While preparing for a recent interview with a member of the Japanese media, I struggled to articulate why user experience and usability are important. Leveraging the Japanese quality culture of the recent half-century (and my own training in industrial engineering), I realized that user experience including usability is precisely analogous to quality of design in physical products.
Further investigation revealed the majority of defintions appear to have customer experience explicitly included. Definitions selected from the Wikipedia entry:
- Philip B. Crosby in the 1980s - "Conformance to requirements". The difficulty with this is that the requirements may not fully represent customer expectations; Crosby treats this as a separate problem.
- Joseph M. Juran - "Fitness for use". Fitness is defined by the customer.
- Noriaki Kano and others - A two-dimensional model of quality. The quality has two dimensions: "must-be quality" and "attractive quality". The former is near to the "fitness for use" and the latter is what the customer would love, but has not yet thought about.
- Gerald M. Weinberg - “Value to some person".
- Genichi Taguchi - Taguchi's definition of quality is based on a more comprehensive view of the production system, and he relates Quality (or, more precisely, the lack of it) to "The loss a product imposes on society after it is shipped".
- American Society for Quality - "A subjective term for which each person has his or her own definition. In technical usage, quality can have two meanings:
- the characteristics of a product or service that bear on its ability to satisfy stated or implied needs.
- a product or service free of deficiencies."
Customer expectations and perceptions are squarely considered in the above definitions. The entry explicitly notes, “The quality of a product or service refers to the perception of the degree to which the product or service meets the customer's expectations.”
Do keep in mind that in these definitions, “customer” is not necessarily the person on the street. Indeed, extracting that person's requirements is challenging, and a task performed by marketers and user experience professionals. Further, the person on the street does not typically have the knowledge to measure highly technical aspects of quality.
While the person on the street does not experience many of the individual features & bugs that make up a product, she does experience the product, interaction, features, support, feel, sales, and even disposal process as a whole. Thus, fundamentally, user experience is quality.
All the players in the mobile industry work, only sometimes in concert, to deliver the user experience. Consider:
- The iPhone would not be nearly as good with a pay-per-megabyte from the operator.
- UK phones support internet, but the process for setting it up with the operators is arduous.
- Applications work well, but the device displays frightening messages about their safety (at the behest of the operators).
- The device reports its characteristics via the user agent string, the operator passes it through, the developer incorporates it into the application or web site design. More on that later this week.
- The device reports its type via the user agent string, but a gateway strips it out and replaces it with data unrelated to the device.
Let's improve user experience. Let's improve quality. Our users deserve it, and so do our profits.