User Experience

What is User Experience? The phrase can be associated with any consumer product or service. You visit a hotel for a couple of days’ stay. How was your experience? You run into a restroom in an office building/in a restaurant for nature’s call. How was your experience? You feeling sick and visiting a doctor. How was your experience? (From registration, waiting, consultation, diagnosis, billing and the aftermath) You buy a latest model mobile phone or camera. How was your experience?

For Software, the phrase UX is becoming the new paradigm. Yesteryear’s definition of good looking UI does not hold good any more. UX is not about a great looking UI for your application. It is more about making sure the application works great too. What is ‘Great’? Everything. The success of providing a great User Experience with a Software application lies in details. The App has to be Easy on the eyes; Easy to Navigate; Easy to Learn and Easy to Use.

Let us analyse a story of a typical Software Application. Finance department of a retail giant, requires all the store managers in the chain to prepare and submit a monthly budget for the store to plan the financial needs of stores for every month. The CFO calls the CIO and tells him he needs the Budget App and will nominate a Point of Contact (POC) from the Finance department for all communications. CIO calls the Manager in-charge of ‘Applications for Store Managers’ and gives brief details of the request and the POC in Finance. After a plethora of meetings, discussions, reviews, approvals and demos, the software application finally gets installed for the store managers to access and prepare monthly budget.

The CFO calls CIO and thanks him and the two top guys congratulate each other and fix up a round of golf on green grass and an evening of cocktails to celebrate the success of the new system. The Grass is not always greener in the other side – The end users. By the time a Store Manager gets a printout of a monthly budget in the approved format, he would pretty much curse everyone in the world with particular attention to the programming team and the CFO. The store manager, of course, does not go to celebrate with cocktails. Instead, he hits the bar hard every night, during the budget week.

The moral of the story: The feedback for a software product/application has to be obtained from the end users of the App, who deals with the system at a transactional level day-in and day-out. Unfortunately, the voice of the customer is too feeble to reach up to the last programmer, who builds the system, due to several commercial, political and tactful reasons.

The paradigm is shifting and a lot of big software corporations are becoming user centric. There are focus groups set up for this thought process. The focus groups work relentlessly towards Usability Studies. The groups strive to represent the voice of the customer to the programmers. The Focus groups play the role of an end user and would not let an App out of the building if it fails to provide a greater UX. The report sent from the Focus Groups to the Programming Team will list the ‘Offences’ in the system, which will make the life of an end user very difficult, at least while they spent time with the system.

What do we all do herein programming community? It is really simple. There is a ton of literature available to read about UX. Also, by asking one simple question, we can change the way a system operates: “If I were to use the system for most of my work life, would I be comfortable?”

Ladies and gentlemen, the buzzword is: Intuitive. If the end user appreciates an application with the words - Intuitive and Slick, you can congratulate yourself for having built a great software application.