Improving the User Experience

Posted by Graham Stinson on Tue, Jun 29, 2010

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Remember that 1980’s era Costner film with corn fields and a departed legendary baseball player who told Costner’s character If you build it, he will come? And remember the 90’s when dot com’s were popping up everywhere, as if a new breed of entrepreneurs had only ever seen one movie in the 80’s?

Coincidence? Maybe.

When it comes to entrepreneurial endeavors, especially in software, the idea If you build it, they will come, sounds great. Build your app, get it out there, and observe as your user count soars into the millions. Is that true? Is ‘building’ really all it takes?

Hard lessons from the dot.com era taught that a good idea and a bunch of funding isn’t enough. Even if you can get the thing built, just putting something out there doesn’t do the trick. If you build it, not only will they probably not come, they might not even care.

“Do nothing out of selfish ambition or vain conceit, but in humility consider others better than yourselves. Each of you should look not only to your own interests, but also to the interests of others.”
– Philippians 2:3-4

How do we engage, then?
The concept of User Experience (UX) is not particularly new, though the name is. It’s a term that encapsulates the efforts of several disciplines: architecture, industrial design, interface design, graphic design, usability — the list goes on. The idea behind it is that we serve our users by speaking their language and communicating within their context. We help them by thinking about each point of interaction and optimizing it to serve them best.

If we’re expecting people to show up and use our application, or site, or product, we will need to understand the people we are trying to serve. Expecting them (or worse, forcing them) to use it because they’re paid staff isn’t enough; for real long-term adoption, these people will need to voluntarily use it because it serves their needs and interests. They’ll need to enjoy it. They’ll need to believe that we built it for them. The easiest way to convince them of that is to do it: build it for the people who use it.

User experience is customer service. It’s about empathy, about caring about the people you’re trying to help – and understanding the nature of the help they need – and then building a solution to their problem.  Not just a general solution, but a specific solution that takes into account the complexities of what they are doing, and makes their process simpler and better.

When we make a task simpler, when we help someone be more productive, when we figure out a way to surface relevant data, we allow someone to look past distraction and noise and discomfort and concentrate on the things that are most important. We free them up to see the bigger picture and get their heart involved in what they’re doing; they can cast a vision for ministry instead of struggling with their tools.

Historically, application design has been geared around features: yes we have that feature, no we don’t have that feature. That approach made some sense when just adding a feature was an ordeal, and when it was highly unlikely that anyone in your church would be able to build anything. Now the tools and expertise are widely available, so there’s no longer any excuse. But indiscriminately adding features isn’t enough, either – we need to look beyond features, beyond checking a box, and look hard at the quality of the things we are building.

If we have the skill, we must bring it to bear, and stop allowing the things we produce for the kingdom to suffer from mediocrity. If we don’t have the skill, we need to seek out those who do — or strive to learn.

Sooner or later, what it really comes down to is love. God gave us the ability to make things that are useful; Christ redeemed our hearts so that his excellence can shine through in what we do. God is calling us to give good gifts to our users.