User Experience “sausage making” isn’t helping your business
As an advocate for user-centered design, I of course focus on the needs of users but from a product design perspective I understand that business needs are important too. If a business wants to remain a business, any investment in user experience improvements needs to improve the bottom line as well. This isn’t an opinion, it’s just the way it is.
This isn’t a How-To for user experience design
I’ve talked a lot in the past about my approach to user experience design, (check out my IXUX series from 2022 if that floats your boat) but my biggest challenge is often just getting a business on board with taking on user experience improvements.
Everyone wants to help you with this
If you were to google “What are the business benefits of an improved user experience” you’d get a lot of grand claims made out there, like “On average, every $1 invested in UX returns $100”. While in my heart I agree with this statement, I know these tend to come from agencies offering UX design services, and not from research studies or even expertly tracked UX metrics. But it’s painting a picture and I can respect that.
Many business owners have their focus elsewhere
When I sit down with a business owner I have a couple of choices to make. I can excitedly explain my user interview plan, my user flows, “how might we” questions, and low fidelity wireframes, and that’s great. I’ll get a few head nods and maybe even a bit of interest. But the times I really see that excitement mirrored back at me is when we’re walking through a high fidelity prototype closer to the end of the project. It’s not surprising, but it does make me think that we need a new way of doing things.
Is good… good enough?
I realize now that a lot of the excitement that comes from these interactions is that business owners don’t set out to make a product that has a poor user experience. They often don’t even know that they have. They’re ticking a lot of boxes and they have a vision in mind. They might even have a good user experience built out.
But good is the enemy of great, am I right?
You’re perfect, it’s everyone else who has a problem
So I have an idea. There is a defense mechanism called projection. It’s when someone notices flaws in others that they’ve failed to address in their own life. Calling them out is a way for them to prove that they don’t have that flaw, because if they did, why would they have the amazing know-how to be pointing it out in others? I’m guilty of it at times, so I get it.
So what I’d like to do is have a kind of guided projection session. Together we’ll find faults in others, and none of it will reflect poorly on either of us! Fun!
And then at the end of this, when you’re ready to let down your defenses, you’ll acknowledge that you might, maybe, possibly, have this or some somewhat-similar-but-definitely-not-as-bad flaw and decide to do something about it!
But for now, this is a safe space. You’re perfect, it’s everyone else who has a problem.
Let’s begin.
“Nightmare” seems dramatic, but this site is no dream I’d want to have
I have been visiting a site called Dream Moods off and on for a long time now. I’m fascinated by dream interpretation and as someone who has visited other similar sites and even purchased a dream dictionary at one point, I find their content the most relatable and informative.
The only problem? It’s way more difficult to find information on the site than it needs to be.
Has anyone ever made a complaint like that about your site? No nope, of course not, right. Why would they? Silly me. Let’s continue.
To give you an idea of what we’re looking at here, the site is at its core, a dream dictionary. A list of symbols that appear in dreams from literally the letter “A”, to “Zoomorphism”. Each of these symbols comes with a brief description of their significance within the dream and how it might represent events and feelings in your waking life.
Side note: For those of you who have never interacted with a printed copy of a dictionary, yes they used to exist in a physical form, this site is pretty in-line with that experience. If you were fancy you had one of those dictionaries with the thumb index, little cutouts that your finger fit in for each letter so you could jump easily to the correct-ish page.
Dream Moods happens to have a digital version of this innovation.
I’ll paint you a picture. Each letter of the alphabet exists across the top of the site as a link. For letter pages with a large number of symbols, once you land on said letter page those are further broken down into page numbers with ranges listed below them. For example page 2 of the ‘B’ pages covers “Bartender” to “Bestiality”, and page 3 covers “Bet” to “Boathouse”. It’s not the worst, I can do what I need to do, but let’s walk through it.
Let’s say I want to find out why I saw lettuce in my dream last night. Here’s what I have to do:
- Scan the alphabet for the letter “L”, here we go, right in the middle, found it!
- Click on “L”
- Do some mental alphabetizing to figure out if lettuce is between “L” and “Leaving” nope, next!
- Is it between “Lecture” and “Lip Piercing”? Why yes it is… wait… right? Yes! Yes it is… right? (Editor’s note: yes it is)
- Click on the page number above “Lecture to Lip Piercing”
- Close an Ad (wasn’t expecting that for this example, but it happened so here we are)
- Scan the very long page for the word “Lettuce” (Fun fact: There are 82 symbols with their descriptions on this particular page, that’s not listed anywhere, I counted. Lettuce was the 33rd word.)
- Discover that “To see lettuce growing in your dream represents abundance. It points you back to a simpler time.”
