Adding Software Value through Effective User Experience DesignExecutive SummaryUser Experience is an overarching term that refers to the quality of experience realized by those using your software. It generally refers to:

the functionality implemented by the software and how appropriate it is relative to the needs of its users;the usability of the functionality, or how easily and effectively users can learn and perform their desired tasks using the software;and the design esthetics in the user interface – how interesting, exciting, or appealing the software is.

Value from software is affected by the quality of user experience

Commercial software emphasizes revenue increaseSoftware built for commercial sale, built to sell products commercially, or constructed to represent an organization in the marketplace creates value through:

Product Sales: Increased revenue from product sales as a result of increased customer product purchasesAd Sales: Increased revenue from advertising sales as a result of increased customer visitsSoftware Licensing: increased revenue from sales of packaged softwareCustomer Retention: improved customer service and/or brand image helping acquire and retain customers

When the quality of user experience on software is high, it generally improves the revenue generating capability of the software. It follows that when user experience is low, it may adversely affect product sales, increase the costs of acquiring and retaining customers, and increase the costs to support the software. The business case for creating software often carries hidden assumptions that the quality of user experience is high.

Software developed or purchased for internal use emphasizes cost savingsSoftware developed for internal use usually focuses on reducing costs through:

Productivity Increases: Cost reductions resulting from staff performing work more effectivelyReduction in Error Rates: Cost reductions resulting from staff identifying and remedying or avoiding process errorsDecreased Training Time: Cost reductions resulting from reduced time to train staff to effectively perform their workImproved Employee Retention: Costs reduced by allowing staff to focus on their work rather than cumbersome internal systems that support that work

Often the business case for purchasing or building internal software assumes an effective user experience. High quality user experience may magnify cost savings while low quality user experience may reduce or completely reverse costs savings.

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Look at the sources of revenue increase and cost savings. How might the quality of your software’s user experience be positively or negatively affecting your software return on investment?

Looking at the user experience of our productWhen looking at the user experience of your software, analyze three aspects:

Utility: What features or functions does the software offer to allow users to complete their desired tasks?Usability: How effectively can users learn and perform tasks using those features?Design Aesthetics: How do the design aesthetics support your brand and improve your user’s experience with the software?

In recent years the quality of user experience for web applications and rich client applications have steadily improved. Rich interactive applications, or RIAs, are becoming the norm. These applications offer responsive, attractive user interfaces that combine effective use of graphics, animation, and media to support users while offering superior user experience. Once a differentiator, rich application behavior is now the norm.

Composite applications, or applications blending functionality through services and leveraged functionality place applications where users can most effectively utilize them, and combine data and information visualization in a way that directly supports their work. For example, BP’s Hurricane Management System uses SharePoint Portal serve to deliver a blended portal application leveraging Microsoft Virtual Earth and relevant data from more than a dozen sources across the organization.As the quality of commercial applications increases, user expectation increases. Microsoft tools have advanced to support the construction of rich interactive and composite applications. ASP.NET AJAX, Silverlight, and Windows Presentation Foundation allow developers to create high quality user experiences. Microsoft’s Expression Studio allows designers and developers to collaborate early and continuously throughout the design and development process. Microsoft tools allow easy integration and leverage of high quality user experience like those in Microsoft Office or Microsoft Live™. Look at the product you are

currently building. Does it offer the utility your users need, the usability that allows them to be effective, and the design aesthetics they expect?

Adding Software Value through Effective User Experience Design

BP’s Hurricane Management System is an excellent example of a rich composite application.

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The process we follow to obtain high quality user experienceWhile no organization sets out to create ugly unusable software, they often fail to support intentions to create high quality user experience with a process to ensure it. An effective software development lifecycle seeks to understand and involve users, incorporate effective user experience design with development, and validate user experience early and continuously.

Understand and involve users: Directly observe prospective users of your software to gather understanding. Distill and communicate that understanding using user models such as personas. Create an extended group of users or customers that you can leverage to obtain feedback on software before it is delivered.Effectively Design User Experience: Involve designers early to prototype and validate user interface designs. Leverage products such as Microsoft’s Expression Studio to allow designers to work effectively and concurrently with development.Validate User Experience: Starting with early low fidelity prototypes, validate that users can effectively use your software to meet their goals. Continue validating through development, and before and after delivery.

Incorporating user experience design practice into a development approach saves development time by eliminating the development on unnecessary features and reducing rework for poorly designed features. UX design reduces development risk through early user validation of features. Look at your current

development processes. Do you have processes steps

that allow you to understand and continuously involve users? Do you leverage designers and support them working concurrently with development? Do you validate user experience by observing how effectively users can utilize your software?

Take the Next Steps to Improving User Experience Awareness in Your OrganizationStart by evaluating your organization’s current quality of user experience design.Look at your organization’s assumption regarding user experience. Is your software return on investment based on high quality user experience?Look at the products you are currently building. Do they have the level of utility, usability, and design aesthetics needed to support both users and your organization’s business case?Look at the process your organization currently uses. Is user experience an element in that process? Do you study and involve users? Do you effectively incorporate user experience designers along with approaches and tools that allow them to collaborate with developers? Do you validate user experience throughout the development process?Assuming room for improvement, look more closely at the approach your organization uses to evaluate product success and to the process used to create software. Take steps to change processes to both associate value with user experience design, and to include process points such as direct user involvement, designer involvement, and frequent user experience validation.

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Identifying User ExperienceUser Experience is an overarching term that refers to the quality of experience realized by those using your software. It is a big term, often stretched to fit the intent of its user, but generally refers to:

the functionality implemented by the software and how appropriate it is relative to the needs of its users;

the usability of the functionality, or how easily and effectively users can learn and perform their desired tasks using the software;

the design aesthetics in the user interface – how interesting, exciting, or appealing the software is.

No organization sets out to do a poor job with the software they design and build—however, many do. And while poor user experience may seem like an unfortunate inconvenience to the users of the software, it could be a large, hidden drain to the return on investment predicted by the organization building the software. For many organizations, poor user experience is a project risk potentially causing rework, scope increases, and political setbacks to those delivering software which frustrates users. Furthermore, many organizations do prioritize user experience highly, but lack the support of processes and tools necessary to effectively achieve high quality user experience.This whitepaper will describe the business impact of emphasizing user experience in your design and development process and finished product. We will look closely at the sources for return on investment based on the type of product you’re engaged in building. We will look at ways to evaluate and improve the quality of user experience in your product, and at ways to improve the requirements, design, development, and evaluation process your organization uses to predictably deliver high quality user experience.

