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There are lots of ways to think about user experience, but one of the ways I like best is how Jeff Bezos describes how Amazon.com treats their customers: 

“We see our customers as invited guests to a party, and we are the hosts. It’s our job every day to make every important aspect of the customer experience a little bit better.”

So a question for this week: Are you talking about your customers in a way that distances them, or in a way that brings them closer? 

Many years ago I was working on a design project with an e-commerce company who was selling electronics on the Web. The design team was working on a large redesign of their web site in response to their latest thinking on what works best for selling their products. At one point I noticed they were making several changes to their web site that reminded me of something I had seen before. So I asked, “Why are you making that change?”

Their answer surprised me: “Well, that’s what Amazon.com does and they test the heck out of everything”. 

This act of copying something because a big-name site does it was new to me at the time…most designers I knew would rather give up designing than blindly copy someone else. But as organizations get bigger and budgets and schedules become tighter, copying gets easier and more frequent. Copying has become common practice in many organizations. 

Copying is part of design and always will be. Most designers are heavily affected by the work around them…emulation is the way humans learn on a very basic level. But there is a very real difference between being inspired by other designs and copying them blindly. 

The latest design to copy is Facebook…they’re the obvious leader in the social space so it is assumed that their design is optimal. But Facebook is actually a huge copycat themselves. They have emulated much of what Twitter has done and just recently introduced Places, which copies the check-in idea from Foursquare. So even if you’re copying a market leader, you’re probably just copying from the designers they copied from anyway. 

But simply put, copying design is a horrible idea. Here’s why: 

• You don’t know why a design element is the way it is. Every design element is in the throes of its own evolution. What state an element is in right now is as much an artifact of how it got there as anything…politics, culture, how good the coffee was that morning…all these things effect how a design element turns out. When you copy a design element you’re missing all of these things…you’re simply copying its current state. Without knowing the history of an element, you can’t know if it’s actually doing the job it’s supposed to do. 
• You’re always behind. Playing catchup by copying other people’s designs means that you’re never innovating. You’re never pushing the boundaries for your customers. They probably won’t notice…and that’s a bad thing. Instead, you want them to notice that you’re improving things all the time based on their feedback. 
• You’re outsourcing your most important decisions. When design teams are on top of their decisions they produce much better work. They’re actively listening to customers and thinking two or three steps ahead. When you outsource your design decisions, you’re stifling this. 
• You’re putting up another barrier between you and your customers. By not responding directly to the needs of your customers you are erecting yet another barrier between you and them. 
• You’re rewarding the wrong behavior. Not only is copying design bad for business, but it’s also detrimental to the psychology of your design team. When the accepted behavior is to copy from others, then you devalue the decisions of your own designers. You might not see negative effects right away, but you will a month or two down the line. 
• You’re devaluing your own data. This is probably the biggest problem with copycat design. By outsourcing your design to others, you’re devaluing the insights you can gain from your own data. This means that you’ll investigate less, test less, do less user testing, talk less to your own customers. Pretty soon your culture becomes a full-blown copycat culture, with no innovation in sight. 

So, back to Amazon. The end of the story is the best part. A few years after the incident above I was chatting with one of my friends who I met later and who happened to work at Amazon during the same time frame. He laughed when I told him this story. He said, “I remember on several occasions having the exact same discussion at Amazon. Someone would lift an idea from a competitor and assume it had been tested, and so we would use it. It’s funny to think that Amazon can test everything…of course they can’t…they’re only human.”

I have this sneaking suspicion that a fair number of people are under the impression that User Experience is the hot new “silver-bullet”. Sorry to burst any bubbles, but I am afraid that just isn’t the case. While there can be no doubt that UX plays an important role in shaping, defining and creating a successful product, it is important to understand that there are often other factors at work that can cancel out even the best designs. 

It is entirely possible to provide a great user experience while your business is running straight into the ground. Being aware of the following points will allow you and your business to put the appropriate time and focus on the right pain-points at the right time.  

Product-market fit can be one of the most difficult pieces of this puzzle and, especially with startups, the source of much agony, turmoil and potentially a company’s undoing. This quote from Marc Andreessen illustrates how serious this one factor is to the health and vitality of a company and how disruptive it can be at the same time:

“Do whatever is required to get to product/market fit. Including changing out people, rewriting your product, moving into a different market, telling customers no when you don’t want to, telling customers yes when you don’t want to, raising that fourth round of highly dilutive venture capital — whatever is required.”

Of course, a great user experience is central to getting people to use a product. But if that product still fails to meet an actual need that the people have, no amount of UX will fix that.

Customer Acquisition is one of fundamental keys to growth for any new (or existing) company. There is a significant cost (both in time and resources) that goes into understanding who you are targeting. It could be customers that have never seen or heard of your product or customers who have bought/used a product/service from one of your competitors. However, if no one uses your product you are going to have a very hard time winning them with your amazing UX. 

Customer feature requests are closely tied to Customer Acquisition. Every product should have a clear roadmap and a clear understanding of what the product does and does not do. If your team does not have this in place, you will find yourself in an endless cycle of catering to customer requests instead of building out the roadmap you had outlined. This reminds me of my favorite quote from Henry Ford, “If I’d asked my customers what they wanted, they’d have said a faster horse.” 

Competitors are always a concern and a disruptive factor you have to be watching out for. In this day and age, time-to-market is getting shorter and shorter. Scrappy startups disrupt and un-seat the incumbents by moving quicker and operating on a significantly tighter release schedule. Everyone is watching everyone. An insignificant tweet can signal a major change in direction if you are watching for it. Down-playing your competitors is a dangerous thing. Be constantly mindful of what the other guy is doing and do it better, faster and with more impact.

Feature wars with your competitors are one of the surefire ways to derail real progress on your product and get yourself into a vicious cycle of trying match features to appease potential customers. Your time is better spent focusing on features that differentiate your product from the rest than the ones that are just a checkbox on a long list.  

Scalability is another component that most people don’t think about until its too late but can lead to customer abandonment and potentially harmful press. This is a potential problem in both the real world (shipping, packaging, distribution) and online (servers, databases, etc). A wise company will invest in the Engineering talent that can address this problem before it becomes a problem—or at least know what to do when it does. 

As I said at the beginning, UX (alone) wont save you. It will not fix or address the other challenges you will face bringing your product to market.   But as you know, it is an integral part creating a successful product that engages and captures your customers. Any company that begins with a focus on the user’s experience will always have a completive advantage over the rest.