Yesterday I skimmed the surface on what User Experience (UX) is all about and what that means to users. Today, I’m going to continue yammering on about it only this time we’ll talk about what having a UX team at the Nerdery means to the people who work with us.
First, Mike Johnson our UX Manager said it’s important to remember that, “good UX creates passionate users.” In turn passionate users are more likely to refer a product to other people, and what it all boils down to is a successful project for you.
It’s also important to remember that Mike’s role is to champion good user experience about every project he works on.
Most of our projects involve teaming up with stellar ad agencies and marketing firms to help them build the interactive portions of their campaigns. It’s a case of two great tastes that taste great together. Agencies bring their creative wizardry and we bring the technical power.
Mike explains it like this: “Each agency we work with is unique in the skills they bring to a project. We’re like this thing that globs on to the agency and fills in the holes they might have. We make them complete.”
“Many agencies we work with come from a print background and find that jumping into the interactive can be a bit stressful,” Mike said. “They’re great at design but don’t have a lot of experience designing and developing complex applications. That’s where we come in. Not only can we execute their creative vision, be we can help them refine and develop their concepts with usability and good application design practices in mind.”
“We’ve always had this team of badass programmers and rock star developers that’s made us so successful with agencies,” he said. “Now, by adding to our diverse set of skills, we can create even more unique configurations of talent to compliment the agency side.”
For non-agency partners the UX team can provide a valuable service by helping the client organize and simplify their vision. ”We build a framework for discussing abstract ideas. We put the studs in the walls before we worry about the wallpaper.”
It doesn’t matter if our client is an ad agency or a business, what Mike’s role comes down to is bringing together the strengths of the design and the development to create natural synergy.
Mike talked about how programmers are really good at writing code, taking care of all the stuff that happens behind the scenes — like database configuration and how passwords are secured. But clients are oftentimes more concerned with how everything looks.
“To the client the UX is the most important part of the application,” he said. “While they want everything to work, their perception of the application is entirely on that surface layer.” If it doesn’t look good, they’ll perceive the entire project negatively, even if the code running it is spectacular.
This might make UX sound like it’s just design, but it’s more than that. In fact, the UX team actually gets involved before the designers start adding all their pretty touches.
“Oftentimes we’re designing complex applications,” Mike said. “And if you throw your average designer at a project before the necessary research and strategy has been determined, they likely won’t know where to start. What UX does is create models and wireframes to give a the designer a scaffold on which to build.”
Does your head hurt yet? Mine kind of does. It’s a lot to take in.
In fact, Mike said, “UX is all encompassing, it’s psychology, business, computer/human interaction, human perception. It’s everything, that’s why I like it.”
That’s probably a good note to end this portion of our UX discussion. Tomorrow, in part III we’ll show you some examples of great UX on the Web, in packaging, and in software.
