Practitioners-Guide-User-Experience-Design

Chapter 4
INNOVATION IS NOT FOR INNOVATION’S SAKE
When describing a product as having great UX, users and creators tend to be on the same
page. They both use words like delightful, intuitive, and fun. The feeling of a product
that’s not only easy to use but actually pleasurable, is perfectly clear to both. Not so when
it comes to innovation. While creators tend to be intent on innovating, users are often
much less enthusiastic. Some users are always looking for new things and don’t mind
having to learn in general. But often when an existing product changes, its loyal users are
disgruntled about having to relearn a task they could already perform. Innovation
generally gets a bad rap if the changes made don’t actually improve the experience or if
there is neither any real need nor any true desire for the new features or product.
One of the best things about working with web and software products is that
innovation is at the very core of the business; it’s what enables us to make existing
products even more successful, and it allows us to invent whole new types of products.
Innovation often gives a product an edge over the competition. And if companies don’t
keep innovating they risk falling prey to the danger Harvard Business School professor
Clayton Christensen pinpointed in his influential book The Innovator’s Dilemma. If you
don’t adopt the better, faster, smarter way to offer your service, someone else will. Just
look at the competition that payment service PayPal has been facing from companies like
Square, Braintree, and Venmo. PayPal may have solved its dilemma temporarily by
purchasing those last two companies, but the mandate to keep innovating isn’t about to
abate.
If that were the only issue with innovation—that you’ve got to keep doing it—maybe
it wouldn’t be so hard to get right. What makes innovation so tricky is that it can easily
backfire, driving users back to something familiar. This double-edged-sword aspect of
innovation is one of the biggest challenges a UX designer contends with, but also one of
the most satisfying.
I love that helping to make sure cutting-edge new products are easy to use and
pleasing are big parts of the job. You’re a key player in helping people on the path to the
future of everyday computer interactions, and there’s always so much to be discovering
and trying out because the target is always moving. This also means you have a lot of
responsibility. When you get it right, you’re redefining the meaning of a positive
experience. New technologies regularly allow us to introduce users to new solutions and
features they couldn’t have told you they wanted. Using GPS sensors to automatically fill
in a starting point for getting directions, remembering the position in a video when a user
stops midway, suggesting more content when a user reaches the end of a page, mimicking
the flip of a page in a gesture-based reading app, placing an unknown feature in the path
of a known one (pull-to-refresh) to yield discoverability, opening the world of publishing
up to the masses with blogs and social media, consolidating the world’s music to create
automated radio stations—no one asked for these features, but now that they’re here we
don’t want to live without them.