User Experience, the Unsung Hero of Great Software
User experience – or UX – is a big focus for us at Smudge. We build apps to solve business problems and great usability can make or break a project.
When businesses think of their users and design an experience that improves those users’ lives, an app is a success. But if a business forgets about their users and focuses only on their own business goals, things don’t tend to go as well.
This story starts in my kitchen
I overuse the spice blend Shichimi Togarashi in my cooking, so I need to refill my spice jar a lot. It’s a small jar – I definitely don’t have the motor skills to fill it without spilling spice everywhere and I was all prepared to make a mess when I grabbed the refill from my pantry.
Then I looked at the oddly shaped pack and realised the manufacturers had designed it with usability in mind. The pack has a spout that perfectly fits the mouth of the jar and there’s the perfect amount of spice to fill the jar. Refilling my jar took seconds and I didn’t make a mess. I can’t say the same when it comes to refilling my peppermill. Peppercorns go everywhere.
Usability is a vital part of software applications
My spice refill pack has been carefully designed. However, it only has a single use case – to refill a jar. Software design isn’t as simple. Software projects are often a tricky balancing act between business goals, user needs, and budget. As a result, designing a good user experience isn't always businesses’ top priority. However, an app’s purpose can be worthy, but if it’s awkward and unintuitive to use, people won’t want to use it.
We’ve all experienced poorly designed apps. For example, I use an app for banking, and some of the bank’s user experience choices break the patterns I expect. That conflict with my expectations creates friction and throws me off. It makes the app hard to use. Conversely, it’s no exaggeration to say good UX improves people’s quality of life.
We aim to make software user-friendly and intuitive, because if people enjoy using your tools they’re more likely to use them and you’re more likely to achieve your business goals. Here’s a few things I’ve learned about good UX from 16 years designing software apps.
Good UX marries your teams’ needs with your business goals
When businesses build a software tool, they’re trying to solve an organisational problem. As a result, at the start of a software project, businesses often focus on the functionality that will solve their problem. They may spend a lot of time thinking about what they want their new app to do, but not so much about how it's going to be used.
Functionality is very important. But if people don’t want to use your new software app or your app isn’t easy to use, your project is likely to fail.
Your baseline for software success is people don’t mind using your new tool. Ideally, you want them to love using it. It’s vital to consider the preferences of the people using your tool day-to-day. You don’t want people to open your app thinking: “Oh no. I got to use this again.”
Include frontline workers in your project team
It can be hard to balance competing intentions for your software project if your project team want things done one way, but your workers don't do tasks like that. We’ve noticed this can become a challenge when leaders are disconnected from what's going on in the field. Leaders know what the business is trying to achieve by building a new software tool but they don’t always know how their people do the work and sometimes they forget to find out.
Managers who started out working in the team they now lead can give valuable insights. However, many managers don’t begin their career in the field, and as a result, they’re less clear on what the job entails. When you put together your project team for a software project, try and include leaders who've worked in the field and people who still work on the frontline.
Avoid pushback by talking to users every step of the way
User research is so important. At Smudge, we like to start software projects by spending time with your users to experience what it’s like to work in your business. We want to understand what your team’s day looks like and how they work. Not only does that help us make their workflow smoother and easier, but it also helps us design a better user experience.
User validation with your team is also key. Feedback from your project team is not the same as feedback from a frontline worker testing the app. Nothing beats getting out in the field.
I remember testing one app with workers. We’d done user research, so I thought the team would use the app in a specific way. I was shocked by how differently people used the tool. The app worked well for some users. For others, usability wasn't even close. That test changed our workflow design. Instead of a step-by-step process, users could choose which order to do tasks. Even if you think you understand your users’ needs, validate twice.
Business goals and usability can compete
As tech consumers, we want flexibility. We don’t all approach tasks in the same way, so many consumer apps have a degree of adaptability built in to allow for this. But when it comes to apps designed to solve business problems, businesses don’t always want to give their workforce that much freedom to choose how to do a task.
Last year we designed an app for a business and we came up against a challenge. We were trying to introduce more flexibility into workflows to make the app more user friendly, but the business wasn’t keen. They were worried their team would use that choice to find a way around doing all the aspects of their job. Good usability can be a double-edged sword.
As a result, how we design an app can change based on cultural differences. Corporate culture can vary wildly. Here in New Zealand, most businesses trust their teams to do their job well. But I’ve worked with international companies with zero trust policies who lock every step of a workflow down. Yet even if you give your team zero flexibility to adapt workflows to their own ways of working, you still want to make your tool easy and intuitive to use.
What defines good user experience?
A good user experience feels natural, while a bad user experience creates friction because you encounter unexpected things. Users expect apps to work in a specific way. Those expectations can be based on the patterns of a particular operating system – for example iOS or Android, or other UX norms. If an app breaks those rules, it won’t feel right.
The other factor in a good user experience is it enhances our natural flow for a task. In other words, user experience isn't confined to digital applications. It's about doing things in a better way in day-to-day life. When we build an app for your business, we digitise your business processes. As a result, a software project can become the catalyst for improving a process, sparking conversation internally around whether work is being done in the right way.
Sometimes managers will talk us through how a process is supposed to work, then we go into the field to do user research and we discover the team has found a way that works better for them. That can create a challenge when businesses don’t embrace that discovery. Other businesses understand an app is the digital transformation component of a wider change project and encourage process evolution if those updates make more sense.
User validation can transform good apps to great
If I had to pick one thing I’d like you to take away from this article, it would be talk to your users every step of the way as you design your software app. You may know what people do, but you need to understand their day and validate how they do tasks before you can design a digital tool that helps them do their work more thoroughly, efficiently, and enjoyably.
I’m Tomo, Technical Team Lead at Smudge. If you’d like to discuss designing a software tool that balances your business goals, your users’ needs, and your project budget – an app your people will really enjoy using, I can help. Don't hesitate to reach out.