A wholly holistic usability experience

I recently returned from a business trip with colleagues to attend and present at the Usability Professionals’ Association (UPA) International Conference 2008, held in Baltimore, Maryland during the third week of June.

The theme of this year’s conference was ‘Usability Through Holistic Practice‘. The UPA believes it’s important for people to understand just how broad a spectrum of professionals touch the user experience of a product or service and bring their own valuable perspective to the process, including marketing specialists, graphic designers, computer scientists, business analysts, psychologists, information architects, technical writers and others.

My colleague Catriona Campbell and I were fortunate enough to present an all-day tutorial around the subject, sharing our own approach to holistic usability and managing user experience.

Attending, and especially presenting at UPA08, gave me a fresh perspective that can be hard to gain when working nose-to-grindstone in the office. In the UK we’re sometimes guilty of thinking that we are somehow behind the curve compared to our American counterparts, when actually we are ahead in many ways, such as the manner in which we regard, measure and design customer experience. It’s not that innovation doesn’t exist in the US, it definitely does, but I believe our general attitude is more adoptive across the board.

Our workshop at the UPA followed the core principles of the Foviance approach to customer experience – combining qualitative and quantitative measurements, to fully understand the true user experience and what is to be done to enhance it.

We presented a broad array of elements and tools that could be employed to manage user experience, from more straightforward devices such as web analytics or satisfaction surveys, to more cutting edge approaches such as eye tracking and EEG stimulus. We also discussed emerging techniques such as benchmarking experience across competitor sites and products using remote usability testing with quantitative numbers of participants and appropriate tools, such as WebEffective from Keynote Systems. Once identified as the right elements or tools needed to achieve a particular project’s aims, any or all of these then needs to be combined in order to deliver a holistic view of customer experience.

Some of the attendees, who ranged from independent usability people to owners of customer experience at large corporations, admitted past experience of having the right tools but encountering problems bringing them all together. As the conference progressed, people searched us out to let us know they had been able to grasp this bigger picture.

For those that attended our workshop, the conference clearly demonstrated that we have the tools and technologies to manage and measure the whole user experience from end to end. Not only that, but we are able to prove categorically the business case for investment in user and customer experience – something that is going to be increasingly important in the ‘credit crunch’.