.
3. The anturage approach is when it was proposed to allocate special zones for gopoty, with strips and striptease, enclosing them with a cage from other visitors. There were also ideas to include the guys in the speakers at full volume with classical music or jazz, spray the smell of sweat in the air, salt the pizza and beer, and even put the buttons under the chairs. According to the convictions, 10% of such UX-gurus, young people of aggressive appearance go to DODO Pizza purely to listen to music and enjoy the softness of the chairs after a hard working day on the steps of the entrances. Let me just remind you that this survey was conducted not in kindergarten for lagging children, but among business experts.
I will not hide, there are about 10% of experienced professionals among such pseudo-advisers. They suggested not to solve any problem with a cavalry attack, but first to penetrate into the very essence of the problem, to try to penetrate into the essence of what is happening in the teenage company and find out from themselves why they violate the peace of this institution. And the final solutions to the problem may be completely different, depending on the analysis of the responses received from young people:
• And we have nowhere else to go,
• There are many young mummies without husbands who are fun to pick up
• Because our Reds local mayor, Foursquare,
• Like that here is so clean and beautiful. Tired of the native basement, the soul is drawn to the culture, and you just want to escape from the hopeless life of your yard.
Each of these answers requires a very special approach to solving the original problem. In any case, a real UX specialist is obliged to be able to come up with solutions that do not lead to increased costs, not to reduce the total number of visitors by building up an aggressive policy - but to a constant increase in profits and the image of the institution in the eyes of people.
For example, protection of a retail outlet can be enhanced not only by hiring the next private security company, but also by opening sales of unique nutritious protein cocktails with L-carnitines (in common smoothies) within the institution, which all local athletes and bodybuilders will be interested in.
And perhaps these very aggressive guys just have a lot of passion and free time - and there is not the slightest idea where to put their potential. It will help the proposal to involve them in the process of growing their own business, not disdainfully withdraw, but rather to highlight a new direction for development, which they can do. For example, let them shoot their own videos, which then will spin on the monitors in the hall of the institution. Congratulations on the day, a declaration of love to his girlfriend, a new video clip - any stormy activity, according to Anton Makarenko, is able to defeat apathy, alcohol and violence.
Perhaps a completely unexpected solution will be found, since the motivation of one of the parties to the conflict will be completely different. That, which it was impossible in principle to predict in advance from a soft sofa.
Here again I want to emphasize that the roots of any UX-problem is not that the establishment has a bad logopip or the wrong color of the entrance door. It's all about the people, not the pictures, that's why without direct contact with these people, sitting on a chair and buried in Dribble, not a single serious problem can be solved.
Judge for yourselves what the problem described above is: first, some people scored on raising their own children, then other people scored on a quality selection of places for institutions and personnel to protect him, while the third people had long and frankly not give a damn about their main job responsibilities to ensure a calm atmosphere inside institutions — and only when this whole lump of problems has accumulated and festered qualitatively for some time — invite the wizard from UX and expect a miracle from him. And miracles, as we know, do not happen, even God created the whole world step by step in 7 days, and not “tomorrow for dinner”.
This is a very important idea to understand such a demand for the UX profession in the modern world, so I’ll repeat it again: where initially all processes are performed perfectly - no special wizards from usability and design are needed. Ideally, this is when the quality of the product / service as a given exceeds the level of all competitors so much that it does not require any additional tricks to motivate the customer. Ideally, this is when problems of conflicted visitors are worked out and worked through at trainings long before the first problems appear, and not after the establishment is on the verge of losing the entire customer base. Ideally, this is when a person in business is replaced by a clear algorithm, scheme, automatic system. A person in any system is always the source of 100% of all problems: lazy, ill, forgot, scored, changed his mind, hungry, etc. Building a business with people and people is a most ungrateful task, since millions of subtleties and personality traits must always be taken into account.
I will try to develop this thought deeper. If, for example, a company of 250 employees has been lazy to look at the Metrics of their own site for years, and then believes that it will swoop down sales that fail right below the plinth right now in 3 days - then you need not a virtuoso designer, but a lobotomy. This is cruel, but how else to deal with people experiencing persistent hallucinations about their business? If the problem is that there are as many as 99 negative reviews on another Google Play application, then it’s not the smm-manager, not the advertising agency, or even the bad rounds of the buttons that are to blame, but the one who released the buggy departing game to the market, saving on Tester extra 200 dollars. This is how the ideal user experience analysis system works - without design, but with people and their money. And most importantly - with the problems, real, and not far-fetched.
