Hello and welcome to the BottomUp skills podcast, I'm Mike Parsons, the CEO of Qualitance. And today we're talking about. User experience. That's right. This is the first of our eight trends from our emerging trends, report and masterclass. And when it comes to user experience, there's one thought that rises above all the others.

When you talk to experts in product all around the world, just like we did. In fact, we talked to over a hundred of them. We said, what's the biggest challenge when it comes to user experience, is it providing a chat app or is it device compatibility or error handling? That's not it the real thing that keeps everybody up at night when they're trying to build a great product.

What's the key thing that they [00:01:00] have to deliver here. It is. The key thought when you're building a product and you're thinking about UX, consistency is key. So when we build an end to end experience for our users, it has to be. Consistent right from onboarding and what you see in the app store ride through to that very first user account initiation, right through to using the core products and services to support, to advocacy.

You have to follow the entire journey and it ain't easy. In fact, almost 30% of the people we talked to said, Hey, UX is their number one challenge when building a product. Now, the thing that I noted about this is if we had done this report five, six, seven years ago, do you know the interesting thing would have been, is the report would have [00:02:00] been inverted.

It actually would have been a lot more about device compatibility, making websites work on mobile phones. Um, But it's really fascinating to see now that the product journeys are longer, deeper and richer, but also those journeys are happening over so many different touchpoints. Just think about the difference between your laptop, your tablet.

Your phone, your television, your watch interface. So I have seven for laps that deliver me native experiences on all those platforms that I just mentioned. Let's say Spotify, Netflix to do list and testicle calendar, et cetera, et cetera. They have to try and create consistent on that. Well, that is the crunch.

So, you know, how do, how do we think about this and how might we find a solution here? Well, it's [00:03:00] fascinating because I think what we have to do is we have to use. A couple of really simple models just to know where we are. So if you want to understand your consistency of user experience, there's a really good model that I find myself coming back to, which is called the basic UX framework.

And it's just five questions. And what I want you to imagine, I'm going to ask, I read out these five questions and what you're going to do is I want you to really. Think about each of these questions for the products that you work on. And if you're not working on a product right now, just think about a product you use a lot and ask these questions of that product.

Okay. These are the basic UX framework and I love them because they will help you determine how consistent your user experience really is. Here we go. Number one is the application aesthetically pleasing. Number [00:04:00] two. Can everybody use it? Number three, does the application make life easier for, is it easy to learn?

Five, do use established design. Patents, some really, really good ones there. So let's, let's explore those for a second. Now for me, aesthetically pleasing, uh, generally means like turn down the noise, um, having really elegant color palettes, but also using color appropriately. To suggest priority to suggest flow within the app.

That's when it's really aesthetically pleasing. Of course, it's got to be nice to look at, but it needs to be smarter than that. You know, those colors need to be put to good use. Obviously beautiful type Paul graphy. I like the idea of spacing, like an app [00:05:00] feeling calm and spacious, not all jumbled up. So that's my thoughts on aesthetically pleasing.

I have to be careful here cause I have so many ideas that I'll, I'll go on and on and on and let's go to the next one. Can everyone use it now? The key thing here is, um, can everyone use it? I like to think of the different modes that people work in. So if my user has an at home or at work mode, that's a good way of thinking.

Can they use it? Um, another way of thinking is if you've got a marketplace, say like Uber, you have a rider and a driver, make sure you test both. Or if you're Airbnb. Can a guest in a host use it. That's kind of everyone. So it's very important for a two-sided marketplace because Hey, if only one side of the market can really use the app and it's terrible for the other side of the market.

Well, you haven't been like an economic imbalance as a result of that. So I've given you some thoughts on aesthetically pleasing. [00:06:00] Can everyone use it, like make it democratic, be careful here. Like you can fall victim to trying to solve every edge case as well. But I would look for those fundamental principles of the main segments of users, the main different types of personas you have.

There's a great way to deliver on the question. Can everyone use it now? The third one does lie. Does the application make life easier? I find there's some great ways to test this. Like. Just tell users they have to pay for it. That will soon tell you if it's making a difference in their life. Um, for testers, when you take it away, do they like say, Oh my gosh, no, don't take it away because those are ultimate indicators of making life easier.

