
Is this the era of "Success by UX"? - andrewcross
http://www.andrewcross.ca/2012/02/14/is-this-the-beginning-of-the-success-by-ux-era/
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chefsurfing
Jared Spool's article "Market Maturity" [1] published in 1997 is a very good
way to understand what kind of experience is required for success. He argues
that success depends on market maturity which roughly follows four stages: 1.
Basic deliverability war, 2. Feature parity war, 3. Productivity / "ease of
use" then finally 4. Price war.

Stage 3 is generally where UX becomes a priority. For a consumer web product
or startup this generally makes sense as a marker for market maturity as
delivering technology and shipping features has become easy and cheap.
Crafting UX is difficult but probably won't be for long. For example Twitter
Bootstrap seems to be lowering the cost of boilerplate UI which in turn lowers
the cost of UX in general.

[1] <http://www.uie.com/articles/market_maturity/>

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andrewcross
A very succinct way of putting it and I fully agree. What will be interesting
to see is how these stages will change as the rate of tech innovation
continues to speed up.

With new products coming out all the time, disruptive technologies may arrive
so quickly that the price war stage is cut short. I think it will still exist,
but just in a more truncated version.

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ender7
As a UX person, I have a little secret to tell you: if the product idea is
really good, the UX part is _really easy_.

Hiring a UX person isn't going to make your product take off. It's not going
to make your users love you. It can make it easier or harder for them to love
you, but it's just a modifier.

Design is how it works. Your _idea_ is how it works.

Unfortunately, the idea, the technology, and the UX are all tightly
intertwined. New technology lets you do things that were never possible
before, enabling new ideas. New ideas need to be massaged through a few UX
wash cycles before they come out looking the way they should. UX must live
within the technical confines of what is possible.

You need all three. Companies fail because they don't care enough about one of
them (or two of them). Traditionally, UX has been the most commonly neglected.
That's starting to change - but that doesn't mean that UX is the source of
success - it's 1/3 of the source of success.

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AznHisoka
Great UX may make for a great tech story, but by itself it won't lead to huge
traction. Great UX doesn't mean great marketing, and word of mouth. In the
end, it comes down to providing something that taps into a need, and
marketing. The UX part is what makes your product sticky, so people won't
leave but it can't attract newcomers.

There are 2 sites that are hardly looked at in the tech space: CafeMom and
SparkPeople. Take a look at them, and you can hardly say they have good UX -
it's messy, and cluttered. Yet both have over 5 million uniques per month.

~~~
tomcreighton
I would argue that amazing UX _IS_ amazing marketing, precisely because people
want to tell other people how awesome the UX is. I have a handy example: the
meteoric launch of Clear.

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AznHisoka
Is this really true except for products that have a strong techie following?
For me, I can't think of any product I recommended to someone mostly because
of the amazing UX.

I'm not discounting the importance of UX, but it's easy to fall into the trap
of focusing too much on the UX, and not on producing something people want,
and finding a way to reach those people in a profitable, scalable way.

~~~
coryl
Hey, have you been to this amazing new Thai restaurant?

Have you seen avatar in 3d yet?

Did you see the game last night? Lin was awesome! They play again tomorrow...

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jurb
I think we are past the point of disruption: a usable product is an absolute
minimum now. Aarron Walter wrote an excellent book on designing for emotion,
where he argues that usability is just like a commodity and low on the user-
need pyramid. Higher up that pyramid is a product that has personality and
invokes the right emotions. You can read an excerpt here:
<http://www.alistapart.com/articles/personality-in-design/>

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replicatorblog
I'm a product designer and love the thesis, but this article is seriously
lacking in argument.

\- Many of the big "UX" benefits would not be possible without massive changes
to entrenched business processes. e.g. Visual voicemail was something that
AT&T needed to support. Likewise, unbundling all the "Crapware" is another
area where Apple forced the carriers to change their business processes.

Apple had the ability to do this because of their momentum. In 2007, Apple had
revolutionized the music industry, was on its way with TV and movies, and
clearly someone at AT&T wanted some of that momentum or certainly didn't want
Verizon to have it.

If anything, the launch of the first iPhone showed UX alone wasn't enough to
dominate the market. The G1 iPhone sold well, but not to the scale it is now.
Only after the price got chopped did people move to it en masse. Apple was
able to do this by having the world's best operations team and forcing extra-
subsidies from the carriers.