1. Software product return is altered by user experienceWhen we set out to build software, we do so to realize a number of benefits, financial and otherwise. For all of the following sources of benefit, high quality user experience can secure, enhance, or magnify that benefit. Poor quality user experience can reduce or completely eliminate benefits, and in some cases turn an expected benefit into an expense. For organizations selling software commercially, or managing eCommerce software to sell products, benefits come in the form of increased revenue.

Increased revenue from product sales supported by the softwareFor eCommerce applications where the software directly supports customers buying products or services, we expect the software we build to enable and increase sales. Effective user experience can indeed improve sales, where poor user experience can significantly dampen sales.

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Increases in ad revenueRevenue improves for an organization that earns revenue from ad sales when usage and visitors increase. Poor user experience causes users to abandon an application sooner, thus reducing ads viewed and revenue earned.

Increases in revenue from sales of softwareFor those creating software for sale commercially, revenue comes from increasing software sales. User experience can enhance brand, improve product review, feedback, and sales through referrals. Low quality user experience can significantly reduce sales.

For organizations with customers buying products, using online software, or simply seeking information about an organization, improving user experience in customer facing applications can have a tangible benefit. In Nielsen-Norman Group’s Usability Return on Investment report, 14 cases are presented that look directly at sales or conversion rate increases. Across these 14 cases an average 100% increase – a doubling of sales or conversion rates – was seen after implementing usability changes. Across 8 cases looking at visitor count, an average increase of 150% was measured. For some commercial applications, improvements have a direct and rapid impact on the revenue of the sponsoring organization. For other commercial facing applications, impact may be less direct.

Improved customer retentionFor those creating software for sale commercially, and for those that create software to support or extend services to customers such as banks or airlines, positive experience with software helps customer retention. As with software sold commercially, poor user experience can damage brand image or give customers reason to look more closely at competitors. High quality user experience can improve customer loyalty.

In Forrester Research’s May 2007 case study “Best Practices Drive Wells Fargo’s Home Page”, Forrester analyst Brad Strothkamp describes Wells’ use of analytical data to improve design. In their 2007 home page redesign Wells Fargo reports a 50% increase in online loan applications, a 23% decrease in searches for commonly accessed pages and functionality – notably the “find ATM locations” option decreased searches for the functionality by 80% while increasing use by 2.2%. For organizations developing or purchasing software for their own internal use, benefits come from the use of that software. Strong user experience can enhance those benefits while poor user experience can erode those benefits.

Increases in productivityWhen software is developed for internal use, the goal is to improve the productivity of those using it, thus reducing costs to the organization. However, software with poor user experience may not deliver the expected productivity gains, but may reduce productivity. Where the software use is optional within the organization, users may “opt out”, resulting in the organization receiving no benefit from their software investment.

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Reduction in error ratesFor both internal and commercial software, lack of an intuitive user interface design can result in reductions in productivity, or increases in product support costs. Software built to help users improve the quality or accuracy of their work carries with it an assumption that costs will be reduced as quality goes up. Poor quality user experience can rob the organization of these benefits.

Decreases in training timeFor both internal and commercial software, well designed software will reduce training time, resulting in a reduction in training costs for software developed for internal use, or a marketable product feature for software sold commercially.

Improved employee satisfaction and retentionFor software created for internal use, many systems are constructed to improve the quality of work life for employees. Poor user experience can actually reduce that quality of work life and result in higher rates of attrition within an organization. Employee satisfaction likely affects productivity across other tasks unrelated to poor performing internal systems.

While all these sources of benefit are driven by the creation of software itself, it is easy to see how poor user experience can significantly reduce these benefits, while high quality user experience can effectively magnify these benefits. David Freedman, director of development for Creative Artists Agency (the foremost talent, literary and sports marketing agency), reports that over 80% of their applications are developed for use by their internal staff. In their business it is important to attract and retain talented employees. CAA’s reputation for being tech savvy has helped it attract and keep both high quality staff and clients. “Our primary metric for the success of our software is adoption rate. It is not enough to simply get it built. Staff need to effectively use it.” To support that objective, David keeps user involvement high throughout the development process.

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Consider the business case for software your organization is currently working on:

How does your organization expect to benefit? Of the benefits listed, which apply?

What assumptions regarding user experiences are those benefits based on? Are efficiency increases based on a certain level of usability? Is assumed commercial success based on superior user experience?

What are the risks of poor user experience? How will benefit decrease? Will there be unexpected consequences such as increased support or training costs?

What are the benefits of better than expected user experience? Will benefits increase? Will some expected expenses such as training for support costs go down?

How will you validate the user experience is of the quality level expected to earn the software’s expected benefits?

Assess your organizational awareness of user experience based on your product’s profileSoftware is designed and implemented for a vast array of reasons. For some applications such as eCommerce software or small commercial applications in competitive categories, the quality of the user experience and its impact on revenue can easily make the difference between commercial success or failure. In these cases, quality UX seems to be wired to the organization’s financial performance, and consequently embedded in software design and development processes.However, for other types of applications, the quality of user experience doesn’t have such an obvious and direct impact on software return on investment. Let’s look at a couple factors that affect a product’s profile and show how aware our organization might be of the user experience. These factors will also help us identify the most relevant sources of software return.

Is your software focused on generating revenue from consumers or reducing cost for your organization?

For many types of software, the use or purchase of that software directly affects the revenue of the organization who built the software. eCommerce software, for example, directly generates revenue through consumers purchasing products through the software. Packaged consumer software, such as home accounting

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software or large enterprise class accounting systems, generates revenue through product sales. The relationship between software and revenue is less apparent in online contexts, such as informational resources or online banking. While clearly consumer-centric, revenue isn’t generated directly from the use of the software. However, when user experience is high it may enhance brand and customer loyalty, and indirectly generate revenue. A poor user experience may result in the loss of a current or potential customer who may turn to a competitor’s site which is easier to use.Software used internally within an organization to support critical customer operations such as call center software can have an impact on customer experience, even though these customers clearly aren’t direct users of the software. Improved user experience here both reduces costs by helping internal staff be more efficient, and increases revenue indirectly by helping to improve customer experience.Software created for internal use to support in-house operations such as time-tracking or employee information portals will likely only be seen by employees of the organization. Improved user experience here increases efficiency, reduces training costs, and may help to reduce internal support costs – not to mention the less tangible benefit of happier employees and the potential affect on productivity and customer service in other areas of the organization.When looking at the software your organization builds, determine how consumer-centric your application is. The more consumer-centric the software, the more your return on software investment is driven by factors that affect your company’s return by generating revenue such as sales from products on eCommerce sites or sales of shrink-wrap software or licenses. The other end of this continuum refers to internal software, the primary goal of which is to reduce costs in the organization.

