UX Final Showdown

Simplicity v Complexity in a Bitter Fight to the Finish

UX Design Professionals know that IC Creative is the best place to start in your search for your dream job in User Experience; IC Creative is renowned as the most experienced recruitment consultancy for UX jobs.

It is a UX design professional’s job to decide how simple or complex their creation is going to be for the end user. Make it too complex and not only can you put off many users, it will seem intimidating and it could be criticised for a lack of aesthetic beauty; UX designers very often tend to lean towards the simple, cleaner appearance. Yet is that always the best path to take?

Many people love the appearance of complexity; they believe it gives them an air of sophistication. Take, for example, the BMW M5: for performance it has few if any rivals in its class, a luxury sports saloon. It boasts phenomenal acceleration: 0-60 miles per hour quicker than you say “0-60 miles per hour,” yet to achieve the optimal performance you need to change so many settings, pressing buttons and turning knobs and making the correct selections and confirming those selections, that to get from 0-60 takes about 10 minutes; whereas a family saloon in which you get in, turn the key and drive away will get you to 60mph a lot quicker in real time. It’s the old “hare and tortoise” story. The BMW owner wants those complicated controls though because it’s part of the “ultimate driving machine.”

On the other hand, UX designers know that simplicity is something that users crave. How many older people have trouble with the remote controls for their television or DVD player? They want to push the ‘on‘ button and let it get on with its job, while the younger generation see more value in having more control over functions. Quite often it comes down to demographics; it is about knowing your target audience and giving them what they want.

Two examples of doing the same job but from different perspectives are Google and Yahoo. Google is a search engine, its homepage is clean and simple, its main component is the search box; this simplicity can mean more complexity because you are making your own way through to your end goal. Yahoo is a web directory, on its homepage there is a lot more clutter, more options, therefore more complexity; yet Yahoo’s complexity means more simplicity because the options for the user are laid out in front of them and they can choose what route they would like to follow.

These are two examples that demonstrate the difference between what Edward Tufte described as Adjacent in Space and Stacked in Time, two ways to present the visual layer of interface.

Think of Adjacent in Space as being like an aircraft cockpit: everything the pilot needs is laid out in front of them, making their job easier. This to the casual observer is an overwhelming amount of visual information, most of which is meaningless.

Stacked in Time on the other hand is splitting functionality into layers, functions and information are only presented when needed. This can present its own problems if the route to the users goal is overly long or complex, they could lose their way.

The UX designer should find a middle ground; enough information and simple functionality so the user can navigate successfully and complete their tasks quickly and easily, but without too much needless information and complexity immediately causing sensory overload. Designing for one’s audience is key.

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User Experience, CRM and the Rise and Rise of Social Networking

The UX Professional’s Role in Customer Relationship Management

User Experience design jobs at IC Creative, the industry leading recruitment consultancy for UX jobs. The traditional view of customer relationship management (CRM) is changing as the potential customer wants to interact with companies in a different way, welcome social CRM and the role the UX professional has to play.

Customer Relationship Management (CRM) is basically how any business manages its interactions with its existing customers and prospective customers. It relies on specialised software that reaps and organises information and simplifies business processes; mostly for use in sales, but it can be employed for other aspects of the business such as marketing, customer service and technical support.

The UX design professional has an important role to play in CRM. The process has to be user-friendly as customers lack patience with, or shy away from, things that seem over-complicated or uninteresting. They need to make it bug free so that it runs smoothly. They need to convince the customer/client that they want to take part, rather than feel they are being forced to give up information. Most importantly of all the customer needs to be convinced that their data will be handled securely and with sensitivity.

While CRM remains a vital business tool, customers’ habits are changing and so CRM has to change to keep up if companies wish to retain their client base. It is believed that by the end of 2012, a massive 20% of the entire population of the world will be interacting through social networks: Facebook, Twitter, Google+, LinkedIn etc. Potential customers for products and services are turning to online peers and social influencers for buying advice; they like to share experiences and opinions. They do not respond as well as previous generations to direct marketing, preferring to be engaged rather that talked at. As companies realise this, they are trying more and more to involve themselves in these online conversations, we are seeing the emergence of Social CRM.

The most oft-quoted definition of social CRM is that which was given by Paul Greenberg:
 “Social CRM is a philosophy and a business strategy, supported by a technology platform, business rules, workflow, processes and social characteristics, designed to engage the customer in a collaborative conversation in order to provide mutually beneficial value in a trusted and transparent business environment. It's the company's response to the customer's ownership of the conversation.”
Companies initially engaged in social media monitoring which involved looking out for their product/service being mentioned and then reacting to it; now some brands actually build their own online communities. It is an important source for potential customers; it gives an idea of product preferences and spending habits and it provides crowd-sourcing solutions which are cheaper that traditional outsourcing. Maria Ogneva, Director of Social Media at Attensity describes the LARA framework they developed which addresses the end-to-end process of social CRM:

• Listen to customer conversations
• Analyse the conversations
• Relate this information to existing information within your enterprise
• Act on those customer conversations

Again the UX designer is an important player. If social network users feel they are being targeted by a direct marketing campaign, the possibility exists that the brand could suffer an adverse reaction with communities making negative remarks about it; therefore, it is important to engage the community members, make the brand interesting for them, for example, by designing interactive apps and games, adding valuable and relevant content and making the company’s page more attractive to visitors.

User experience jobs, Usability, Information Architecture (IA), Interaction Design and Visual Design jobs, visit IC Creative.