As Sam Horodezky so eloquently puts it: if you ask people if they would except anything less than the best user experience design, most people would probably say “No! I won’t.” But few of those same people are willing to do what is necessary to create the best user experience design.
And that is how we started this episode.
Loyal listeners of Helping Sells Radio know that I am not a designer. Far from it. I don’t understand it, and I could not recognize it if I saw it.
Basically, I am not really interested in it, so I don’t put the time in to learn about it.
It’s not my thing.
But when I had a chance to interview Sam Horodezky, founder of Strathearn Design, I jumped at the chance.
Here’s why.
He specializes in B2B UX design. This is a B2B podcast.
I know just enough about UX design to know that if a product is designed well, it can help customers be more successful with it.
The language on his website talks about helping customers achieve better UX outcomes.
That last reason is really the only reason I needed to want to talk to Sam about UX design.
I enjoyed our discussion and learned a lot. This is my reflection on four things I learned from Sam.
Be intentional
We talked a lot about intention: to make design decisions for specific reasons, and then live with those decisions. I asked Sam about products that have certain parts that are designed well and certain parts that are not designed well.
Most products have this.
We can all think of some.
I ask if good designers make those decisions intentionally, even making bad designs on purpose because they want to focus on one part of the product to make that part great.
He said that he mostly sees companies NOT being intentional. That it’s more likely the designers (the teams) didn’t even think about it [making those bad designs].
It is terrifying to think about. But it also makes sense. We can’t think of everything. Unless we are intentional.
Sam’s advice is to be more intentional about design decisions.
Make trade-offs
Being intentional brings us to a related topic: trade-offs.
No one has the resources to do everything. Even Apple…..which everyone knows prioritizes design….failed to make iTunes great software. iTunes is famously not good (yes, it’s an opinion), yet Apple's hardware products are famously well-designed.
Neither Sam or I were in the room at Apple when these decisions were made, but you can assume even Apple (with all the resources you could image) made trade-offs.
Focus on personas
How do you make those trade-offs and be intentional about it? In B2B software, it’s understanding personas.
Here’s an example of two personas.
Persona 1: Expense report submitter
Modern expense report software is awesome for a person, like me, who submits expense reports. I get a receipt at the airport coffee bar and before I put my wallet away, I capture the receipt in the app on my phone and the app does the rest. Captures the amount, the vendor, the category, the date, and even guesses the description text with incredible accuracy.
I love it.
But that’s all this app does.
What does our accounting manager think of using it? It probably sucks for them. They have to log into another system and somehow get my expense data in the ERP in order to process it.
Let’s flip the script.
Persona 2: Expense report processor
Our ERP has an expense module. We turned it on. We saved money because we don’t have to pay for this mobile expense app, which is nice. But more importantly, the expense module is tightly integrated with the ERP, making life easy for the accounting manager to process expense reports.
The ERP expense module sucks for me.
Now, instead of taking a photo of a receipt and moving on with my life, I now have to do a lot of downloading, saving to PDF, renaming files, uploading receipts one at a time, typing in amounts, vendor names, dates, reasons for the expense, set the category, etc, etc, etc.
Ugh.
Five minutes a month becomes two hours a month.
Our finance manager is happy.
Which persona should you design for?
The expense submitter or the expense processor?
What I learned?
There is no right answer except to say, take personas seriously.
Sometimes good documentation (or training) is better than improving the design
If you take personas seriously, you realize different personas have different needs and expectations.
Administrators of software are perfectly happy with many ways software is designed, as long as there is descent documentation or training. If you explain how to use your software well, some personas will be happy. So part of the user experience is how you help someone use the software as designed.
This is important because in B2B, software imposes a new way of working. No matter how good the software is, it is still different from how people work today.
People don’t like change. But you can minimize the resistance by providing good documentation. This can often be a better solution than redesigning the interface.
Faster and less expensive to implement as well.
Still not a designer, but...
I have a much better appreciate for the discipline of design. There is a process. There is a methodology. It can be learned. I’m glad I talked to Sam. I hope after listening, you are too.
More about Sam
His website: https://www.strathearn-design.com/
On Twitter: http://twitter.com/strdesign
181 Four Things I Learned About UX Design from Sam Horodezky