Is your software compelled-use or elective-use?For many websites and small commercial products, the person using the software is usually the one who made the decision to use it and/or to purchase it. For example, if you were to use an online mapping service and find yourself displeased with the software, you have a few choices and can easily elect to use something else. This is a prime example of elective-use software. The consumer has a number of options, and reversing a decision to use a product has a little consequence for the user. If you were to purchase software to help with your home accounting, you will likely make a decision between several competitors. If you find yourself unhappy with this software, you may be able to return the software to a retailer, or maybe not. Changing to another product may require that you expend effort to learn the new product and reenter a number of transactions. But, you do have the option to stop using the software and purchase something else. Your use is elective although there may be a cost of reversing a decision, so usage may be slightly compelled by your desire to avoid that cost.If you encounter trouble with your home accounting software you may find yourself visiting the publisher’s website. You don’t really have an option to visit someone else’s website. You could seek outside help from a friend or consultant. And, if you were truly dissatisfied with your online customer service experience, it may affect your decision to keep the software. This sort of online support software straddles the line between compelled and elective use.If in your job you use accounting software as part of supporting your organization, the decision of which accounting software to use was likely not yours. If you don’t like your experience using that software, you may not have many options. If you and

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others complain loudly enough, the publisher might improve user experience, your organization might create an alternative user interface to replace the user experience for important functionality you need, or your organization may, usually at great expense, decide to replace the software with a competitive product. In this case, the use of this software is compelled by your organization.

Many of us (the authors of this paper included) are required to use software written internally by your organization to track time spent against various projects. If you are not fond of your company’s in-house developed application, you may find you have few alternatives. You might be able to complain to whoever created and maintains the software for changes, but when

doing so, you’d better have a good idea of what specific changes you’d like. Changes often require budgetary approval, and even approved changes require prioritization against a number of other ongoing projects in your company’s portfolio. Software like this is clearly compelled use.

Some organizations, or parts of an organization, prize user experience highly

If we take these axes and put them together, in the top right quadrant we can see elective use revenue generating software. For software that fits this catagory, the quality of user experienced seems directly wired to the organization’s financial statement. At least the organization seems hyper-aware of user experience. UX shortcomings seem to have big impact here,

and most organizations writing this software understand this. You will see this understanding manifest in the employees dedicated to user experience work, and the process used to create this software. There’s no end to evidence derived from research or anecdotal information that describes the big benefit of consumer software organizations that get UX right, and the cautionary tales of those who didn’t.It is in the other three quadrants where user experience benefits seem less clear, and user experience is often a secondary or marginal focus. For commercial compelled user products, the sales of the software may be more directly tied to the benefits the software promises to the organization. While many of those benefits assume a reasonable level of usability, since users often don’t have the opportunity to opt-out if they dislike the product, usability issues take a back seat to product features that help the product sell. For example, on most commercial compelled use products, an issue that deals with usability will generally be treated as a secondary concern to new, undeveloped features. This stands counter to user

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experience goals, but possibly adds more functionality and thus is perceived to make the product more marketable. The irony is that adding more features into a product that is already difficult to use further decreases the quality of user experience. For products built for internal use the story is even more troublesome. Clearly products build for an internal user rely on effective use by their target users to realize their anticipated benefit. The business case for building such software usually revolves around cost savings due to increases in efficiency. Poor user experience may increase the amount of time users require to perform tasks, or result in mistakes that diminish or negate efficiency. The need for additional user training or user support may add unforeseen costs to the software. Poorly designed internal systems may result in unhappy employees and increased employee attrition rates.Most software development projects put a heavy emphasis on the efficiency of the system. And, it is true that poor system response times are one of the easiest user experience issues to identify and attempt to resolve. Developers may spend a significant portion of their time improving features so that they meet performance standards in order to take milliseconds or, in some cases, whole seconds off of transaction times. However, in comparison to usability improvements, these efficiency gains are often miniscule. When a feature is redesigned to be more intuitive, the increase in time saved by users can often be measured in minutes, not seconds. Well designed systems allow users to think in a new way, and empowerthem to complete tasks they had never imagined possible. When looking at the business case for greater user experience in internal software, look closely at assumptions made regarding increases in efficiency, error rates, and training and support costs. These are user experience related concerns where low quality user experience might diminish value from the software, and high quality user experience might magnify it.

Consider the variety of software products and projects being developed in your organization:

What quadrant in the revenue generating, cost saving, elective and compelled use chart would each application fall?

For each of these projects and products, subjectively rate the quality of user experience. Do you see a correlation between UX quality and its place in the model?

For each of these projects and products, look at the development process used by your organization. How is UX incorporated into that development process? Does the process vary by project and product? Why?

For each product or project, where has quality of user experience affected the expected outcome of that project or product?

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For new projects, assess potential benefits and risks along use and revenue generation axesCommercial elective use software relies on end-user revenueSoftware in the commercial elective user quadrant such as eCommerce sites, and commercial package software relies on sales to consumers to drive revenue. For eCommerce sites look for improvements in user experience to improve sales.For shrink-wrapped software look for user experience to improve the rate of sales. Also look for higher rates of customer referrals and favorable product reviews. In both cases analyze your competitors to evaluate how their user experience benefits or hurts them. Have they set a high bar, or given you an opportunity? Can you use ease of use and low training costs as a benefit to help sell your product, or a subject to avoid?What is the cost to your organization to support customers with questions or issues? Can the quality of UX reduce this cost?Before and after focusing attention on user experience, measure changes in sales, along with other indicators such as product reviews or customer service calls, to assess the effects of user experience on your return.

