Out With The Old
In a recent BusinessWeek article, Shoshana Zuboff, a former HBS professor, argues that the old school focus on financialization and administration is an ineffective and downright problematic way of doing business. For decades, the accepted response to shrinking margins has been to create internal efficiencies and cut costs. While this approach creates short-term relief, margins continue to shrink, while the value customers receive remains stagnant, or even recedes.

The alternative/new approach is customer-centric. Businesses should be focused, first and foremost, on the needs of customer. According to Zuboff:

Business is no longer just about the product. Now it’s about solutions for the individual. Economic value is hidden in consumers’ unmet needs and is released by providing people with the means to fulfill those needs.

The benefits customers receive can’t be happy accidents that occasionally follow in the wake of financial success. While profitability, efficiency, and shareholder value are important, they shouldn’t come at the expense of customer needs.

It Applies To UX, Too
The other day I was perusing A Project Guide to UX Design — a good source of practical UX how-to’s — when I came across this definition of UX:

The creation and synchronization of the elements that affect users’ experience with a particular company, with the intent of influencing their perceptions and behavior.

While the first part of that definition sounds fair, the last portion leaves a lot to be desired: “with the intent of influencing their perceptions and behavior.” That line presents UX design as a self-serving, inward focused practice that has as its main objective positive brand spin and profitability. While those may on some level be important to your business, if they’re the core drivers of your UX program (or your business writ large), you’ve missed the boat.

The new rules of business apply to UX, too, (it is USER experience, after all) and there is no room for navel-gazing. Even with all the hype around UX over the past few years, I believe most companies with web products or services that claim to embrace it as an organizational philosophy are merely paying the discipline lip-service. If you don’t think that’s true, take a closer look at all the convoluted, confusing, and difficult to use websites and applications out there.

How UX Fits In
UX focused design firms (you know, like KA+A) are uniquely positioned to play a pivotal role in the transformation of organizations into customer-centric entities. In addition to design lead processes, they bring to the table an innate and cultivated ability to empathize with users/customers.

At the highest level, UX firms help organizations stop doing stuff that can’t be mapped to specific user needs, and start doing stuff that can be. This might mean making small changes to a product that customers are happily using. Or, it might mean going back to the drawing board because the product/idea never addressed a meaningful user need in the first place. At KA+A, we help clients begin to focus on users and their tasks rather than the product and its functionality. Your users could care less about how your product does what it does. They care about having their needs met.

Forgetting your users and focusing on your own needs and worries is an unfortunately easy and common situation to find yourself in. It can be a painful and counterintuitive thing to change, but you’ve got to take the spotlight off of yourself, and put it on your customers. You’ve got to listen to them, observe them, and invite them into the process. It’s the only way to identify truly unique opportunities to introduce value into their lives.

Postscript
The day after I wrote this post, I listened to the current BusinessWeek’s Innovation of the Week Podcast. David Midgley, an INSEAD marketing professor and author, spoke about the importance of marketing when it comes to influencing customers behavior (i.e. getting them to buy/use your product). The host correctly pointed out that consumers are skeptical of advertising and marketing. So how do you get them to listen? Address a meaningful need, and make their lives better.