Practitioners-Guide-User-Experience-Design

A SMALLER USER BASE TENDS TO MAKE INNOVATION EASIER
When I think of great UX, many of the examples that come to mind are of sites or apps
with relatively small, specialized user bases. This is because a smaller audience tends to
mean your users will have more aligned interests in your product, so you have fewer
personas to design for. And when you don’t need to design for such a large swath of the
population, there are fewer ways usability can be influenced. Most often, your users will
be familiar with the same set of interactions. If they’re older users, say for an AARP app,
then touch interactions will be relatively new to them, and they might not like
gamification elements; if they’re twentysomething gamers, they’ll totally expect touch
interactions, and they’ll find gamification elements appealing (or, beware, they’ll have
criticisms about how they’re done).
Uber, the taxi hailing app, is one product of this kind that has great UX. It has a
decent-sized user base, but the company doesn’t have to push for huge scale; the product
is targeting users of a certain income class in urban areas. It’s sustainable for Uber to only
ever appeal to this niche, so its decisions about innovations to introduce don’t have to take
account of other demographics.
Now take the case of Twitter, which is seeking to expand even past its already very
large user base. The company has found that some people who go to the site find it hard to
grasp how to send tweets, and it wants to bring more users in and get them to interact with
tweets more. So it’s added a new set of selections at the bottom of every tweet the user is
reading for retweeting, quoting a tweet, and other options like emailing a tweet and
copying a link to a tweet. Now, this increase of interaction design might be considered bad
UX by some. Just how much dumbing down of a product a design should do to appeal to
additional users has become a fairly lively topic of discussion among my colleagues.
Twitter is sacrificing the minimalist component of great UX for features that help engage
less-active users. An alternative approach might be to allow users to customize their
interface whichever way they prefer through a settings option. But some would argue that
if you don’t choose one UX for all users, you are acknowledging that you don’t know
which is the right answer. Whoever said UX was easy?
I’ve learned to be okay with criticism about not limiting to one best option. But what
I am not okay with is failing to have the right options for current power users and for
creating new power users.