Commercial compelled use relies on buyer revenue and differentiates with user experienceSoftware built for commercial sale, but with usage compelled by employers or other forces, will often rely on the availability of features relative to competitors to help sell software. These features help build a business case for its potential buyers. Superior user experience may enhance that business case since the publishing organization can reasonably claim lower training costs and higher end user satisfaction. Poor user experience can be a negative differentiator your competitors will likely pick up on. When feature parity with the competition has been accomplished, user experience may be an important battleground. If achieving feature parity is cost prohibitive, user experience may be your primary battleground.For online services and customer support sites, you will find that a high quality user experience can enhance brand, while a low quality experience can detract.Measure changes in sales along with other indicators, such as product reviews or customer service calls, to assess the effects of user experience on your return. Pay careful attention to customer retention.

Internal compelled use software increases productivity and improves qualitySoftware built for internal use to support necessary business processes within the organization is usually built to increase productivity. This can be a tricky thing on which to calculate a return on investment. Organizations usually don’t intend to decrease employee count as a result of efficiency gains, but look for increases in other types of work employees perform. For example, call center staff may be able to answer more calls daily, while marketing staff may be able to increase their number of outgoing calls. Consultants may increase billable time. Software may be built based on a business case of lowering costs, it may be increases in revenue that the organization actually sees.

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Measure increases in work volume. Measure increases in other work made possible as a result of efficiency gains.You may find that improving user experience lowers error rates or rework. Identify and measure errors avoided or reduced as a result of improved internal support systems.You might find that improving user experience reduces or does away with the need for internal training.Measure time and expense for employee training before and after user experience improvements. Improved user experience may lead to employees carrying out activities that they were not able to do before the better-designed software came along.Identify new areas where employees are excelling, or finding new ways to think about problems.Internal software is often built to support day-to-day tasks employers require of their employees such as time tracking or other reporting. Often this work is considered administrative overhead and can result in poorer job satisfaction. Measure time spent on administrative tasks supported by internal software. Measure subjective employee job satisfaction.

Internal elective use software needs to entice users with productivity gainsFor internal software where usage isn’t mandated, such as internal company portals or other information resources, improvements in productivity are often expected but not achieved when users simply opt-out of using the software. Measure use and adoption rate of internal software.Measure performance improvements for activities supported by the software, and activities users may have more time to perform, or be more effective at performing as a result of using the software.Measure time and expense for employee training for the software. Query users who have opted-in, to see how the system has affected them or their work. Measure employee’s subjective job satisfaction.

For commercial software, use the grid to analyze your customer’s benefits

For customers of software, look closely at the internal use sections of the grid for guidance. While your organization may generate revenue from the sales of your product, your customers will save money by increasing efficiency, and reducing training expenses and error rates. Use this information to better understand your customer’s business case, and the impact of user experience on that business case.

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User’s ability to opt-out amplifies user experience concern and increases risk related to poor user experienceYou will notice that sources of return for commercial software are the same for both elective and compelled use. Sources for cost reduction are similar for internal software for both compelled and elective use. Treat elective use for software as an amplifier. Where the software use is elective, both positive and negative effects are amplified based on the number of users inside your user constituency. Elective use commercial software is a high-stakes game of user experience. It is understandable why organizations writing software for this quadrant are eager to match that concern with people and process to address it. Organizations that develop consumer facing products often employ business processes and staff to facilitate strong user experience, while organizations with an internal user base de-emphasize user experience roles and regulations. Are internal users less important? Are users required to use software less important? While we may not think so, it may be true that their impact on return may take a little more rigor to quantify, measure, and make visible within your organization.

2. Improving the software you build

Strong user experience begins with the functionality we choose to offer

Well-designed software offers functionality that is appropriate relative to the needs of its target users. We often concern ourselves with the usability of software, and we should. Usability is a measurement of how effectively people using software can perform their intended tasks. Usability as a concern is often separated from utility, or the ability of a product to perform a particular task. Both usability and utility bundle up into the term usefulness.

At times the decision about what to build is trivialized as requirements gathering. An ideal user experience offers what we need, nothing more and nothing less. It is sometimes easy to identify software that doesn’t know quite what its user needs by the fact that it offers far too much utility – so much so that it makes it difficult to find what we need.

Detailed user interface design combines usability and appropriate aestheticsUsability, like system performance, is a measurable characteristic of a system. Given a particular task or use case a person using our system needs to perform, we can ask some number of users to attempt to complete this task. This is accomplished not by giving them instructions, but by giving our users an objective. For instance in an

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email application we might ask someone to “send a message to an old friend in your address book.” We will not tell them “first click the ‘new message’ button.” Our users’ ability to find the correct button is what we are measuring. Asking a number of users to perform a task in our system will allow us to measure:

1. the number of users who successfully complete tasks2. the time it takes to complete tasks3. the number of errors or missteps made along the way

The answers to these questions allow us to begin to measure usability. The term usability often refers to how long it takes to learn to use the software, and how easy or difficult it is to remember how to perform infrequently used tasks. You may notice at times that ugly user interfaces may actually be quite usable. Robert Scoble in his March 2006 blog post speaking about Markus Frind, the founder of Plentyoffish.com, tells the story:

“He says he designed his site to be easy to use, fast to load, and uncluttered, but he didn’t pick pretty colors or fonts.”

Plentyoffish.com is a free dating service that currently reports ever 13 million page views a day, and over 3 million unique users visiting per month. Plentyoffish is often categorized with CraigsList, Myspace, and Google as having an ugly, but useful user interface. This trend has caused many in the blogosphere to report “ugly is the new black.”These new “ugly” websites and their success help us understand and separate design esthetic concerns from usefulness. More and more “ugly” is becoming acceptable, and even kitschy when considering some commercial websites. However, keeping software product aesthetics consistent with your brand is often an important quality of software. It is also important not to underestimate the importance of a product that looks and feels good to use. In Emotional Design, Don Norman backs up with research and analysis the idea that attractive things work better:

“Attractive things make people feel good, which in turn makes them think more creatively…. making it easier for people to find solutions to the problems they encounter.”

It’s generally a user experience failure to focus on either utility or aesthetics alone. They’re conjoined concerns. Effective user experience places emphasis on both.

