3/25/15, 9:45 AMEnterprise UX essentials - the virtues and perils of simplicity - diginomica
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Enterprise UX essentials – the virtues andEnterprise UX essentials – the virtues and
perils of simplicityperils of simplicity
March 20, 2015 By Jon Reed
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SUMMARY: UX designer/instructor Everett McKay has a way of cutting through theEnterprise UX noise. In part two, we get into the elusive pursuit of design simplicity,the personas debate, and software’s overly-hostile personality.
One of the best parts of attending Everett McKay’s UX design class was learning how heapproaches design simplicity. We’ve heard plenty on the virtues of simplicity in Enterprise UX, butnot enough about the tradeoffs – or how to make it a design reality.
McKay also has sharp views on the personas debate(when they work/when they don’t), influenced bywhat he saw firsthand at Microsoft. (You may wantto also check out the first part of this feature fromlast week, Enterprise UX is communication – beyondUX cliches).
A simple UX – not simple toachieve
McKay began the “Make it simple” section of his course with a definition of design simplicity:
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“Simplicity is the reduction or elimination of design elements that target users are aware of andconsider unessential.”
But that definition is loaded with challenges. Designers tend to get a bitcarried away with aesthetic touches. McKay counters that with a quotefrom Alan Cooper: “No matter how cool your interface is, less of it wouldbe better.”
We learned this the hard way at diginomica before a radical pare-down ofour initial interface. As Den Howlett put it at the time, ‘Love it or hate it we
realized a long time ago that pretty pictures and a slick design don’t do it for the buyers we wantto reach.’
But it’s the “unessential” aspect that’s the kicker – too often, a dramatically pared-down designburies or eliminates functions we rely upon (high on my own list: the Windows 8 “Start menu”brouhaha). As McKay says, “Removing the essential isn’t simplicity, it’s bad design.” Or, as AlbertEinstein said, “Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler.”
Here’s McKay’s slide on why design simplicity matters:
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Image used with permission of Everett McKay. This content is available in his UI is Communicationbook.
McKay recommends the following simplification techniques:
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Image used with permission of Everett McKay. This content is available in his UI is Communicationbook.
My personal fave is “detail on demand” – the most effective designs might be complex, but theyshield that complexity, revealing it only when needed. (If you’re curious on terminology, here’smore on design constraints and controls/natural mapping).
Weighing in on the personas debate
In UX circles, the value of researching and creating personas has been subject to considerabledebate. McKay experienced the challenge of using personas firsthand while on the Windows teamat Microsoft. As McKay told our class, Microsoft invested heavily in personas for Windows Vista,but phased them out completely starting with Windows 7. McKay isn’t backing away from thevalue of personas, but he has some caveats:
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Keep persona definitions simple – a page or two of bullet points at most for mostprojects. “At Microsoft, the Windows Vista team had 20+ page documents for each persona,says McKay. “That was just way too much detail, so few people bothered to read them.”Focus the persona on the specific feature you are designing. “The only purpose ofpersonas is to help your team make better design decisions. If an attribute isn’t relevant tomaking decisions, get rid of it—it will only get in the way,” says McKay. “If you’re designing asearch feature, for example, focus the personas on how your different target users performsearch. That’s all you need.”Don’t bog your personas down with hobbies and off-topic interests. It’s common touse a first name and a photo for each persona. But beyond that, McKay cautions againstadding extraneous human touches: “Many people include personal details in their personaslike hobbies, or what I like to call the ‘4 Cs’: details about the persona’s children, coffee, cars,and cats. But unless these details shown influence design decisions, the personas are morepractical without them.”
McKay concludes: “I have noticed that developers especially hate being asked to use personaswith such irrelevant personal details. Using simpler, more focused personas will help get yourdevelopers on board.”
All software has a personality – avoid the hostile side
If Enterprise UX is communication, then the logical extension is McKay’s view that “all software hasa personality.” In our podcast, we got into how software tends to reveal a very hostile side of thatpersonality when errors occur. Often, the error messages come with “life or death” language, andnuclear warning symbols that ratchet up the absurdity. McKay:
On the developer side, we have a history of extremely harsh language. So we useterms like, “Catastrophic, abort, terminate, kill.”… It’s not a big deal at all, but the errormessage looks like we’re on nuclear lock down. It’s just a horrible visual experience,and the text is horrible as well.
I’ve picked on Microsoft a bit, but here we have a classic example from Apple of using bombimagery for an error:
“
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McKay showed our class several examples of a better “software personality”. When one strays offthe happy path with WordPress, you won’t see a lighted fuse. Instead, they throw “Matt” under thebus:
Perhaps it’s not a perfect example; refreshing the page without other possible resolutions isn’t allthat satisfying, but at least the error message has an informal, “we’re all in it together” context.
