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Building better services, UX

Kirsten Doyle
By Kirsten Doyle, ITWeb contributor.
Johannesburg, 05 Feb 2018

In the world of digital products and services, user experience (UX) aims to fulfil the user's needs. It takes into account their feelings and attitudes towards using a specific product, service or system. It means blending aesthetics and functionality - positive user experiences keep customers loyal to brands.

UX is based on a design thinking process - identifying needs and looking at the problems users are facing. There are typically five stages to the design thinking process: empathise, define, ideate, prototype, and test.

This is according to Chris Dawson, practice lead: Digital Enablement at DVT, discussing trends in UX for 2018.

A modular approach

The first trend, says Dawson, is a move towards design systems. He says design systems are essentially a more modular approach to developing products or systems, providing product development teams with a reusable, component-based framework to product development.

He says design systems are particularly effective in large corporates with multiple products, such as banks.

"They might have a team of designers, within the bank, whose sole purpose is to serve the other designers in the organisation. They are there to make rolling out product design a lot easier for everyone else. This results in getting products to market more quickly, and wasting less resources. A component-based framework that is accessible in one location, makes for a faster, more agile process, without sacrificing quality."

Dawson says it's more of a long term view. "It's an upfront investment that will take three or four months of dedicated effort from the design team. It's not going into a particular project budget, and there are no immediately tangible results from an external perspective, but a system is being set up that will have huge benefits for the design organisation's productivity moving forward."

He says reusable components will ensure a more consistent look and feel across the company's products and services, and consistency translates into user efficiency. These include better control and collaboration, improved modularity, increased product value, and money saved.

He says one approach to building a design system, is atomic design. "This is taking design down to its smallest elements - a menu, a button, a tick box, and suchlike. Interfaces are made up of smaller elements, so they can be broken down into the fundamental components and built up from there. That's atomic design in a nutshell."

However, he says in SA we just aren't there with our thinking yet. "We're a bit behind the curve in terms of design systems, but as design is more emphasised, it's something we will start to see come up."

Human-centred design

According to Dawson, human-centred design is being adopted by a lot of clients and companies DVT works with. "It really forms the basis for the training we provide when it comes to UX. It's putting the end user at the focus of every decision that's made during the design process. The designer acknowledges they're not the target audience, so the importance here is getting user research into how the actual users experience the product."

There are several ways of doing this. "Businesses can do studies that are data driven, where they install monitoring in their applications, such as Google analytics, and other products that focus on where a user touches the screen on the device, or even more advanced techniques such as tracking eye movement."

There are other ways are to observe the user using the product. "A number of our customers have created a dedicated lab setup for user testing. One of our clients in the entertainment industry has created an observation space complete with a sofa, TV and a satellite decoder. They invite customers to use pre-release versions of their software and they can watch how the person interacts, using the remote control for example."

He says human-centred design is only going to grow. "Companies that don't do this will feel it, as they won't have the same user experience as companies that do. Successful companies aren't designing products by guess work, with a 'they'll probably figure out how to use it' attitude. There's a lot more emphasis placed on the user and on testing."

Service design

Although people usually think of UX in terms of product design, there's a strong movement towards service design these days. Service design looks at both the customer journey, and the user journey.

"Service design is about mapping the whole experience, and looking at the entire journey. Starting from where they pick up the phone and where they interact by e-mail, to the Web site and the app experience. Service design ends up being far more strategic."

There's the analogy of the front stage and the back stage, Dawson explains. Some parts of the service are apparent to the user of the service - these could be described as the front stage. The supporting processes that are invisible to the user, would be the back stage, that often features a lot more complexity.

"With service design, the end result is an orchestration of all the different players, and of everything working together. It will centre around the customer's needs, but it's also about the business objectives; it even takes into account employee experience."

Blueprinting is also a part of service design, he explains. Journey mapping centres around the full 'front stage' of the customer's experience, while blueprinting looks at the front to the core of the service, taking into account elements such as how it delivers and operates, and links that to the customer experience.

All in all, he says the aim of service design is to base design on a genuine and deep understanding of the purpose of the service, and the provider's ability to deliver it. One of the main principles of service design is to design products and services based on the needs of the user, rather than the needs of the organisation. "Service design cannot happen without a lot of input from the users of the service, and other stakeholders, but still need to be designed with a clear business case in mind."

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