As we saw on the example of Dodo-pizza, the most sophisticated visualization approaches and effective graphical interfaces have nothing to do with analyzing user experience and searching for human problems. Here we understand the problems of people like hunger, cold, loneliness, a string of children's complexes, etc. No picture in the world will feed a person or will not give heating in case of burst pipes, a picture cannot give a person perspectives in life and a chance to do an interesting job. The real work with user experience, its motivations, needs, problems and overthrows is more like the actions of a crisis manager, not an illustrator. Human psychology is far beyond the picture, unless of course we are not talking about the tests of Rorschha.
What will be the "correct" solution to the problem of a pizzeria? In my opinion, it sounds like this - stop fantasizing and imagining yourself as a great connoisseur of life, sitting at a MacBook; and go and talk to people. Find out, propose, interest, listen. Nothing else in the present UX will invent in the next 10 thousand years.
Google gives the term UX a very simple definition: it is the general experience of a person using a product, such as a website or computer application, in terms of simplicity and comfort of its use. Ok, now let's see what definition UX specialists are given by the Russian owners of studios and agencies that create these very information products:
')
Strange really. It feels like UX designers are always mistaken for someone else, justifying it with a desire to save a budget. Agree, it would be extremely strange in order to save, to treat treating the prostate not to an experienced doctor, but to a poet who beautifully rhymes the lines. None of you would probably also get on the plane, knowing that in order to save money, instead of an experienced pilot, a florist was planted at the helm, who knows how to make very beautiful bouquets. However, the tendency to replace the deep analysis of UX with beautiful illustrations is now so popular that it forces us to show by examples with what monstrous consequences such mindless following of fashion and imaginary economy of the budget can bring to monstrous consequences.
Would you believe if I tell you that tens of millions of users all over the world are happy to buy certain specific goods with a margin of three hundred or more times; goods that cause obvious harm to their health? Would you believe if you find out that these same millions of buyers spit on the possible danger of criminal prosecution, moral condemnation of society, even on the loss of a family or career? Wouldn't it seem incredible to you that the giant sales of this product are provided not by a new-fashioned material design from a well-known guru, but by the opportunity to rummage through a garbage can in search of a “bookmark” for a couple of hours on the other side of the city? And the army of fans of this specific product is more than the army of Apple, Tesla and Uber fans combined. But, frankly speaking, the owner of each online store dreams of the same level of mass dependence and involvement in their distribution network, ordering a logo for 10 thousand euros. In no case do I propagandize the dark side of business, just trying to show that where there is a real demand not sucked from the finger by well-groomed marketers - no design or analyst is needed at all, no matter how immoral or illegal it is.
Well, what then does a UX expert do in any successful company (where there is already a well-established demand), if it doesn't draw pictures?
Consider the most typical problem, which is 146% related to the problem of the end-user experience, and we will evaluate which solutions will be proposed by real Russian UX experts. And the real “combat” task will be put to us by the owner of the Dodo-pizza, dear Fyodor Ovchinnikov ( link to the discussion of the problem in the UX club ).
I must say at once that I have been following the blog of this unconditionally talented businessman for a very long time, and I sincerely would like to help his problem with my article. It was all the more sad to read all the advice that the Russian gurus and experts gave him with salaries of 200 thousand per month and more. I conditionally divided the entire array of recommendations received into three groups:
1. Homophobic approach. For some reason, the first thing that immediately comes to mind about dozens of “living usability icons” is to make Dodo-pizza as gay as possible, hire the most wretched waiters there and hang portraits of Conchita Wurst everywhere. In their opinion, such a rebranding will immediately solve all the problems of the pizzeria network and will give the business a new twist to success. About 50% of all experts.
2. Lazy approach. The authors of such advice as a rule insisted that any company that regularly loses money on its problem must necessarily lose even more. For example, if there are not enough security guards at the entrance, you need to triple the cost of security. If the institution loses money from too small checks - you need to raise prices even further in the menu. In general, such experts have made every effort to at least double the cost item of the company, most effectively to scare away all the other decent visitors of pizzerias without the slightest guarantee of success. This approach accounts for approximately 30% of the total UX market.
3. The anturage approach is when it was proposed to allocate special zones for gopoty, with strips and striptease, enclosing them with a cage from other visitors. There were also ideas to include the guys in the speakers at full volume with classical music or jazz, spray the smell of sweat in the air, salt the pizza and beer, and even put the buttons under the chairs. According to the convictions, 10% of such UX-gurus, young people of aggressive appearance go to DODO Pizza purely to listen to music and enjoy the softness of the chairs after a hard working day on the steps of the entrances. Let me just remind you that this survey was conducted not in kindergarten for lagging children, but among business experts.