Wrap: next UX move for enterprises – start training
I’ve run into plenty of companies that lack UX resources. So if you want to bring UX designsensibilities into your shop, where do you begin? Hire an outside agency? Recruit a UX expert?McKay believes it should start with training, including UX training for developers:
“
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As someone in the training business, naturally, I think that training teams in UX goes along, long way. Even though there’s a lot of companies trying to get serious about UIdesign, the reality is that their design staff is relatively sparse. So you might have ateam of a hundred developers, and you might have a usability team of five people.
It’s very difficult for a team of five UX professionals to scale to a hundred people. It’sjust really hard to do. So a lot of my best customers are recognizing this, and they’rehaving me train their teams throughout the world. I think developers are more likely toembrace the idea of a great user experience if they understand why it’s important, andhow to do it in a very objective way.
McKay doesn’t think it’s realistic to hire the number of designers needed to handle all theelements of good UX. But he does think that rolling out UX training, and developing a set ofguidelines around that training, is viable. With this approach, design is built into the developmentprocess, experts are freed up to have the most impact, and good design can scale:
If everybody on the team knows how to write a good error message, a designerdoesn’t have to deal with that. It’s not realistic to have a designer, or even a writer,design every single error message, but if we have a good set of guidelines, and wehave people on board with what we’re trying to do, we can scale that a whole lot moreefficiently.
So that’s kind of the thing that I see my customers wanting to do: get their teams toadopt more design thinking in their process, embrace it rather than oppose it, andknow enough so that we can scale our very limited scarce resources a whole lot moreefficiently.
That’s a good note to wrap on. I hope you’ve enjoyed this two part series – I’ll return to UX topicsin the future, so please drop me a line if you’ve seen something in the field worth covering.
Here’s the embedded version of my UX podcast with McKay:
“
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Busting the omnichannel - enterprise hacks and chatsWhy UX matters - live from Atlanta with Everett McKay
00:00 00:00
!" #
(You can download the podcast also, on my Busting the Omnichannel page)
This article is part of a ongoing series I am writing on Enterprise UX and the highs and lows ofmobile app design.
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Image credits: Slides and book excerpts from UI is Communication are used with the expresspermission of Everett McKay, all rights reserved. McKay photo by Jon Reed. Feature image: keep itsimple © Marek – Fotolia.com.
Disclosure: I have no financial ties to Everett McKay or UX Design Edge, and I funded the trip toAtlanta for family reasons. McKay provided me with a complementary one day attendance to hisclass for the purposes of this article content.
Updated with a few clarifications on March 23, 11:29 am.
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Jon ReedJon Reed has been involved in enterprise communities since 1995, including timespent building ERP recruiting and training firms. These days, Jon is a rovingblogger/analyst, and also counsels vendors and startups on go-to-market strategy.He is a diginomica co-founder, Enterprise Irregular, and purveyor of multi-mediacontent. Jon is an advocate for media over marketing; he sees diginomica as achance to disrupt tech media, with the BS-weary enterprise reader in mind.
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Hank says:March 23, 2015 at 2:46 pmThis is a really great piece, Jon. I love all the advice and commentary. A couple of added
thoughts:* The persona guidance is golden. Knowing that a persona likes hockey and indiemusic does nothing to help me design (if it was a person, I might have more to talk about withthem, but not a persona), but knowing that the persona frequently multi-tasks and needs helpto make sure he/she doesn’t lose context when switching activities is great for designers.*Simple is complex, but it is about choices.* Much of the advice could apply very effectively tosome of my passions–messaging and differentiation.* Years ago, and I always remember this,Ronni Marshak (with Patricia Seybold Group), suggested that “intuitive” interfaces would not begood enough. Why? Because intuitive means you can figure it out. For most functions, thegoal should be “obvious interfaces”—nothing to figure out, it is obvious what to do. Moreadvanced stuff could be intuitive (i.e. detail on demand things), but obvious is better.This is amust read for pretty much anyone involved in technology. Thanks for sharing.Hank
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3/25/15, 9:45 AMEnterprise UX essentials - the virtues and perils of simplicity - diginomica
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Jon Reed says:March 23, 2015 at 3:08 pmThanks Hank – McKay had a ton of good insights that pushed my own UX thinking –
nice combo of working for a large company (Microsoft) and then testing those principlesout in the field independently after leaving. McKay had more content on the tradeoffs ofsimplicity that I didn’t include here, but he pointed out that every design choice has atradeoff. That includes “simplicity” which is idealized to the point of being almost useless.
But, it can be a powerful principle if the tradeoffs are understood in the context of thepersonas/roles being designed for. One thing that came out in my Infor piece was that personas are ideally developedthrough both interviews and on-site observations. Too often, the “personas” are notgrounded in the specifics of what that particular user does on the job.
No amount of “hobbies” to humanize the persona can make up for the ignorance oflacking intimate knowledge of how they do their jobs and how they use the software inquestion (or want to use it). Strong ;points on intuition – that was something I covered more directly in part one,Enterprise UX is Communication.
– Jon
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