Get serious about ‘user experience’
“User experience (UX),” the emotions, attitudes and actions that a product or service elicits from consumers, is becoming even more multidimensional. The key to delivering UX is to understand the value of a product from the user’s perspective. This has become a primary pursuit of top global companies as they try to offer differentiated UX, such as pleasure, convenience, familiarity and uniqueness, to their customers. Even chip maker Intel now touches more things in people’s lives than just the PC as it strives to “develop technologies that people want.”Naturalness, richness and personalization are the future trends of UX. Technology developments have replaced keyboards with touch screens and voice command, and interaction between humans and products/services has come naturally. Also, users are becoming more immersed because more human senses are involved and information is better visualized. Meanwhile, mobile devices offer a bonanza of content and services to assist users in real time. By 2015, 40 percent of all smartphones in the world are expected to be linked to a situation recognition service that spontaneously alerts owners to nearby goods and services.
Companies need to realize that having technically superior products and services are no longer a guarantee of success if they fall short in UX. Improvement of UX at Korean companies must start at the top, with the CEO acting as a consumer advocate. Also, companies should not necessarily aim for “big bang” innovation. Moderate UX improvements can enhance value and achieve customer loyalty.
First, a corporate UX philosophy should be established and shared with all employees. Guidelines will help the philosophy materialize in products and services and they have to be reviewed constantly to keep pace with rapidly changing technologies and customer preferences.
Next, UX-oriented ideas should be reflected in the entire product development process, starting at the first stage. Advanced companies brainstorm UX-oriented ideas with a bottom-up approach. In contrast, Korean companies decide product specifics first and then ask the team in charge to address UX design. A more effective way to ensure UX would be to empower a UX team with decision making and execution responsibilities. This would help ensure that products and services are consistent in UX content and function.
The UX team, however, should not work in a vacuum. Another UX-related shortcoming at Korean companies is not facilitating internal collaboration or treating UX development as a core task. Many companies also outsource UX tasks with the company only approving the results, but the UX value that it envisioned can be diluted by outsourcing.
In order to properly embed UX ideas into a product, communication and collaboration should be strengthened between a UX team and a business team. In particular, in areas where rapid development is important like mobile business, a UX team can use simple sketches to gauge consumer opinion and then discuss adjustments with the business team.
Collaboration, of course, can only function well if everyone speaks the same language. UX embraces various academic fields, and breakdowns in communication can easily occur. For example, a software program developer does not think about hardware design and a UX designer does not understand programming.
Advanced companies are hiring people who understand other perspectives, including those with backgrounds in human-computer interaction and psychology. Korean companies tend to hire people whose education and work history is directly related to a position. Therefore, basic education on UX-related fields such as user research, UI programming and interaction design are necessary. In addition, communication skills need to be improved to facilitate clear and precise expression of opinions and ideas.
Finally, companies should improve their information-gathering on users in order to make sound, rational decisions. Advanced companies study users to glean unvarnished information on UX design. However, Korean companies mostly rely on individual subjectivity from management. Working-level employees even call UX a “boss experience.” Objective decision making based on user research would be better. In addition, research on humans’ intrinsic factors and society and culture will also be crucial to strengthening knowledge for sustainable improvement.
*The writer is a research fellow at the Samsung Economic Research Institute. Visit www.seriworld.org for more SERI reports.
By Chun Sang-In
with the Korea JoongAng Daily
To write comments, please log in to one of the accounts.
Standards Board Policy (0/250자)