How to create an experience that sells - and do you want that?

(contributed by Pat)

A great piece from Mark Hurst on the conundrum we all face: who should we be designing experiences for? He opens with the question:

Which would you rather do...

  • create a experience that, even if you don't particularly care for it yourself, becomes wildly popular and puts your name on the map?
  • ...or... create an experience you firmly believe in, no matter how popular (or not) it becomes?

And the difficulties in answering that question...

Because here's the thing: the larger culture can't decide which to value. Sometimes a "good experience" is the thing that makes a boatload of money, because it serves some consumer desire, no matter the intrinsic value or integrity - "the customer is always right." And if enough people buy it, it makes for good copy.

On the other hand, sometimes the "good experience" is the thing that is most authentic, and often popular to a small minority. The scrappy restaurant with cuisine for the foodie palate, the indie film refusing to dumb down its plot or characters, the neighborhood or book or community "keeping it real" - it's practically a cliche, given how obsessed the culture is sometimes with finding the real or authentic thing.

Mark goes on to discuss how this choice can affect how commercially successful the resulting experience might be, but just this conundrum is something that is a real issue within the UX field. We say we should always listen to the customer, but we know that often the best results are achieved through dogged determination and passion for something the designer/creator/owner believes in. Which way would you go?

Hunters and Farmers

(contributed by Pat)

I really liked this post by Seth Godin on the topic of realising there are different skills for different roles and that some people may have one skill-set or the other. And that's OK.

Clearly, farming is a very different activity from hunting. Farmers spend time sweating the details, worrying about the weather, making smart choices about seeds and breeding and working hard to avoid a bad crop. Hunters, on the other hand, have long periods of distracted noticing interrupted by brief moments of frenzied panic.

It's not crazy to imagine that some people are better at one activity than another. There might even be a gulf between people who are good at each of the two skills.

Seth applies this model to other situations, such as students in a classroom, and of course marketing. And I think it's very relevant to UX: horses for courses, different strokes for different folks, know thy audience yadda yadda.

It really makes me think the way in which a lot of our society is structured, or governed, is often a "one size fits all" or "lowest common denominator" or "majority rules" arrangement. To think that someone's potential is being wasted simply because of the way in which the challenge, environment, opportunity or system is framed, is quite sad.

The example I keep thinking of is the (all too common) story of a dyslexic child, in a time gone by where people didn't understand such conditions, brought up to feel as though they are stupid, but they go on to achieve brilliant things in their life; if only their condition was recognised, understood and appropriately catered for (treated like "hunters" instead of "farmers"), would they have achieved even more brilliant things?

Why do users share?

(contributed by Melissa)

In his article titled Will You Be E-Mailing This Column? It’s Awesome, John Tierney asks what sort of articles do users share and what motivates them?

Researchers at the University of Pennsylvania have intensively studied the New York Times list of most-e-mailed articles, checking it every 15 minutes for more than six months, analyzing the content of thousands of articles and controlling for factors like the placement in the paper or on the Web home page.

You can also check out this link within the post to a blog which asks readers to comment on why they comment: tierneylab.blogs.nytimes.com