Raising the UX bar for next generation browser based applicationsThe term “Web 2.0” was coined by Tim O’Reilly in 2003 to explain a major change taking place in the way web applications look, feel, and the types of functionality they offer. Since that term was coined, browser-based rich interactive applications (RIAs) have increasingly become the norm. Today internet users expect:

more control through things like more flexible navigation or information categorization using folksonomies, or tagging;

opportunities to give feedback and collaborate with other users by using commenting systems, rating systems, wiki-style document modification, and social networking features;

more responsive user interfaces by using Ajax (asynchronous JavaScript and XML) to retrieve information quickly

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richer interaction that often incorporates the use of audio and video.

Web 2.0 isn’t a specification and there is no standard for browser-based rich interactive applications. Web 2.0 is a new way to think about browser-based software, and along with it a new set of raised expectations on the part of users of the web, and other pieces of software in their “software ecosystem.” New web design aesthetics and technology have led to usable, responsive applications such as Google’s Gmail and Maps, and forced competitor Yahoo! to raise the quality of user experience in Yahoo! Mail and Yahoo! Maps. Today Microsoft’s Live Search, Maps, and Mail press forward with groundbreaking rich internet experiences.

Rich clients blur the lines between the desktop and the networkA software client that five years ago may have been described asfatis rich today. Rich client applications usually refer to software that is installed and run on a personal computer that leverages a graphic user interface. Once “fat” referred to clients that had a large amount of software to install client-side to support local, client-side processing. “Thin” referred to applications with a small amount of software to install client side, that relied heavily on delegating much of its processing to a server elsewhere on the network. Today’s rich clients successfully blur the lines between thin and fat offering responsive client-side processing coupled with access to a wide array of services, information, and computation power located on a public or private network. Rich clients are often network aware without being network dependent. That is to say that when connected to a network they grant access to network services, but when disconnected, remain functional and useful. As the quality and responsiveness of rich clients continue to improve in popular consumer software, the expectations of users of all software are raised. Luke Kowalski, corporate UI Architect for Oracle Corporation, reports:

“We are actually seeing a bit of a bottoms-up driven approach. End users exposed to Google Mail, Vista, Mac OS X, or even Flash animations on web sites are starting to expect and even demand the same user experience in their CRM, financials, and other applications at the office.”

The desktop and the network continue to blur as more composite applications arrive in the commercial marketplace and are created inside organizations for use on their own desktops. Composite applications combine multiple applications into a single useful user experience. These applications may be integrated through services and

by mixing in the user experience from a component such as Microsoft’s Virtual Earth into user experience that support critical business functionality.When Hurricane Katrina struck, energy giant BP was confronted with the challenge of locating its people and material assets

Adding Software Value through Effective User Experience Design

BP’s Hurricane Management System is an excellent example of a rich composite application.

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and making decisions about their care. This was an unacceptably time-consuming process during a time when every second counted. In response BP has constructed its Hurricane Management System, which combines the 3D satellite imagery of the Microsoft® Virtual Earth™ mapping software and real-time weather data with a visual representation of BP people and facilities. The solution not only leveraged Virtual Earth, but also integrated existing data from Microsoft SQL and presented that data in Microsoft SharePoint. Says Stephen Fortune Information Management Director, Gulf of Mexico Strategic Performance Unit, BP:

“The Hurricane Management System… brought together everything in the SharePoint site. It was based on a tight integration of SharePoint Portal Server, Virtual Earth, and SQL Server.” “This solution is changing the way we do business. When the data is presented through a map-based interface, it’s amazing. It gives you a richer, bigger, more intelligent picture of what’s going on.”

Improving user experience often involves placing functionality where it will be most effectively used. In a collaborative effort between SAP and Microsoft, day to day business functionality will be integrated into Microsoft Office, an application suite where business users spend much of their time already. Version 1.0 of Duet comes with five prepackaged scenarios: Leave Management, Time Management, Organization Management, Reports & Analytics, and Budget Monitoring. Microsoft allows the cutting edge user experience of Live and Office to be integrated easily through offerings like the Windows Live Developer Center and the Office Developer Center.

Microsoft development tools such as Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF), Silverlight, and Expression Blend provide a foundation for creating cutting edge applications that blur boundaries between the web and the desktop. Josh Jacobson, Senior Product Manager, Yahoo! Messenger for Windows Vista™, says:

“Harnessing the capabilities of Windows Presentation Foundation, we are delivering an eye-popping cinematic interface that draws people to the new Yahoo!

Messenger. Consumers experience an immediate emotional connection,”

Adding Software Value through Effective User Experience Design

Yahoo’s Messenger for Windows Vista leveraged Windows Presentation Foundation and Silverlight to produce an eye-popping user experience.

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3. Improving the process you use to design and build softwareIt is hard to disagree with the argument that user experience is important. No one sets out to write ugly unusable software. And, we all understand how a poor user experience can affect our ability to learn to use and get value out of software. But, given the objective of high quality user experience, how do we adapt our software requirements, design, construction, and validation processes to ensure that objective is met?

Start by understanding your usersThe verb phrase “user experience design” incorporates a family of design processes referred to as user-centered design. User-centric approaches seek first to understand users, their problems and goals, then seek to identify possible implementation solutions. It is a common misconception for organizations to consider themselves user-centric because they have consideration for their customers. A process becomes user-centric when you convert consideration into tangible process steps.

Collaborate with your users to determine requirementsThe Standish Group’s often-cited CHAOS report said in 1994 that the biggest factor challenging projects was lack of user involvement. Since then a number of companies appear to have responded by adding practices to actively involve users in their process. While progress is being made, involving end users in the requirements, design, development, and validation process is often still overlooked.

There are a variety of conventional ways to involve users in your development process including:

interviews observation focus groups surveys

usability tests beta tests demos

Participatory Design, an approach directly involving users in the design process, was first researched during the 1970’s in Scandinavia. Joint application design, or JAD, was developed by Chuck Morris of IBM. JAD involved users in facilitated work sessions to directly elicit and vet requirements. Most recently Extreme Programming and other Agile development approaches advocate the inclusion of users on a customer team responsible for writing requirements as “user stories” and collaborating with the development team as software emerges.