Cool cool. Now what?
So let’s talk about how that made you feel
There’s a few things you can tell right away from looking at the site. A primary goal for the owner of the site is to sell ad space. In my time on the “Lecture to Lip Piercing” page I saw 5 ads. They likely have a decent amount of traffic and found a good way to profit from traffic in advertising. Good for them.
But how did you feel about that user experience?
How long do you think it might take to find all of the symbols in the last dream you had?
How often do you dream about just one thing, like lettuce?
Because the advice I will give for this site is unsolicited, I do not have the pleasure of a stakeholder interview to kick me off for this project. So let’s do a little make believe.
The Dream Scenario
Let’s say the owner of the site reached out to me (oh please universe, let this happen soon)! They’re frustrated because they get so many emails from users that are less and less about having their dreams interpreted and more and more about how the site has turned into a billboard page and it takes forever to find what they need. They’re seeing visits decline and they rely on those to make their advertising profitable. They know that the information they’re sharing is still valuable to a lot of folks. They’re desperate to find a solution that will allow them to remain profitable, and not upset their users in the process. They heard something about user experience and want to see if it will help them.
As a huge fan of the actual content available on the site, I’m feeling generous and I decide to give this information to them for free! It will be in the form of an article that I’ll post online and share with other business owners that might read this as well. (Yes, it’s this one.) They’ll use these insights to make improvements to their site, and the next time I have a dream about driving into a pit, it won’t take me 6 extra clicks and a lot of scrolling to find out that my drive and ambition on that day was making me feel hopeless.
So here’s how we get started
Before I start any project I want to clearly define the problem that the product is looking to solve. Without a clearly defined problem, how can you clearly solve it? We have a variety of ways to define problem statements. Design thinking uses a Who, What, Where, and Why approach where you define who has the problem, what the problem is, where the problem is occurring, and why there is a need for a solution. We can simplify this using the following pattern to create a single statement:
A [user] needs [the need] in order to accomplish [goal].
I’m using information shared on the site as a makeshift stakeholder interview to find the information I need here.
Based on that, the problem statement for Dream Moods could be:
A dreamer needs to interpret the meaning of their dreams to gain a clearer view of their real feelings in order to further their self exploration for a better understanding of their true self.
Whether or not you personally believe that an understanding of your dreams can lead to any meaningful change in your real life is not the point. Did you see anywhere that “Advertising for a crystal candle holder” was mentioned in that problem statement? And again, this was built from information pulled from their site.
This is one simple example. Even without an elaborate UX effort this site could benefit from simple established usability norms we see within the industry. I know you’ve been thinking it this whole time, you UX designer on the sly, you. Yes folks, a search bar could do wonders for this page. Do you think dictionary.com has the alphabet linked on their page? Well yes, actually they do, but it’s in a small section called “Browse” at the very bottom of the page. It’s not what they expect most people to do, it’s something they’ve put there for those folks that still long for their thumb index, and like only the best dream-inducing reading at bed time.
But what about my advertising profits?
I know what you’re thinking. I’m suggesting that this site, that is offering free dream interpretation resources for everyone, remove their advertising. And you’re thinking “You know websites cost money right?” If we conducted user interviews I might ask “How do you currently go about interpreting your dreams?” paired with, “And are you looking for an alternative to that approach?”
Let’s imagine some responses, and as we do, how do you think that might change the approach to this site?
Participant 1
“I ask my grandmother, she’s very insightful about that stuff.”
“I’d like somewhere I could ask about my dreams anonymously, I don’t want to tell my grandma that I sometimes dream about things that would make her blush.”
Participant 2
“I go to this website that lists different symbols, kind of like a dictionary, but if the dictionary didn’t have a search feature.”
“I’d like to find a site with the same content, but that’s easier to navigate, and maybe had a paid option that was ad-free.”
Yes, I structured these to support my argument, but this is dreamland, remember? While we may not get exactly the answers we expect and want during these interviews, we always learn something. And most of the time that includes something actionable that we can use to do better.
You have to want it
Not all solutions will be so obvious. This was, pun-intended, a dream example. The issues on your site may be a bit more nuanced and require an actual conversation or two. This article is the first in a series that will highlight various problems sites commonly have, but might not even realize. If you’re here, you already want to do better, so I hope to provide the encouragement you need to seek help from an experienced UX designer.
Share your goals. Work with experts. Don’t go it alone. And if you meet the owner of Dream Moods, tell them to call me!
This article is day 1 of a 31 day series. A mash-up of the Inktober 2023 prompt list and UX insights for business owners. Read more about the challenge here.
