Last month, we started a new employee spotlight series—kicking off with our beloved ONE-KEY™ support representative, Corey—a new series where we shed light on the hardworking people who make the One-Key app possible.
This week’s article serves as our next installment of this series, and we couldn’t be happier with whom we’ve chosen to spotlight!
The fields of app and software development rely on multidisciplinary teams working in tandem. Together, these teams ensure they can not only build the proverbial airplane, but also, that they can provide assurances to key stakeholders that the airplane they’ve constructed is structurally sound and can fly (and safely land); taking the metaphor one step further, it’s also crucial the team can fill the airplane with enough passengers to make the incredible airborne journey fiscally feasible, time and time again.
Developing the One-Key app requires a similar group from diverse areas of expertise. There are of course the software engineers who have the technical knowhow to build app features from the ground up, and the product managers who lead the product vision and oversee these technical teams ensuring functionality ends up in your hands.
However, an even more critical role is one that ensures the vision we have for our app and the functionality we develop connects back to our users’ needs.
Enter: the user experience practitioner, tasked with engaging end users, running beta tests, conducting user interviews, surveying our users for feedback, and more.
I had the privilege of sitting down with one such practitioner. Tennyson Tippy, a Senior User Experience Researcher on the One-Key team, leads research initiatives for the One-Key app. She seeks genuine answers from real end users to sensitive questions like, “What’s the most frustrating part about your day?” Through the research Tennyson conducts, our engineers make incremental improvements that help improve end users’ interactions with our app.
User experience, as the term suggests, is a methodology used by practitioners, researchers, and product designers which puts the user of a product they’re building at the center of development prioritization.
User experience research is the critical, user-participatory study and observation of how end users interact with a product or service. User experience research seeks to uncover and fully understand users’ needs, desires, as well as the unique challenges they encounter while using a product; these findings are critically studied and applied to future iterations of the product, ensuring its features better align with the needs and goals of its target user, ultimately improving outcomes for those who interact with it.
Qualtrics notes, you may think of UX as a subdiscipline of customer experience (aka ‘CX’). And while CX focuses on “a wholistic view of your brand” as it’s perceived in the eyes of the customer as they’re “completing tasks and using interactive platforms and services,” UX is “more focused on utility and useability—the hands-on side of things.”
Professional builders certainly want to ensure the occupants of the buildings they construct are satisfied that their precise specifications are met, and that building inspectors can sign off. We’ve previously discussed the importance of building trust and improving the customer experience to this effect.
However, the same principles that builders use when creating structures in the physical world can be applied to digital products, where the gap between what developers build and end users expect is often fuzzier. What better example of this exists than Mike Judge’s Silicon Valley? This show tells the story of a small California startup trying to find their way building a product that’s both professionally gratifying and which users will find valuable.
In the critical moment where the product is ready to be put in the hands of end users, however, its developers come to a stark realization: They’ve only requested the feedback of engineers, not the people they actually anticipate using the product. The result is a focus group of prospective users providing honest feedback critical of the product that miserably fails to meet their expectations of a usable product.
Oftentimes when discussing User Experience (UX), the job titles “Designer” and “Researcher” are uttered in the same breath with little time spent distinguishing between the two, often leading to confusion and the common question arising, “What’s the difference between a User Experience Designer and Researcher?”
When distinguishing UX designers from UX researchers, there are a couple of key things to keep in mind, though there is of course some overlap to the positions as well.
A user experience researcher may discover that a town needs a bridge, realizing all the activities, efficiencies, and positive impact a bridge could have on townspeople. A UX designer, on the other hand, may serve as the architect, responsible to take the town’s plans and execute those plans, ensuring the bridge works well for everyone using it.