Collaborate with users in contextContextual Design, a user-centered design processes published by Holtzblatt & Beyer recommends joining users where they will use the software you are designing and building. Contextual Design recommends a master-apprentice style of interview where an analyst or designer takes on an apprenticeship role with a potential user asking that user to teach them their job. Along the way they collect artifacts, observe existing software, note current pain points, and try to truly understand the goals that compel the use of the software.The next time you work with your users in a conference room setting, consider moving the discussion into the context of their real work. Rather

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than asking, “What do you want the new software to do?” ask, “Do you mind if I watch and ask questions while you just do your job?”

An end-user team as an extension of your development teamA pattern has emerged for involving a team of end-users continuously throughout the requirements, design, and development. Elsevier, a leader in scientific and medical publishing, has established a development partner program used on new projects. The development partner group is composed of dozens of users who agree to participate in the development process. They make themselves available for interviews, surveys, focus group discussions, usability test, and general collaborative work with the team. Heather Williams, a senior interaction designer, reports:

“We couldn’t have achieved such a wonderful end result without their ongoing participation. Their input has impacted all aspects of the product from content preparation, site navigation, on-screen terminology and visual design.”

In a July 2004 article posted on SoftwareCEO.com, McAfee software development manager David Ries describes a 90% drop in expected support calls after a new release of Active VirusScan software. He attributes this success to very usable UI created through continuous end-user involvement using their JDP – or Joint Development Program involving users’ continuous involvement with the design and development team of McAfee.In Case Study for Customer Input for a Successful Product, Lynn Miller, director of user interface development for Alias (now Autodesk) describes a variety of mechanisms for working with end-users and prospective end-users for the SketchBook Pro product. She refers to her extended group of end users as development partners, but is cautious to say:

“…it was important for us to focus on trying to understand how the customers worked and what their problems were instead of listening to the specific solutions that they proposed. By making sure that we thoroughly understood the problem, we could devise a solution that fit our application better.”

These three examples of successful end-user involvement in the research, requirements, design, and development process all come from commercial environments where the success of the product had a quick and direct influence on the profitability of the organization building the software. For organizations creating applications for internal use with the goal of improving efficiency, the same approach can be used to reduce development time, ensure the inclusion of important features and exclusion of non-essential features, and reduce or completely avoid staff training time.

Use Personas to give focus to requirement and design decisions An immense number of decisions go into the design and development of any software product, including:

Have we chosen the correction functionality? Will this application be easy enough? Will this application perform well enough? Will this application be useful and desirable?

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The answer to all these questions depends specifically on who your target user is. It’s difficult and not always advisable to simply delegate questions like this directly to users. Different users have different opinions. Any individual user’s experience and opinions may be limited or biased based on their past good or bad experiences with software. Understanding users’ desires, needs, and limitations that affect the software design is critical to aid in making the vast number of detailed decisions made - most of them without users present or available to consult with. In most large development environments, you’ll find analysts, developers, and testers that have never actually met users. Without a common understanding of users, decisions are often made based on assumptions about users, use, or based on the individual decision maker’s preferences.

User-centered design processes distill and communicate what we know about users in simple, approachable models. Personas are a common and popular example of user models. An effective persona tells us something about: the goals of the user that

compel them to use the software;

the problems or pain points the software could help resolve;

the context they work in and are likely to use the software in;

their experience level with both the technology and the domain they will be working in;

and their software and technology ecosystem – the tools they use and enjoy

today The most effective user models distill and communicate what you havelearned about your users through research and collaboration. While a persona might look like it describes a real person, it’s actually a composite person, an archetype, built from the information representative and most relevant to your product’s design. Creating a persona that describes a tangible individual forces us to prioritize and chose the information most relevant to our decision making process. The target users of our software may vary in age between 19 and 30 years old, and may vary in computer expertise between complete novice and guru hacker. But stating that Jen is 23 year-old with strong computer skills forces us to decide what’s typical and design for that. Given those large ranges of age and computer skills, we could have constructed multiple personas. In addition to Jen, we could have described Josh, a 19 year-old amateur hacker writing software since he was 10 years old.

Adding Software Value through Effective User Experience Design

Jen, a 23 year old college student from Philadelphia“a computer’s just a tool, a necessary one, but still just a tool”

Jen comes from an upper middle class background, but like many college students needs to be financially conservative since she's not yet working. Jen's been using computers since her family purchased its first Apple computer when she was 4. Today she comfortably moves back and forth from Apple to Windows based computers.

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We could actually have stopped at profiling our users – leaving ranges of information. When modeling users you get to decide what’s most relevant to the applications you are building, the team you are communicating to, and the types of design decisions you are making. A persona or profile has the job of communicating that most relevant information to help create empathy and understanding within the development team. A persona acts as a design target. Our decisions are made not based on our personal biases, but in the best interest of our now commonly understood user. Personas aren’t the only form of user model. You are likely using a simple form of user model in your development today. Actors used in use case modeling serve well as a user model. Profile your actors by asking for and filling in details about their goals, pain points, computer experience, domain experience, working context, and software and tool ecosystem. You can use the same profiling approach on user roles, or any other way you choose to identify the users of your system. You could select representative values from the ranges of information in profiles to create personas. The goal is communication and building a shared understanding of your users.

Start by building personas based on what your team believes todayBuilding a persona or profile based on the assumptions held about your users can ignite a valuable discussion. Assembling these assumptions into a tangible persona gives a team a common design target. In the process of creating such a persona, you’ll often realize there are important details you don’t know, or that the team holds conflicting assumptions about the users of their software. These are opportunities for more focused research. Assumption based personas are described in Pruitt and Adlin’s Persona Lifecycle. Similarly Cooper, Reiman and Cronin, describe provisional personas in the About Face 3. And, Don Norman describes ad-hoc personas in his essay Ad-Hoc Personas and Empathetic Focus.

“They [ad-hoc personas] are created quickly, they do not use real data, and they are employed without much background information and attention to detail. But even so, they serve as wonderful tools for building understanding and empathy into the design process in a way that would be impossible with any other method.”

In Software Engineering with Microsoft Visual Studio Team System, Guckenheimer effectively distills the creation and use of personas in a software development lifecycle.

Iteratively design and test user interfaceThe user interface of software is built to support users achieving immediate tasks in support of the goals that motivate their use – the goals identified in a persona or other user model.

