Little Springs Design. 2001 – 2010.

First, let me summarize the back story. Jono DiCarlo, as part of his These things I believe post states in point #6 that UI design is not marketing. His point seemed to be that marketing through UI was inherently a lie, so failed the consumer or end user.

Chris Fahey more or less rebutted this in his UX of a Salesman post last week by stating approximately the opposite. You need to go to one of his two upcoming presentations to get the full story, but overall, he's pushing the role of satisfying the user's demand at acquisition time. So as far as I can tell, yeah, usability and design is about marketing to him.

Khoi Vinh then posts in the Subtraction blog (where I finally ran across this, then had to catch up) that he, again, feels that "interface is marketing." It's a designer's role to make things that are covetous, so people will want to buy them.

This started to really get to me, and make me think I should talk about it, when this totally unrelated post touched on the same issues.

Okay, so first, what is everyone really talking about? I think there are several issues.

1. Design
2. Marketing
3. Customer experience

Customer experience is one most folks seem to have not heard about. Organizations that really care have been doing this – and doing it well – for a long time, but I've only been aware of it as a codified job area for a few years. The whole job of a CX team is to make sure every customer touchpoint, throughout the customer lifecycle is consistent, satisfying and reinforces the brand. Think or search and you'll find examples like Nordstrom and Zappos.

So, where do UX-types (to include interaction designers) fall into this? Well, I say, all of it. Sure you have to market, and consider the lifecycle experience, but tell me you haven't been doing that anyway?

Consider a product – as I was just this morning – that requires registration to proceed past the intro graphics and sample version. What does your design center around? I say:

• Communicate what the product does, once the user signs up
• Do everything within the corporate and product brand
• Entice them to act now
• Clearly state what is involved in the process
• Carry through on this – keep the interface consistent with the expectation already set

That is, you consider how to market to the user, to get them to want to click the right part of the page, and you build the whole signup and first-run process as a consistent, satisfying experience.

That all just falls into the larger goals. If you can make a signup box and process to market to the customer, you can make the whole product, or a whole set of products for your company or clients appeal to users and meet corporate goals about selling, or signup, or churn.

In fact, we've said this all along. Check out our home page for another take on this. Brand is core and will guide your decisions; strategy, marketing, technology and design all contribute to success.

And, no matter how cynical you'd like to be about marketing, there's not a bit of lying. You are communicating what the product actually does. I am comfortable saying anything about a product or feature, and enticing users to click on things and sign up for service and make purchases, as long as it's all centered around unambiguously truthful information. If anything, I say most interactive products are undersold, with perfectly cool, easy-to-use features no one knows about. It's your job to make that design work for the company and the end user, so the product is used to the fullest extent.

Lots of marketing metrics are actually useful, and worth fighting towards. Churn – how many customers leave (or stop using) your product after a certain time period – is a favorite measure of mobile operators, but also one of my favorites. Customers churn, mostly, when they are unhappy. Improving customer experience, and user experience has demonstrable effects on churn. When you design a better experience, you are improving marketing metrics, and pleasing customers. The two can and should work hand in hand.

This entry was posted on Friday, August 15th, 2008 at 8:37 am and is filed under Business, Design. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.