Designing experiences for advanced technologies
Aug 14th, 2018
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Continuous Process of UX
Good designs are iterative and continuous.
Designing beautiful user experiences for advanced technologies is not a one-time affair that can be accomplished by spending an exorbitant amount of money.
It is a continuous effort of relentlessly improving the user experience, product performance and aligning the product with your user. Only through years of user experience and product detailing, you can create a product that’s loved by its end users.
Getting a product to market immediately does not guarantee you success. It’ll turn counter-productive if you cannot keep iterating your designs.
Narrowing the Focus
Products that target a broad market often achieve less.
The effort and cost required to develop a software product is high.
It, however, has a larger reach than brick-and-mortar stores. This shouldn't tempt you to widen the target market.
Products that try to be too broad often end up achieving less. They tend to suffer the wrath of low quality and poor focus. Narrowing the focus ensures better user experience. Keep in mind that long term cost, resource allocation and end user attention are being spent on every unnecessary feature.
Technology and Design
Designers and developers need to understand each other.
User experience designers need to understand the processes, constraints, limitations and powers of technology to design accordingly.
Likewise, developers who understand design are able to build better experiential products. Continuous communication and understanding between developers and designers are important. Absence of such communication can result in wrong design or technology decision in the future.
Familiarising New Technologies
You can design better when you are used to the latest technology.
Experience designers need to be a step ahead in reading and experiencing latest technologies, understanding the product design of new technologies.
They must be up to date with the latest experiences, designs and interactions. Self-exploring new applications, VR, AR, depth cameras, gesture based applications, AI applications, wearable devices, IoT applications makes designers feel familiar with the technology. Only when they are familiar, they can design for the same.
Long term Planning
Having a product roadmap for the long term even if it’s an MVP
Even while starting out with an MVP, it's imperative to chart out an assumed plan for the long term.
List down all features and functionalities that would be included in different phases. This helps in architecting and designing the system for scalability. Absence of such long term planning leads to re-thinking, re-designing and re-architecting the system on a future date when the resources could have been better used for product growth. Even when your goal is to reach the market first, a clear timeline is absolutely necessary.
Experienced multidisciplinary team
Professionals from different domains can contribute to an overall better design
Rather than the general idea of hiring jack of all trades who are flexible enough to be trained in domain, a good multi-disciplinary team with professionals from experience design, software development, graphics, marketing, sales, PR, etc. contribute in a product growth better and faster. Such a team can collaborate synergically to bring out the best efforts.
Domain Knowledge and a Solid Use Case
Understanding how a particular industry works
Getting accurately inside the minds of the end users is challenging.
That's when having extensive domain knowledge and solid definition of a use case become important. Online research and discussions with domain experts can take months, but it's worth every minute spend. Domain knowledge lets you understand those specific problems that are very common to oversee.
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