When designing user interface, deal with utility, usability, and visual design in that order of concernPreviously we separated the concepts of utility, usability, and the esthetic visual design. Those concepts don’t separate very cleanly in that when designing user interfaces it’s difficult, and not productive, to deal with one aspect at a time. Before we can undertake the design of some user interface, we will need to make decisions regarding the functionality the software needs to support: its utility. Our user models will help. When the use of software is compelled by a particular

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organization with business objectives and a business process to support, understanding those business objectives and their supporting process is also critical.

Design and test UI before you developGiven some set of tasks, or use-cases, a user of our software would like to perform, it is time to envision how that user might achieve their goals. The task of designing user interface can be a difficult and time-consuming one. It involves iterating through and validating a variety of approaches. This may start by talking through usage in front of a whiteboard, and sketching the user interface that might support that usage. UI design often continues by building low-fidelity user interface prototypes using paper, pencil, and tape. Given a paper prototype, it is easy to test the user interface by asking someone to stand in as the user and attempt to perform the task the UI should support. In this simple form of lightweight usability testing one of the team members who constructed the prototype will play the role of the computer moving paper screens as users operate the UI with finger and felt tip pen. This style of testing is often referred to as “Wizard of Oz” style usability testing referring to the final scenes of the 1939 film where we are asked to “pay no attention to the man behind the curtain.” In this case the man behind the curtain operates our paper prototype. In Adding Usability Testing to an Agile Project, Meszaros and Aston describe injecting lightweight testing of paper prototypes into their project:

“Both paper prototyping and Wizard of Oz testing were easy to do despite no formal training in any aspect of it. Common sense prevailed and proved adequate.” The authors go on to say:“The value that we derived by the usability testing was far greater than anticipated… Overall we were able to deliver on time, under budget and exceeded our business partners’ expectations”

UI design can progress from rough pencil sketches to higher fidelity renderings using visual design tools, HTML, or prototypes for rich client applications. Usability testing can progress from simple lightweight usability tests to more formal testing using usability labs, and recruited users that are ideal representatives of your target user constituencies. Many organizations find that progressing to high fidelity prototypes and more formal usability testing isn’t necessary, that they get sufficient value from lightweight usability testing against paper prototypes. The important point to make is that omitting an iterative user interface design and testing step can be very costly. Meszaros and Aston comment:

“Emergent Design doesn’t work very well for user interfaces. Some Design Up Front seems to provide better guidance to the development team and provides earlier opportunities for feedback.”

Testing functionality with users invariably results in change. Change made to fully constructed software can be more costly. In the paper “Using the RITE method to improve products; a definition and a case study” five authors from Microsoft describe RITE: Rapid Iterative Testing and Evaluation. Instead of focusing on merely identifying issues to fix, RITE places emphasis on fixing those issues as quickly as possible through iterative testing, resulting in measuring the number of issues resolved. The result is an emphasis on the quality of the delivered product and repair of usability issues as quickly as possible.

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UI designer and developer collaboration decreases construction timeWhile a UI designer may begin iterative design on whiteboard or paper very early in this process, the functionality that needs to be supported and essential components of the UI will start to settle. While more detailed aspects of the user interface design may change to support increased usability and better visual design esthetics, there’s an opportunity for developers to begin building and testing functionality to support the user interface. In many organizations, developers and user interface designers begin collaboration early to discuss functionality and begin their respective cycles of detailed design and development. Where software is delivered to an HTML client, developers may focus on authoring semantically correct XHTML and user interface designers may author CSS( cascading style sheets) to control the specific placement and visual design of the user interface.Microsoft’s incorporation of XAML (extensible application markup language) provides an additional point of collaboration between developers and UI designers. XAML can describe a graphically rich user interface containing 2D and 3D objects. Microsoft tools such as Expression Designer and Blend allow designers to create or alter work and write XAML files directly. XAML writing plug-ins also exist for other popular applications such as Adobe Illustrator and Autodesk’s Maya. The important point here is mediation approaches such as XHTML and CSS, or XAML, afford UI designers and developers a collaboration mechanism that lets each begin to work in parallel and collaborate— expediating the software development lifecycle. Testing software for usability and aesthetic feedback can continue while development is ongoing and many changes can be accommodated by the mediation language. Oxygen Media will begin shipping Ript in Q4 of 2007. Ript is a consumer product which heavily leverages image manipulation, 3D graphics, and its superior user experience. Ken Judy of Oxygen Media reports:

“UX is the differentiating factor for our applications.”“Our team is genuinely impressed with XAML. Developers can make adjustments to things they would have taken UI specialist involvement before. UX people are able to contribute at level deeper than before by working directly with XAML. Our UX person works inside the development team collaborating directly with development.”

Regardless of the mechanism used for collaboration, early involvement of user interface design and frequent collaboration seems to be a pattern that results in faster overall design and development time and higher quality user experience.

Validate user experience as well as functionalityIn many organizations testing refers to the work testers do to identify functional bugs in the software. While the existence of functional bugs in the software certainly impacts the user experience, issues with learnability and users’ ability to efficiently perform the functionality both quickly and without error are often overlooked. These user experience concerns are where an organization’s expected return on investment for software development can be quickly reduced or completely removed as result of poor, but bug free, user experience.

Involve users in usability testing to validate softwareThe most conventional way to validate user experience is through usability testing. This can be done in a lightweight manner simply by observing users of your software

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at your location or theirs. More formal approaches may call for recording a number users in a usability lab setting, then annotating those recordings for later analysis by usability engineers. For many applications observing even an hour’s worth of application use isn’t sufficient for determining usability.

Validate the software as it will be used. When used frequently, applications should become more efficient for end-users. Observing and solicticing feedback from users after they’ve had opportunity to work with the application for days or weeks can provide valuable insight. Applications that benefit from installation in a customer’s environment to leverage important details of their context may require alternative validation strategies. For instance, software used to monitor network applications, or software written to analyze financial transactions, may need accurate data gathered over time in order to leverage that data effectively. In these contexts, there are a number of alternative validation approaches. Leveraging a trusted development partner group of end users is beneficial. Consider this group the alpha-testers of your software and:

arrange regular phone interviews to discuss experience with the application arrange for on-site visits with your users to observe use send surveys to gather information arrange for remote electronic observation of use using utilities designed for

remote usability testing such as TechSmith’s UserVue, even simple desktop sharing tools like Webex, or GoToMeeting, or tools like Microsoft’s Windows Meeting Space.

analyze data from application use to determine how often specific features are used, tasks are performed and abandoned, or mistakes were made. This type of electronic analysis may require additional development beyond simple log analysis to record the by-user frequency of tasks performed.