I will not hide, there are about 10% of experienced professionals among such pseudo-advisers. They suggested not to solve any problem with a cavalry attack, but first to penetrate into the very essence of the problem, to try to penetrate into the essence of what is happening in the teenage company and find out from themselves why they violate the peace of this institution. And the final solutions to the problem may be completely different, depending on the analysis of the responses received from young people:
• And we have nowhere else to go,
• There are many young mummies without husbands who are fun to pick up
• Because our Reds local mayor, Foursquare,
• Like that here is so clean and beautiful. Tired of the native basement, the soul is drawn to the culture, and you just want to escape from the hopeless life of your yard.
Each of these answers requires a very special approach to solving the original problem. In any case, a real UX specialist is obliged to be able to come up with solutions that do not lead to increased costs, not to reduce the total number of visitors by building up an aggressive policy - but to a constant increase in profits and the image of the institution in the eyes of people.
For example, protection of a retail outlet can be enhanced not only by hiring the next private security company, but also by opening sales of unique nutritious protein cocktails with L-carnitines (in common smoothies) within the institution, which all local athletes and bodybuilders will be interested in.
And perhaps these very aggressive guys just have a lot of passion and free time - and there is not the slightest idea where to put their potential. It will help the proposal to involve them in the process of growing their own business, not disdainfully withdraw, but rather to highlight a new direction for development, which they can do. For example, let them shoot their own videos, which then will spin on the monitors in the hall of the institution. Congratulations on the day, a declaration of love to his girlfriend, a new video clip - any stormy activity, according to Anton Makarenko, is able to defeat apathy, alcohol and violence.
Perhaps a completely unexpected solution will be found, since the motivation of one of the parties to the conflict will be completely different. That, which it was impossible in principle to predict in advance from a soft sofa.
Here again I want to emphasize that the roots of any UX-problem is not that the establishment has a bad logopip or the wrong color of the entrance door. It's all about the people, not the pictures, that's why without direct contact with these people, sitting on a chair and buried in Dribble, not a single serious problem can be solved.
Judge for yourselves what the problem described above is: first, some people scored on raising their own children, then other people scored on a quality selection of places for institutions and personnel to protect him, while the third people had long and frankly not give a damn about their main job responsibilities to ensure a calm atmosphere inside institutions — and only when this whole lump of problems has accumulated and festered qualitatively for some time — invite the wizard from UX and expect a miracle from him. And miracles, as we know, do not happen, even God created the whole world step by step in 7 days, and not “tomorrow for dinner”.
This is a very important idea to understand such a demand for the UX profession in the modern world, so I’ll repeat it again: where initially all processes are performed perfectly - no special wizards from usability and design are needed. Ideally, this is when the quality of the product / service as a given exceeds the level of all competitors so much that it does not require any additional tricks to motivate the customer. Ideally, this is when problems of conflicted visitors are worked out and worked through at trainings long before the first problems appear, and not after the establishment is on the verge of losing the entire customer base. Ideally, this is when a person in business is replaced by a clear algorithm, scheme, automatic system. A person in any system is always the source of 100% of all problems: lazy, ill, forgot, scored, changed his mind, hungry, etc. Building a business with people and people is a most ungrateful task, since millions of subtleties and personality traits must always be taken into account.
I will try to develop this thought deeper. If, for example, a company of 250 employees has been lazy to look at the Metrics of their own site for years, and then believes that it will swoop down sales that fail right below the plinth right now in 3 days - then you need not a virtuoso designer, but a lobotomy. This is cruel, but how else to deal with people experiencing persistent hallucinations about their business? If the problem is that there are as many as 99 negative reviews on another Google Play application, then it’s not the smm-manager, not the advertising agency, or even the bad rounds of the buttons that are to blame, but the one who released the buggy departing game to the market, saving on Tester extra 200 dollars. This is how the ideal user experience analysis system works - without design, but with people and their money. And most importantly - with the problems, real, and not far-fetched.
As we saw on the example of Dodo-pizza, the most sophisticated visualization approaches and effective graphical interfaces have nothing to do with analyzing user experience and searching for human problems. Here we understand the problems of people like hunger, cold, loneliness, a string of children's complexes, etc. No picture in the world will feed a person or will not give heating in case of burst pipes, a picture cannot give a person perspectives in life and a chance to do an interesting job. The real work with user experience, its motivations, needs, problems and overthrows is more like the actions of a crisis manager, not an illustrator. Human psychology is far beyond the picture, unless of course we are not talking about the tests of Rorschha.
What will be the "correct" solution to the problem of a pizzeria? In my opinion, it sounds like this - stop fantasizing and imagining yourself as a great connoisseur of life, sitting at a MacBook; and go and talk to people. Find out, propose, interest, listen. Nothing else in the present UX will invent in the next 10 thousand years.
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/290252/
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