Now the UI did get people excited and you can't separate the success of Apple
from the strength of their UI, but this article would make you think that the
great UX was the primary reason Apple has succeeded.

Design is important, but Dribbble is full of beautiful app designs that sell
10 units a week, where as you will find many horribly designed, modern sites,
that are dominating new markets.

~~~
ootachi
Horribly designed sites can dominate old markets too. Amazon is the perfect
example of why design doesn't matter. Likewise Craigslist and eBay... the list
goes on and on. It's all about marketing and luck.

~~~
gravitronic
I read on HN once that for products that there's an inverse relationship in
play here.

The more you need a product the less it's design matters. The less you need a
product the more it's design matters.

This is why de-facto standard utilities like Amazon, Craigslist, eBay do not
need to be "beautiful"

~~~
InclinedPlane
That only applies when there is no competition. Look at cars and firearms, for
example. Pretty crucial items when they are needed but design is still at the
forefront when it comes to making a choice.

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thesash
I think that one important thing to keep in mind is that user experience is
much _more_ than just the interface of the product.

Sometimes, a simple shift in metaphor i.e. Hipmunk's gantt chart is enough to
substantially improve the UX, but sometimes it requires an entirely new
product strategy to do something revolutionary. Consider Amazon Prime. Is the
user interface particularly pretty? No, but the experience of using the
service truly is revolutionary, and so far no other retailers can match it
because the experience is only made possible by supply chain management and
distribution that Amazon has in place.

The iPhone UX was revolutionary because it challenged the entire model of
interaction between user and phone. The experience of using an iPhone is the
sum total of an astounding number of innovations, only some of which have to
do with the UI. Consider the hardware innovations from the glass screen to the
proximity sensor, to the hi-res screen in the iPhone 4 that no one expected or
anticipated. Then there is the ecosystem aspect, which required not only a
fundamental re-thinking about how both users and developers would interact
with technology, but also massive distribution which was already in place
through iTunes. Of course, the multi-touch interface, and the laser focus on
developing quality software for email, messaging, phone, and music, played a
huge role in overall UX, but they would not have been possible without the
other innovations.

I guess it really all just goes back to the fact that design is how it works,
not how it looks, which requires a deep understanding of the problem and needs
of the customer, not just the ability to arrange pixels in a pretty pattern on
the screen.

~~~
ThomPete
What really improved the usability and experience for people was the hardware,
to be exact the touch.

By removing the abstraction that normally exist from having to covert mouse
movement with the hand to mouse movement on the screen, who ever invented that
is the real hero.

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ezl
I see the value of UX, and I haven't decided how important it is to me yet.

I _do_ feel like the conversations in tech circles seem to be overselling its
benefits. I get skeptical when hearing bold, blanket assertions like "A UX
person is one of the critical components of a startup today. You need a
[hacker, hustler,UX person]".

I don't disagree that some startups need a UX person, but that flavor of claim
strikes me as overreaching, and possibly just UX guys talking up their book.
/not saying this is necessarily the case, but I can't tell that its not/

Specifically regarding the Hipmunk case, since its often cited as an example
of how newcomers superior UX/UI can oust established players: Why are non-
Hipmunk sites still in business, or even more, why are they still the dominant
players in the market?

Its undeniable that there are examples of "bad UX companies" succeeding and
"great UX companies" failing. What experiments can be/have been done to
isolate the impact of just UX as a contributor for startup failure/success?

(I don't consider "split testing UX on a given site" sufficient. This
generally finds local maxima and incremental improvements to the business. It
generally makes you succeed more or less, but I want to hear about why the UX
guy is a critical pillar to the existence of a company (and then, most
companies))

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ThomPete
Lets not discuss UX as if it's some well defined term.

Hipmunk is an innovation in user interface design or information design, not
something that sprung out of what is normally considered a UX process.

The user experience is everything from how it's designed, to how well it's
programmed. It's everything and therefore it's nothing.

It's an industry term not a skill as such.

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ootachi
Nope. It's the era of success by marketing and luck, as it always has been and
always will be.

Engineering is, as usual, pretty much irrelevant to success. That includes UX.

~~~
Yhippa
This makes me wonder if there are any major products out there that succeed
despite terribad UX. In my mind I have a bunch of enterprise-y web apps but
none really stand out.

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ootachi
Amazon, eBay, Craigslist. Especially that last one.

~~~
mforsberg
I agree they lack the edge in UX, on the other hand they got the other 2/3 of
the puzzle that ender7 talks about in his first comment.

