- Why User Experience Always Has to Come First
- The Nuggets translation Project
- Translator: Nicolas Li
- Proofreader: Linpu. Li (LLP0574), Siegen (Siegeout)
Actions speak louder than words. If a UX feels more like “user development” than “user experience,” the business is doomed. Monetization based on conflicting, disruptive, and irritating behavior is not sustainable. Making quick money instead of providing a better user experience is the opposite of user-centric.
This is why digital services in general, and mobile advertising in particular, produce the best templates for evaluating business model design. The tight combination of real-time data and predictive analytics allows rigorous organizations to quickly calculate and trade off theoretical and real-world user experiences. The pros and cons have become fairly clear. Almost everyone in the enterprise now knows where respected users are in value creation and where the data clusters they form can be collected.
Facebook, for example, makes a lot of money from mobile advertisers, but it currently refuses to fund inefficient technology that undermines the overall user experience. About 40% of users give up on the site because it takes three seconds for the page to load. Latency issues often lead to user churn and are inevitable for Facebook. Not surprisingly, these companies tell advertisers to speed up their loading, or they will end their business.
“Our goal is to bring users the best advertising experience on mobile devices. By considering the site’s performance and individual users’ network relationships, we can enhance these experiences and deliver the results advertisers expect.” A Facebook spokesman said.
In general, Facebook optimizes the user experience for advertisers who procrastinate when the delay caused by loading ads is clearly damaging the quality of the user experience. Churn of any kind is an increasingly measurable outcome. Facebook has stated forcefully that it values a great user experience over bad advertising.
This highlights a fundamental dynamic that is globalizing digital goods and services: dynamic pricing is replaced by dynamic opportunism. This is where platform providers and innovation ecosystems are starting to rethink how to truly monetize users and partners. This means that they must always calculate when it’s worth it to get hot money or dollars by degrading their user experience.
Continuous web fusion data and analytics basically force businesses to reveal how they see the value of user relationships, as partners, or as adversaries through the accumulation of a series of events. The former perception motivates a different investment in user experience than the latter.
There’s no question about reducing the annoyance and distraction of the user experience. It’s not about money and creating value. But for many more companies, technology makes it easy to get away with small bugs that benefit them but interfere with the user experience. In other words, the paltry temptations and opportunities for each user and partner grow exponentially.
Google’s strategy of reducing interstitials – the ubiquitous, intricate pop-up ads that fill the entire screen of a phone – reinforces this theme.
“Google’s goal is not just to get people to search for more informative results, but also to make those results work better for them – for example, not to annoy them with pop-up ads,” Fauci observes. “That’s what Google is doing with their search algorithm.” Last year they started to rank ‘mobile-friendly’ sites higher, and in 2014 they also started ranking encrypted sites higher.”
Note the pop-up’s IQ-interference index – one of hundreds of statistical elements That Google uses to weight its mobile search algorithm. This means that Google tracks churn just as rigorously as Facebook does. But the main question remains: when does user experience start to feel like, or become, user development?
Ads that really interest or please users are obviously popular, no matter how intrusive their presence may be. Adoption and attrition rates are now being tracked and analyzed more and more rigorously.
But the most important lesson should not be the rethinking of how effective advertising is, but how – individually and collectively – advertising is defined and the user experience is determined. These phenomena, such as trivial errors or pop-up ads, are a real threat to the growth of sustainable platforms and ecosystems.
So these themes of user experience go beyond digital advertising trends. One Amazon development engineer, for example, told me that her company goes to great lengths to avoid digital interference with its users. The evaluation criteria of the entire KPI is created around the performance of the acceptance/attrition rate. Tests are being hotly discussed that explicitly examine how “best” or “average” users respond to digital distractions. She insists that improving Amazon’s overall user experience is a priority. Optimizing relationships as a whole, rather than individual transactions, is a core value.
The challenge for leaders inside and outside the enterprise around user-centric is becoming more and more vivid and harsh. Will business rules be reconsidered around optimizing the user experience for user value? Or will “dynamic speculation” be transferred to user development? How your business defines and manages its adoption/attrition rate will help you find out.