If you work at a company, big or small, creating a technology product, you know User Experience (UX) is the *it* thing of the moment. It’s all about great UX, great visualizations, great design, innovative data input, design-driven development, “just like Apple” and the likes. We are all enamored with the endless possibilities of UI / UX that have been neglected for a couple of decades, but now the pendulum has passed that mid-point and it’s on an upswing to the other side, where we put too much focus on UX and design.
Honestly, I should be the last person talking about great user experience. My first startup V1 product was a God awful user experience. Only when we created the V2 of the product it went from awful to awesome. It was a “cultural” shock for me, but at the end I got “it”.
Now, what I see is a lot of startups, investors and entrepreneurs putting excessive emphasis in User Experience. That phrase might not even make sense. How’s it possible to have a UX that is “too good”? Well, it is! Actually, it’s not the problem with a UX that’s too good, but it’s the other variable that is being neglected: value added.
The shittier your product value, the better UX you must have for people to sign up and stick around!
Let’s be clear, I’m not saying there is a trade-off between value and user experience, they go hand in hand, but the lower the incremental value of your product, the better the UX must be to offset it.
To make things even more complicated, “value” is not an absolute variable. It’s a relative variable to every other competitor, substitute, and alternative and for the need of the customers themselves. The jackpot is to find a product where no matter how bad the UX will be, customers will flock to your product and happily (or unhappily) pay for it. Think about how many forms, how many answers, how many hours and how much money you have to pay to get a heart transplant. No one in the history of heart transplants will say, “I won’t do it because I have to fill an 11-page long questionnaire”.
On the flip-side, imagine an industry that has dozens of competitors, each one trying to outdo the next one. If you think about B2C, the only way for you to enter the game is by delivering a kick-ass sign up experience and a kick-ass first time experience, because the tolerance consumers will have to deal with your product is very low. They will balk at the fact the sign up button was too small, or that you asked for their zip code.
I would actually make a case that if you can’t convince a person to go through some hurdles to get to your product, you didn’t create enough value yet, or that you might be attracting the wrong kind of customers.
Now, let’s not get carried away and purposeful deliver a bad user experience, or even involuntarily deliver a bad user experience (the ship for awful UX has left and it isn’t coming back). You must deliver a GAUX (Generally Acceptable User Experience) to even enter the market, unless you have some giant moat (like an exclusive distribution deal with the US Army or a patent on the letter M).
We should spend more time focusing on delivering significant value to end users (the "destination"), where UX is part of that value, instead of building an awesome UX to nowhere.
Leelee Sobieski Teri Hatcher Lauren Bush Natalie Zea Brody Dalle
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