Experience Atttending the UX Malaysia Meet Up

...by shazzain |

This time we are required to write a blog post to review the UX Malaysia Meet Up with the focus on "Good UX Impact for Businesses" so here are some points I had taken during the session held on 21 April 2018 at Seek Asia.

Firstly, the organizers did not consider the background of people attending and I was one of those with no knowledge to this area. There was no introduction given on this meet and what UX was and also what the meet up was meant to achieve. So then I had to ask what is "UX" to a friend, to which he responded its "User Experience". The definition of UX from a simple google search on Wikipedia states User Experience (UX) refers to a person's emotions and attitudes about using a particular product, system or service. It includes the practical, experiential, affective, meaningful and valuable aspects of human–computer interaction and product ownership. Additionally, it includes a person’s perceptions of system aspects such as utility, ease of use and efficiency. User experience may be considered subjective in nature to the degree that it is about individual perception and thought with respect to the system. User experience is dynamic as it is constantly modified over time due to changing usage circumstances and changes to individual systems as well as the wider usage context in which they can be found. In the end user experience is about how the user interacts with and experiences the product.

A formal definition of UX issued by ISO9241-210:2010: “A person's perceptions and responses that result from the use and / or anticipated use of a product, system or service” is ambiguous and needs to be refined. (Law & Abrahãob, 2014). In order to have a good UX in anything, design plays an important role. The development of designs should be carefully done by the businesses as it will influence the UX point, therefore as pointed out during the discussion feedback is an important element for design to ensure it works well with the users. One of the questions thrown to the panel was to have or not to have a design team, one of them responded that it is not priority during an early phase of setting up a business, efforts are concentrated on marketing, operational and putting management teams in place. Market acquisition is more of a focus, as start ups needs to obtain good data and market research where people are needed to test it. For certain businesses, User Interface (UI) is needed but not for UX, as business can still survive without a design team.

For a B2C, it was stated that they need to have a design but not necessarily to have a design team in place at the start as it is costly, what is usually done is a company uses a template and employ a part time designer to get things moving. Until such time they know the market and start acquiring it, only then will they spend money, time and effort to perfect it. A problem should be known before starting the business and in order to sell the product created, businesses should know how much people are willing to pay to solve the problem. One of the panels stated that B2C is not a lucrative business but B2C is, however tools are built for both platforms in order to have a reach towards both areas.

When you employ a consultant, they should know the entire business and provide clarity to problem solving. Businesses should provide structure or space to explore the problems. It was noted that a design should serve a business purpose, most businesses are afraid of research as data can tell them that the business was conducted in a wrong direction or such, but this is a good thing as businesses can then steer away and manage the problem earlier instead of later, after suffering losses. Most of the time, people within the business or organisations are the designers without realizing it. They are the ones creating value for UX, therefore, engaging the teams within the business is the best way to solve a problem and come up with a design that will benefit UX. According to (Brajnik and Giachin, 2013), UX covers at least the following aspects; aesthetics, emotions, perceived usability, hedonic attributes, cognitive load, interactivity, social responses, persuasion and acceptability. An on-going process of improvements, transfer of knowledge and sustainability of processes are a good way of managing the design puts in place by an external consultant. It enables the business to survive and tweak the design as and when required without having to go back to a consultant. Businesses should aim at an experimental validation of the effectiveness of design factors that are expected to bear upon UX, usability and accept- ability (Brajnik & Giachin, 2013).

Therefore, in order to have a good impact on UX, businesses should focus on ecosystem building i.e. good platforms, partnering on data, research analysis, have a personalise data experience and use the user persona and information sharing to build the ecosystem and platforms. A design should be performed to reach a desired ROI.

References

Brajnik, G., & Giachin, C. (2013). Using sketchesandstoryboardstoassessimpactofagedifference. Int. J.Human-ComputerStudies, 552-566.

Law, E. L.-C., & Abrahãob, S. (2014). Interplay between User Experience (UX) evaluation and system development. International Journal of Human-Computer Studies, 523-525.