Practitioners-Guide-User-Experience-Design

BUSINESS GOALS WILL OFTEN OVERSHADOW UX INNOVATION
Companies and products that boom out of the gate by offering some great innovation for
users often run into difficulties in balancing the needs of the business, which may
encroach on the beautiful new user experience. Venmo, the former competitor and now
subsidiary to PayPal, came onto the scene with a great innovation for users: send money to
others for free. Venmo could offer the service for free at first because its business goal at
the time, like that of any young startup, was to grow its user base. The goals of the user
and that of the business were one and the same. I loved the service, because I could send
money to friends with my credit card or pay my rent, all with no surcharge, whereas
PayPal takes a fee out of whatever amount of money is being transferred. But once Venmo
had grown a large user base, the business goal became to make money and to leverage that
user base to do so. The app began charging users a transaction fee. Things presumably
worked out well for the founders, because they sold the company to PayPal, but many
companies have struggled mightily to make this transition. A key rule here is that the more
business goals diverge from user goals, the more care needs to be put into designing the
parts of an experience that serve only the business. They must be made as consonant with
the positive experience your product offers users as possible.
For a successful example, let’s look at how Facebook has evolved. At its start
Facebook provided value to its users simply by connecting them to one another. The
interface was extremely simple, basically mimicking a phone directory, because that’s all
that was needed. Too much more might have detracted from the primary goal of its users
—to easily get in touch with their friends—and Facebook smartly stayed out of the way.
But as the company sought to grow beyond its original user base of college students, it
began to innovate more features. Mark Zuckerberg wanted to bring more and more people
into the network and to make communicating through it continuously more engaging.
Facebook did this by introducing instant messaging, photo storage and tagging, and
timelines of events in a user’s life. These changes weren’t particularly difficult UX
challenges, because they were still rooted in the goal of growing the user base and the
interface was still not imposing anything unrelated to connecting people. Some users
objected to the introduction of the timeline, because it revealed so much all of a sudden
about what they’d been up to. Facebook’s approach of surprising users with new features
has been periodically jarring and has led to many hiccups for the company (about which
more later). But ultimately most users became convinced of the benefits of the timeline, or
at least habituated to it, because it did in fact serve the user goal of being more closely
connected with one’s friends. In order to become a viable business in the long term,
though, Facebook eventually had to find a way to make revenue, and to do that, like
Venmo, they had to leverage the human capital they had built up.
The product teams were charged with creating an experience to sell things like
stickers for messaging, ads for brands that kept users on the Facebook platform, and ways
of promoting your posts by paying a fee. These were informed product innovations
because they were still about enhancing users’ interactions with their social network. But
they presented real UX challenges. They had to inspire users to interact with things other
than their friends’ posts and messages while preserving the feelings of personal
connection, intimacy, and friendship the site had always offered. When Facebook