User-Centered Design + Communications
In our ongoing obsession with balancing “usability,� broadly-defined, with distinctiveness, Catalyst is increasingly interested in how organizations that have invested in user-centered design communicate the value of that investment to stakeholders. To put it another way, we’re interested in how people market improved interface usability. If you’ve spent money on making an interface better, it should, itself, be a marketable asset. But most organizations seem to overlook this or struggle with it.
In fairness to them, it’s a hard problem. How do you market what isn’t conceived of or perceived as a product/ service? Secondarily, how do you market when the terminology and insights driving an improvement are not commonly understood? That’s the conundrum organizations face with interfaces improved by user-centered design and testing.
There’s a long-standing set of practices that frame strategy, tactics and related creativity around product + service marketing – any marketing student or exec, and even most good PR people know this. To oversimplify, and therefore no doubt irritate serious students of all this, we’ll call it the features/benefits approach. Basically, it means that when you market something, you tell people what it does, and why + how that function produces value. Take, for example, any consumer product packaging or advertising, particularly technology. For a recent classic, check out the way James Dyson talks about his slightly-ridiculous-looking-but-apparently-fabulous vacuum cleaner .
There’s also a pretty good set of practices around marketing non-product/service constructs like “reputation,� even in the private sector (politics, of course, is all about this side of things). This isn’t so much about features/benefits as it is about personality/achievements/associations. Or what’s the person or organization like in general? Quirky? Hard-nosed? What have they accomplished that’s notable? How and why? And in what favorable company or context can they be seen regularly – with other impressive people, at some other credible event, etc. The bottom line here: creating an intuitive, emotional and less-information-based impression.
Of course, these two approaches can and should overlap – even very fact-based product marketing should inspire some emotion, and powerful emotive associations are best when buttressed by a few hard facts. But how does all this work when you’re talking about, e.g., a website – and not the products it sells or the phrasing of the content on it? For a fairly solid idea, check out PR Newswire’s description of its recently-launched interface upgrade.
The first step is to realize the interface IS, in fact, a product – and should be treated as such. Clearly, PRN has adopted a features/benefits approach with some success – a user or third-party interested in knowing the big deal about the redesign could get an good idea quickly from their description. But the ideal for “communicating usability� as Cofactors and Catalyst Group Design call it, is to also include context for why a site makes it easier to do certain things. And this requires selective marketing of site usage statistics – in combination with artful description of design attributes. A further level involves pushing for an emotional perception – aided in part by visual design, rather than information architecture.
Our point: usability need not end with wireframes and information design. In fact, it can be a key weapon in the battle for people’s attention. If five websites all do or sell the same thing – but only one is really beautifully designed and touts that fact, that one has an advantage. Even if the products on the others are somehow more powerful or even cheaper. This is something that Apple has again gotten right with the iPod and iTunes, though how they deal with increasing competition remains to be seen.
