In 2007, the Barbarian Group formally established a well-staffed, well-organized department around User Experience design. Lead by Justin Baum, the group now has 5-7 people operating full time on an assortment of projects. Justin was a Barbarian back in the day, before he left to pursue formal career in User Experience, finally landing in the UX group at Apple out in the bay area before we lured him back to start our UX department.
The varying nature of the projects we do here necessitate different methodologies, processes, and teams. It is important to be able to define what process and skills a particular project warrants. A lot of the skills and methodologies being described in the UX wiki are not all exclusively owned by IAs and Interaction Designers at The Barbarian Group. The visual designers, flash artists, writers and creative leads on our projects make UX, IA and IxD design decisions all the time. The goal of the UX department here is to foster and grow more awareness around IA and IxD skills and methodologies and incorporate them into our design process and culture.
Broadly speaking, our UX department, like the company as a whole, follows processes around two different methodologies: waterfalling, and Agile. Each has its own process – and we’ll talk a bit more about this in the Processes and Methodologies section, below. We’ll just talk a bit here about some of the deliverables that come out of these processes, and what might be relevant to You.
At The Barbarian Group we put an emphasis on fostering a deep understanding of the people we create websites, products and services for. Over the years, companies have had various ways of framing and thinking about their customers – marketing segments, users, consumers, and demographics are a few words that represent these mindsets. As the creators of digital products and services we find ourselves in a position where marketing a competitive feature set to potential consumers is becoming an out-moded way of thinking. The more connected and savvy people become, the less effective strategies rooted in thinking of the customer as a “consumer,” “user” or “segment” are. In particular, on the web, the most successful sites are driven by a constantly evolving understanding of what people do, why they do “it”, and in what contexts “it” happens. In other words successful products are rooted in an understanding of peoples’ unique behaviors, motivations and contexts.
Lets look at the social web as an example of success driven by an understanding of the people using the products. Morgan Stanley points to social websites as the “hottest” and fastest growing area on the web. Applying the old strategies and ways of thinking may lead a company to believe that feature parity in the social space will lead to success. A feature-driven design strategy, if you will. There is an apparent demand for social features such as video sharing, photo sharing, profiles, friends lists, messaging, comments and so forth. A company by the name of Ning, in fact, makes it very easy and very cheap to support this kind of strategy. For nearly nothing, anyone can setup a feature rich social-network and augment it with a myriad of equally free widgets.
But is this what people really want? Is this the recipe for success and desirable experiences on the social web? In the vast majority of cases we don’t think so. Aside from the Myspaces and Facebooks of the social web, the majority of successful sites are focused on supporting a specific set of behaviors, motivations and contexts. For example Flickr, YouTube, Last.fm, Twitter, and Digg are some high profile cases. While they all may have user profiles and some incarnation of a friends list, their success is driven by how well they have understood, supported and continually listened to the behaviors, motivations and contexts of the people using their services. They obviously aren’t perfect, but they are all headed in the right direction – a departure from thinking of consumers as a market in need of feature parity and towards something that meets the focused and unique needs of individuals.
For any client dipping their toe in the social web or looking to create a product that builds upon their existing conversation with their customers, we recommend beginning with research. Until you fully understand and can empathize with the people you are trying to engage with, you won’t have a successful strategy. We have found a combination of traditional quantitative techniques and qualitative ethnographic techniques - such as contextual inquiry, observation and interviewing - are the key to design research that can meaningfully inform a strategy. Investing in this type of research leads to strategies that set you up, not only to come out of the gate with a unique and meaningful experience for your customers, but also to adapt as you learn more about them and how your product fits into their lives.
on March 11, 2010 at 11:21 AM
