Most South African organisations focus internally when designing software, ignoring how users will interact with the solution.
"Although demand for user experience design is growing in SA, there is still a great deal of misunderstanding about its strategic relevance to an organisation," says ThoughtWorks user experience design consultant, Rob Enslin.
According to Enslin, this means that when a company is conceptualising applications, it tends to make short-term decisions that put project budget ahead of value for the user or customer.
"The irony is that, compared with other disciplines in IT, the investment of time and effort in user experience design is minimal, yet its value in terms of customer attraction and retention is so significant that ignoring it amounts to recklessness."
As such, many organisations are giving user experience a place at the boardroom table, notes Enslin, citing an example of bank ATMs that could be programmed to offer the usual withdrawal amount of a regular customer.
"Programming is so advanced these days that setting up an ATM network to do this involves minimal development. Yet, the loyalty building value to both the customer and the company in personalising such a relatively small interaction is enormous," he says, adding that companies often feel they cannot justify developers working on such "trivial" interaction features, which he believes is the incorrect way to do things.
Designing for context is a critical part of getting user experience design right, stresses Enslin.
"Until recently, our use of technology was relatively static. We sat at a desktop computer, or used our laptops, in our offices or at a desk at home. We had a single source of computing. Now, we're mostly mobile," he notes. "More and more, we expect to have the same experience, contextualised, across all applications and interfaces, in all environments, on all devices. Yet, organisations are still delivering to us products made for the desktop."
He concludes that designing for context focuses on delivering consistency of user experience, a complementary user experience and a continuous experience.
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