UX and the missing piece?

There has been a great resurgence of interest in User Experience – UX or UXD, which cannot be a bad thing. I remember the first ripples when this discipline started to take its first faltering steps int the US a good few years ago. It slid off the radar for a while but is now back stronger than ever.

Reading some of the many articles in the media what I an struck by is the unspoken dimension that is so apparent in what people are trying to achieve – it is psychology. Back in the 1950’s when advertising in the US was searching for some underlying scientific principles, it was psychology that they turned to. Like the web today, they were dealing with human behaviour, trying to understand it, evaluate it … and ultimately, predict it.

Many of the techniques employed by UX practitioners will be familiar to any psychologist – what sometimes concerns me is that in general it lacks the theoretical foundations. This restricts the deeper understanding and insight of cognition and behaviour that could lead to the most effective outcomes.

 

Can you see the wood for the numbers?

Search marketing is a wonderful tool, and any marketer worth his or her salt loves the data and evaluative tools it delivers. The old adage, ‘If you can’t measure it you can’t use it,’ comes to mind.  But I’m getting increasingly uneasy about the the amount of weight given to this one dimension. Client review meetings devote an inordinate amount of time to going over the stats, slicing and dicing the data. Nothing wrong with that, but I would like to start re-dressing the balance a little. Putting the user more centre stage rather than the numbers.

It’s easy to count the user sessions, track the visitors and measure the conversions, but often, when we look to improve the performance, the focus is upon the numbers, the keywords, the content and the clicks. Performance may be greatly enhanced by going back to the user and the user’s experience.

It’s easy to see why the focus tends to be upon the numbers – quantitative data is easier to collect and easier to analyse. Qualitative data is harder to amass and analysis takes more skill and experience than just wielding a calculator. Social psychologists use a number of approaches to qualitative data including ethnographic studies. One of the most interesting is perhaps grounded theory which, simply put,  means approaching the data with a completely open mind and no preconceived questions to ask – the theory being emergent from the data itself.

Unfortunately, when all the quantitative analysis of web stats has been done, qualitative decisions are often made on the basis of hunches and anecdotal evidence, with no real input from the user.

Perhaps getting back to the user and spending more time on the experience might deliver even better results that can then be evidenced by the stats. I feel sure that some of the predictable and unimaginative sites we see today are the product of too much data focus. They look as though they were built by statisticians – not humans.