If you wanted to get a proxy measure for making life easier, I think you could try the net promoter score. How likely would they be to recommend this? Um, and I would actually just, [00:07:00] um, get as close to your users as possible here. Maybe do some user interviews, record some journeys, see where they click, how they click, um, see if the effort reward equation is working out.

So that's user experience. Is it easy to learn? Well, there's some interesting thoughts here. I would actually. I would actually sort of say, if you need an elaborate, um, introduction, an onboarding into your app, where you have all sorts of. Explanations of what things do in the interface and so forth. I think that might be a little bit of a tell, um, that if the interface doesn't speak for itself, if it's not so intuitive that it doesn't need a manual of sorts, then that might be a signal to you that it's not that easy to learn.

[00:08:00] Now, another thing that you could do here. Beyond user interviews is look at the data. So if you have an events based analytics tool like Mixpanel, um, you could establish where journeys break, uh, where people are falling off. And those would be indications, particularly if you could segment your first time users, um, you could see.

Just how they are, how far they're getting in the journey. If you have a lot of abandonment through the journey, if you have a lot of, uh, attrition of users like deleting your app, if it's a native app, those are all indicators that it might not be so easy to learn. I was looking today at a product that we've launched and looking at average engagement time per session.

It was interesting because, um, you know, When you get into that and roughly mobile apps, decent [00:09:00] mobile apps you want to be at about the four or five minute per session. Obviously some apps are a bit quicker. If they're more utilitarian. If it's gaming, gosh, the numbers were really high. But the interesting thing is to see how many users come back a second time is that's going to be a proxy for some sort of sense of, Hey, it was pretty easy to learn how to use them back again to have a go.

Um, so that's some thinking on how you can answer the question. Is it easy to learn when in doubt, just put it in the hands of a user, ask them to complete a task, and that will pretty soon tell you if it's easy to learn or not. Now the last one here is like, okay, do we use established design patents? Now?

It's really interesting here that. A different way of saying that, um, is that design patterns are like, um, sometimes they're enforced, but other times design patterns are just defacto standards of, [00:10:00] um, uh, where you expect to find things on your app. So what you'll see is without doubt, Android and iOS, um, has very distinct.

Design patents. Um, and, um, it's really interesting because, you know, um, when you look at these different apps, things are meant to be in a certain place like the back button and the menu button has to be some of the most basic things that need to be. Where you would guess them to be if you've never used the app, that's a great test to see if you're adhering to design patent.

And if you're a little bit thinking who might, this is a little bit abstract, I would go and have a look at where everything is on your mobile phone. Have a look at apps and you'll [00:11:00] start to see that the consistent use of color. The consistent use of navigation for back menu, et cetera. How things call upon the share function within your mobile device?

These are all done to defacto standards, ways that are pretty similar throughout all apps that creates familiarity comfort from the user's perspective. So this is it. Five big questions to see if you can tackle the biggest challenge. On the front end, that is, which is all about building a consistent product experience.

The other thing that we learned, um, is that one company had consolidated all of their design patterns and design libraries centrally, and they made a one employee. End to end responsible for their banking app in terms of UX. So they own the entire intent UX experience. And this was a really successful way of [00:12:00] meeting the challenge of consistency.

So there you have it. Consistency is key. Isn't it just such a powerful thought. And if you've had to build a serious product in your life, you'll really feel the size of this challenge. As you tie together, different platforms, different web services. On the front end for customers on the back end for employees, like it starts to get pretty big.

You might be having some web services. Uh, you can, I've had apps that have had up to 15 different web services. So it starts to get pretty complex. But the answer to all of this can be found at bottom-up dot IO. Isn't that great. In fact, What we're talking about today is just one of eight trends that we discovered in our emerging trends report.

And you can get the entire report and you can download it. You get the whole deck, everything you get video, it's all at bottom-up dot IO, where you can get it all for free. When you can learn [00:13:00] about a lot of other stuff as well. Like. Design thinking and agile, and I hope that all of these come together to be vital tools in your product tool belt.

I hope that you can use this thinking about your ex consistency to go out into the world and to build products that matter. All right. That's it for the bottom-up skills podcast that's around.