Kathy Sierra has a very good post on how poor user experiences deplete our cognitive resources.

If your UX asks the user to make choices, for example, even if those choices are both clear and useful, the act of deciding is a cognitive drain. And not just while they’re deciding… even after we choose, an unconscious cognitive background thread is slowly consuming/leaking resources, “Was that the right choice?” […]

If our work drains a user’s cognitive resources, what does he lose? What else could he have done with those scarce, precious, easily-depleted resources? Maybe he’s trying to stick with that diet. Or practice guitar. Or play with his kids.

This is a useful reminder that every choice in an interface has a cost, even when the options are clear and reasonable. Designers often treat choice as generosity: more filters, more settings, more routes through the same task. The user experiences it as work.

That work does not end at the edge of the screen. A bad interaction can leave someone with less patience, less focus and less capacity for whatever comes next. Our designs echo beyond our applications, which is a slightly uncomfortable thought.

It should be.

From Nielsen’s latest Alertbox column:

The websites that had high visual-appeal ratings were then tested for usability. On average, participants’ task-failure rate on these sites was over 50%; this is an unacceptable failure rate based on our tracking of failure rates since 2000. However, despite this atrocious failure rate, participants’ satisfaction ratings remained high. In this case, research indicated that the look and feel of the site had a Halo Effect on the entire site experience, even when these sites were poorly designed for usability.

The easy reading is that visual design can compensate for poor usability. That is too generous. A polished surface does not fix a broken task flow, but it can change how people judge the experience while they are failing their way through it.

This is why treating usability and visual design as separate concerns is so misleading. People do not experience an interface in layers. They experience the whole package, with all the unfairness that implies. Things that look better do not always work better. They are often judged as though they do.

Joshua Porter explains why UX designers sleep well at night:

People who ruthlessly prototype are in a big way setting their mind at ease because they’ve seen the future… they know what works and what doesn’t. That’s a pretty big deal… people work better when they are calm and fully understand the situation they’re in.

There is a useful connection here with the principle that good design is thorough down to the last detail. That sounds, at first, like a principle aimed at users: fewer gaps, fewer surprises, fewer rough edges.

But thoroughness also changes the designer’s position. Prototyping forces decisions into the open while they can still be changed. It replaces vague confidence with evidence, which is a much better sleeping aid than taste.

Good design helps users because someone has already done the worrying on their behalf.

Horace Dediu makes an interesting argument.

Chris Dixon, on the balance between product development and financing:

Good entrepreneurs spend most of their time focusing on the other market: the one between their company and their customers. This means looking at the world through the lens of products and not financing. This lens is particularly important when you are initially developing your idea or when you are thinking about product expansions.

The product lens suggests you should ask questions like: have the products in area X caught up to the best practices of the industry? Are they reaching their potential? Are they exciting? Are there big cultural/technological/economic changes happening that allow dramatically better products to be created?

The useful part of this framing is that it moves the question away from the company’s needs and back to the customer’s. Financing matters, obviously, but it is a poor lens for deciding what should exist. It can explain how a company survives. It cannot explain why anyone would care.

As a rule of thumb, companies that stop seeing through the product lens tend not to last long. The spreadsheet can describe the business. It cannot explain the product.

(Via Parislemon.)

Boon Chew nails it:

[…] (you’re not really assuming UX = just an amazing app or website, right?). Hiring a team of “UX designers” isn’t going to solve anything unless the proper understanding, systems, culture, sponsorship and environment are in place. And if these things aren’t in place, it’s our job as practitioners to help build it up, if we all agree that’s where we need to go.

The useful correction here is that UX is too often treated as something that can be packaged into a team. Hire a few specialists, give them a corner of the process, and the organisation can claim it is taking experience seriously. That only works on the org chart.

UX does not belong in a box. It belongs in the way the company works.

An obsessive focus on SEO often obscures the real goal. The problem is that SEO metrics are usually proxies for something else: attention, trust, relevance, sales, or whatever the business actually needs.

Seth Godin puts it well:

Once you find the simple proxy and decide to make it go up, there are lots of available tactics that have nothing at all to do with improving the very thing you set out to achieve in the first place. When we fall in love with a proxy, we spend our time improving the proxy instead of focusing on our original (more important) goal instead.

Gaming the system is never the goal. The goal is the goal.

This is where SEO becomes dangerous. It gives people a visible number to improve, which is useful right up to the point where the number replaces the thing it was meant to represent. Ranking higher is not the same as being more useful. Getting more traffic is not the same as earning more attention.

Jeff Bezos gave 37signals a useful test for good judgement. Jason Fried writes:

He said people who were right a lot of the time were people who often changed their minds. […]

This doesn’t mean you shouldn’t have a well formed point of view, but it means you should consider your point of view as temporary.

What trait signified someone who was wrong a lot of the time? Someone obsessed with details that only support one point of view. If someone can’t climb out of the details, and see the bigger picture from multiple angles, they’re often wrong most of the time.

The interesting part is the distinction between having a point of view and becoming trapped inside it. A well-formed opinion is useful because it gives you something to test against reality.

Good judgement depends on being able to leave your own position and come back with a better one.

Kyle VanHemert, writing for Co.Design:

In the world of motor sports, UBC is a well-known brand. The German company specializes in carbon fiber, manufacturing extremely high-performance parts for Toyota’s Formula 1 cars and luxury rides like the Porsche GT2. The problem was, while those gorgeous machines relied on UBC parts, they never bore the UBC name. So a few years back, Ulf Bräutigam, the company’s CEO, had an idea to raise his company’s profile: UBC would build a vehicle of its own. In 2010, he enlisted industrial designer Christian Zanzotti to design a carbon-fiber bike that the masses simply couldn’t ignore.

The result is the most beautifully designed bike I have seen in a while.

Om Malik in his recent article Amplification & the changing role of media writes:

Back in the day, news people made choice by deciding which stories to write. Today, we have to adopt a similar rigor about what we choose to share and amplify. In sharing (on Twitter or even re-blogging) we are sending the same message as doing an original news report. The easy thing is to share or reblog everything, but by being deliberate about it, we are essentially “editing” and telling the world: “this is how I see the world/this particular beat.”

[…] in the future when Dorsey, Zuckerberg and Hastings are no longer an anomaly, the media person’s role is no longer just reporting news. Reporting through sharing and curation are going to be vital roles for us to play.

I agree. If you want to become the lens through which your readers understand the world, writing is only part of the job. You also need to curate and share what other people have said, because selection is a form of argument.

The aim is to become the first place readers turn. Not last.

Automated, uncurated feeds make you neither early nor influential. They make you a pipe. Pipes are useful, but nobody asks them what they think.