Good or Bad Experience? Not Always Obvious

Have you seen this video yet? You gotta:

Pretty fun example of techno-speak, thanks Paul. Lee says it was created as a joke for a Rockwell sales meeting, presumably to make the point that too much babble won't sell baubles.

But on the other hand, what it brings to mind for me is that for the right audience, the video might well be perfectly calibrated--the real joke, in my mind, is that there might in fact be people out there to whom the sales guy makes perfect sense. Who on earth are those people, and what must they talk about at their dinner parties (if anything)?

And that's really the core activity of user experience: Understanding the audience, and delivering the message in a way that makes sense. Which is harder than it sounds: As easy as it is to fall back on usability rules of thumb, to invoke "audience-appropriateness," "user-friendliness," and so on, the truth is that many audiences are idiosyncratic, and our best guesses are no substitute for first-hand interaction with users--letting them get their hands on the design, and observing them with the methodological approach of a user experience professional, is often the only way to know what works or doesn't, and why--or most importantly, why not.

Comments

[Ariel van Spronsen]

Totally. An interesting thing that this brings up too, is thinking about peoples' need to feel "in" or "in the know".

Using this vid as an example, let's say the intended audience is a group of folks that pride themselves on knowing gadgetry and throw terminology around to sound cool among their peers. If we were to test them, the honest answer would probably be that they don't know half the terms the sales guy is throwing out. However, they might say they do. And they might be highly attracted to the product, because all that techy jargon satisfies their idea of what they *want* to be.

Anyway, this is all to say that understanding the oh-so-human stuff like aspirations is a big part of the fun.