A new lease of life for user centered design

By Marty Carroll

In any fast-moving industry, it’s usually possible to get a glimpse of the future by studying the past. The foundations of the modern usability and customer experience industry were built from the principles of HCI, or human-computer interaction, an area of study which kick-started ongoing investigation into the interface between technology and people across a broad variety of platforms and channels.

When the HCI industry gathered momentum in the 1980s, it was primarily concerned with making desktop software easier to use. By the time the mass-market leapt online in the 1990s and branches of HCI had begun evolving into usability, its proponents were employing ‘discount usability’ methods that made some headway to improving usability but were not allowed to slow down development timescales.

During the 1990s web design methods and agency productivity centered on technology itself rather than the eventual consumers of the information, and this attitude dictated the design process. By 2001, a more user-centric approach had begun gaining currency within the web design community and we were ahead of the pack in recognising the value of usability testing. We believed it was important to conduct usability studies in the early stages of web design, helping to create sites that were more in keeping with the needs of end users. We understood the importance of the bottom-line needs of businesses, but argued successfully that aligning design with what was best for its users would ultimately be good for business too.

Back to the present day: I believe it is time that similar user-centric design techniques used so successfully for the web are now applied to a wide range of other services across multiple channels. The experiences customers have with different channels are summed to make up the customer’s impression of the whole brand, and forward thinking companies need to be thinking about customer experience holistically. It doesn’t matter that the web experience is great if the call centre keeps people on hold forever, for example. Similarly, it doesn’t matter that goods are shipped immediately if they’re poorly packaged and arrive smashed into pieces.

We are applying the same rigour with which we approach webdesign across all other customer ‘touch points’, to establish where there are breakdowns. We have found that when we take this user-centric design approach, our clients improve their customer experience, boost retention and satisfaction
of calls, increase customer ‘lifetimes’, and the whole business is impacted positively and profitably, just as it was with the earlier days of user-centric web usability.

Some people say that unlike time and turnover, customer experience is intangible and impossible to measure. We disagree. With the right metrics, and the processes to record them, you can measure the quality of the customer experience. The Apple Store, which offers customer support surgeries and training, shows how a good customer experience can be an important part of the brand. While there are many companies that see customer experience as a cost, those that thrive will be the ones who choose to see it as a worthwhile investment.