The yin-yang relationship between business and design is a long and storied one, and the crux of the complex relationship, at least from the design perspective, is summarized rather nicely by Phil Goddard of Human Factors International, one of the largest and most respected user-centered design firms in the world:
“A big part of the job of a good UX professional is being an effective critic. Our job is to research, quantify, and articulate the strengths and weaknesses of the ‘experience’ of a design—much like the critic of a movie.”
A movie critic, however, has a much simpler task than a user experience professional. The entity a movie critic assesses—a movie—is always assessed in purely subjective terms. No consumer of a movie critic’s wares would expect otherwise. When we read movie reviews, we judge the merit of the review chiefly on the qualifications of the reviewer, and whether or not we’ve agreed or disagreed with his or her reviews of other movies in the past. If a movie review doesn’t share our taste in movies, we move on to a reviewer who does. That’s why movie critics are a dime a gross: there are as many opinions about movies as there are people in the universe, and each one of those opinions, fundamentally, is correct. Star ratings, rotten tomatoes, or thumbs-up/thumbs-down grades attempt to quantify movie reviews, but these, really, can’t stand up to vigorous quantitative analysis.
In a white paper titled Connecting UI Design and Business, Goddard, a PhD in cognitive psychology, suggests that the qualitative aspects of user experience design can be mitigated by breaking down the analysis of a website itself into a scorecard in which user experience experts “grade” a website according to five accepted dimensions of good design practice: navigation, content, presentation, interaction, and value and usefulness. Each dimension becomes a section of the scorecard, and the dimensions themselves are sub-divided into a series of posits, like “navigation options are visible and clear,” or “labels are distinctive and descriptive.” The reviewer then assigns each posit a grade from 1 to 5, and the results for each section are then tallied and presented as a percentage—just the sort of thing you would see on a college exam. While the posits themselves surely lend themselves to the whims and whimsies of subjectivity, the composite scores, nevertheless, provide plenty of fodder for design and business professionals alike to evaluate the effectiveness, usefulness, and overall “success” of a website’s design. Even further, these scores give business owners good benchmarking data, and give design professionals the direction they need for improving design in future iterations.
Though the scorecards are fairly effective, they have one serious disadvantage: they’re being filled out by user experience professionals performing evaluations, not by real users completing business-oriented tasks. But Goddard has a solution for this, and it’s something we’ve been doing at Makibie for years: evaluating designs from a user’s perspective through the use of personas and user scenarios.
Simply put, a persona is an archetype of a website’s intended user. Each potential user archetype has a unique persona; for one website, therefore, there may be several personas. A user scenario, simply put, is a task a persona would want to accomplish on a website—get information, make a purchase, watch a video, interact with a friend. Just as there may be several personas for a website, typically there are dozens of user scenarios. Designers, therefore, typically design towards the most important user scenarios. Which user scenarios are the most important? Herein lies the link between business and design: the most important user scenarios are the ones that provide the most business value.
By completing user experience scorecards designed from the viewpoint of personas and user scenarios, user experience experts can provide their business counterparts with useful, usable quantifiable data on the design elements that matter most: those that directly impact business value. On a typical e-commerce site, for example, if the design intrudes upon a user’s ability to place items in a shopping cart and check out, a persona/user scenario based user experience scorecard will point that out in a direct and actionable manner, giving the business people the fodder they need to secure funding to make design improvements, and giving design people the fodder they need to know where to begin to make improvements in the design. Neither the business team or the design team needs to fumble about through the fog.
But why stop here? Sure, such a paradigm is powerful, but even more powerful would be such a paradigm coupled with real, hardcore, scientific web analytics. The challenge of getting here, of course, is the task of linking user scenarios with the web analytics that best describe them. For the more obvious user scenarios, the web analytic that best describes it might be obvious: to measure the amount of transactions completed successfully, you could divide the number of times a transaction start button was clicked by the number of times the confirmation message for that transaction was served. For the more esoteric user scenarios, coming up with a web analytic that best describes them might be more complex or convoluted, but the beauty of user scenarios is that they can almost always be analyzed by one quantifiable metric or another. User scenarios are, after all, most likely business goals, and business goals are almost always quantifiable.
And business goals are almost always measurable, directly, via web analytics—if they weren’t, hundreds of business dashboard RIA developers would have gone out of business years ago. The logical next step, therefore, is to combine the notion of a persona and user scenario-based user experience scorecard with web analytics that measure business goals into a user experience RIA dashboard that aggregates subjective, yet quantifiable, user experience data with hardcore web analytics to measure the total user experience of a website in a meaningful and actionable way. Such a user experience dashboard would be a Rosetta Stone, of sorts; allowing business teams and design teams not only to understand each other, but giving them the power to speak exactly the same language.