Including user experience validation into your process allows you to confirm that your users are able to get the performance out of the software that was expected and allows you take corrective measures if not. You will be able to detect if user experience issues are absorbing some of the expected return of your application.

Adding UX practices reduces development timeAdding user experience practices to a software development lifecycle usually involves:

Research of users through interview, observation, or other forms of study Modeling and communication of relevant user details in user models such as

personas Iteratively designing user interface based on the objectives of users Iteratively validating user interface designs for usability during development

with users Validating user experience on finished product with users before final

shipment

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If your current development approach doesn’t contain these practices, you will find that adding them in will likely result in a reduction in the overall time to understand requirements, design, develop, and validate software. By adding these steps in, you avoid other costs and risks including:

Design and development of unneeded functionality (unnecessary utility)This is often one of the largest benefits. An ideal product design contains sufficient functionality to create a product that’s useful to its target users. In the absence of study and strong understanding of target users, the approach is often to require, design, and implement more functionality than is needed.

Rework caused by late identification of important functionalityNecessary but missing functionality is often detected late through internal testing, or worse, through use by users after delivery. Better user understanding, and iterative user-centric design reduces the risk of omitted critical functionality.

Rework caused by late identification of usability issuesIteratively testing user interface designs initially using lightweight prototypes improves the quality of design going in to the development process. A great majority of usability issues can be detected and removed from the design before it is developed, significantly reducing development costs related to rework after an interface has been built.

There is an underlying theme to these benefits: a better understanding of what to build allows us to write less code. Many emergent best practices in software development feel similarly counter-intuitive. The emergent best practice of creating automated unit tests for code during development may seem like it takes more time. However, the effect of adding the practice improves code quality reducing the time spent in later testing stages. Unit test supporting a body of code act as regression tests for code level design and significantly reduce time, and risks associated with changing that code to add or alter features. Unit testing as a practice may add time initially, but significantly reduces time in the overall development lifecycle. Similarly adding UX practices improves the quality of requirements to development and the resulting finished product. The result is a faster time to market with a product carrying far less risk of rework due to poor user satisfaction.

4. Take the Next Steps to Improving User Experience Awareness in Your OrganizationIf your organization creates software where user experience concerns are hardto quantify or easy to neglect, you have likely noticed the impact of neglecting user experience. You may have observed instances where you have involved users effectively in your initial requirements and design process. You may have been more effective at choosing functionality, or the utility in your software. Through a combination of effective UI design work and validation of usability, you may have delivered software your users really love.

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Changing your organization’s process, or investing in staff or tools to help make user experience more consistent, will involve looking closer at your business case. Look at the areas for cost reduction or revenue increase that are affected by user experience. For products under development, or projects in your portfolio look at the assumptions in the business case that are affected by user experience:

Is the organization assuming a certain level of efficiency by users? Has the organization factored in training costs and at what level? Has the organization factored in support costs and at what level? Might high user error rates affect product return and how? If users can opt to use the software, what happens if they opt out?

If the consequences of any of these questions have significant impact, it is time to consider injecting user experience practices into your process.

Involve end users early as part of discovery and initial requirements Build a team of end users you can leverage for collaboration, research, and

testing Allow time for user interface designers to iteratively improve UI Build a collaborative relationship between UI designers and developers Validate user experience along with functional accuracy

Given an awareness of user experience as a concern in the software your organization creates, you can begin to effectively manage it and maximize return on investment along with the satisfaction of your users and stakeholders.

Sources: Bias & Mayhew, Cost-Justifying Usability, 2005, Morgan Kaufman BP Cuts Hours Off Emergency Response with Visual Solution that Tracks Threats

to Assets, http://www.microsoft.com/casestudies/casestudy.aspx?casestudyid=201427

Duet for Microsoft Office and SAP, http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/products/ha101527581033.aspx

Hadley, Clean, cutting-edge UI design cuts McAfee’s support calls by 90%, July 2004, http://www.softwareceo.com/com070604.php

Holtzblatt & Beyer, Contextual Design, 1997, Morgan Kaufman Medlock, M. C., Wixon D., Terrano, M., Romero R., Fulton B. Using the RITE

Method to Improve Products: a Definition and a Case Study, 2002, http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=3b882eb1-5f06-41d9-baba-d39ad13bc3ff&DisplayLang=en

Miller, Case Study of Customer Input for a Successful Product, 2005, Proceedings of the Agile Development Conference, http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1121987.1122115

Norman, Ad-Hoc Personas and Empathetic Focus, http://www.jnd.org/dn.mss/personas_empath.html

Nielsen Norman Group, Usability Return on Investment, http://www.NNgroup.com/reports/roi

MSDN Development Centers, http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/developercenters/default.aspx

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Pruit and Adlin, The Persona Lifecycle, 2006, Morgan Kaufman Standish Group, The CHOS Report, 1994,

http://www.standishgroup.com/sample_research/chaos_1994_1.php Strothkamp, Case Study: Metrics Drive Wells Fargo’s Home Page, Forrester

Research May, 2007, http://www.forrester.com/Research/Document/Excerpt/0,7211,42448,00.html

Usability in the real world: Business Benefits of Usability, UPA, http://www.upassoc.org/usability_resources/usability_in_the_real_world/benefits_of_usability.html

Yahoo! Reinvents Instant Messaging for Windows Vista, http://www.microsoft.com/casestudies/casestudy.aspx?casestudyid=201417

Other reading: Usability in Software Design MSDN,

http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms997577.aspx User Experience, Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_experience Joint application design, Wikipedia,

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joint_application_design Participatory design, Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Participatory_design The role of anti-marketing design, http://scobleizer.com/2006/03/04/the-role-of-

anti-marketing-design/ Ugly is the new black: http://www.uie.com/brainsparks/2006/03/27/is-ugly-the-

new-black/ Tim O’reilly, What is web 2.0?,

http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/oreilly/tim/news/2005/09/30/what-is-web-20.html XAML exporters for several design applications,

http://blogs.msdn.com/expression/archive/2006/01/31/521171.aspx Bolt, Guide to remote usability testing,

http://www.ok-cancel.com/archives/article/2006/07/guide-to-remote-usability-testing.html

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