User Experience Blog Posts

I’ve written extensively about user experience characteristics that define a successful and profitable SaaS application.  I’ve talked about performance, connectedness, conceptual models, monitoring, on-boarding and the essential requirement to design for the complete customer life cycle.

I’d even argue that the user experience of a SaaS application can be more important to its ultimate profitability then the features provided by the core application. Because the SaaS business model relies on service subscriptions (which are perishable!), continued customer retention is essential for profitability.  Continued customer retention depends on user experience.

This is in contrast to traditional on-premise software. With on-premise software, profitability is defined by the intellectual property of the code and the value that it can command on a per-seat license. The vendor’s goal is to sell as many licensed copies as possible. The list of features is what makes the sale. Once the software is sold, the revenue is recognized. Retention or even long-term use or user satisfaction, is not the primary focus (the 10%-20% maintenance fees traditionally charged by big enterprise on-premise software vendors does not change this focus).

With SaaS, value is defined by the user experience that leads to customer retention and a predictable recurring revenue stream.The engagement process (sign-up, provisioning, social networking), the ease of use, the timed/frequent updates, a focus on high value scenarios, user monitoring, agile pricing, etc. are what engenders sign-ups and retention (i.e. the recurring revenue stream for the application). Modular, reusable UI and mutli-tenant design enable scalability without linearly increasing costs.

This radically alters what defines successful application design.  In on-premise software, the sale of the application license defines the value.  With SaaS, a scalable user experience around the entire customer life cycle defines the value.

This year Catalyst has seen a significant shift in areas of practice and the kinds of applications and interfaces we are engaged to develop. Part of this reflects changes in our own areas of interest, in particular, our work to support and develop sustainability initiatives. But I believe the shifts area reflective a larger move in the industry itself.

Compared to the last several years we have seen dramatic growth in the demand for application design services in sustainability and health care. There has also been continued growth in specific delivery styles of applications, such as SaaS and RIAs.  Desktop apps growth is relatively stable and flat, except in the area of health care, where this is an uptick in growth.  None of this is too surprising.

More interesting has been a rapid surge in interest for mobile application and gesture based interface design, as well as an increase in the requests for instrument control interfaces (perhaps reflecting the growth in embedded processors and remote monitoring).

For my own conceptual understanding of these trends I created color-coded matrix that shows the high growth areas relative to the lower growth areas.  It presents a heatmap-style view of application design trends with red representing hot areas and blue representing cool areas.

I recently attended an event on social media and application design. I got into a conversation with another attendee and asked him what he did for a living.  He paused and then answered “I help good companies let others know how good they really are”.

It was an odd answer, so I asked more:  “How do you do that?”. He then went on to explain how he developed web sites, wrote content, optimized SEO, and did the whole social media thing.  It sounded like all of the mechanical things that so many other consultants and agencies say they do. But his initial description intrigued me because his description gave me his purpose for what he did, the ‘why’ rather than the ‘what and how’.

It started me thinking about Catalyst Resources and the way that we describe what we do.  Sure we design Rich Internet Applications and efficient, aesthetic interfaces. We even refine this further by specifying our focus on mission critical applications and modular, reusable UI.  But this ‘what and how’ is not the motivator that actually makes us wake up every morning and go to work.  It is not the ‘why’ we do what we do.  It is not the essence of our DNA as a company.

Why we do what we do at Catalyst Resources is because we believe that we can fundamentally improve the efficiency and the “pleasurability” of any business activity.  The ‘what and how’ is by optimizing business processes, streamlining workflows, creating user-validated, high-performance, modular user interfaces and designing beautiful, intuitive and streamlined Rich Internet Applications.

When I am brought in on a new project I don’t immediately start thinking about what I am going to do from a UI or an application design perspective.  I think “what does this company need in order to be more successful”.  Coming up with this takes a lot more work and a lot more creativity then coming up with a well-designed set of UI elements.  But it is this goal that is the real inspiration behind every project that Catalyst undertakes.

Maybe we need to come up with a tag line: Catalyst Resources - we make the world better, one application at a time.  Kind of has a nice ring.

Many of our recent engagements have been around designing instrument control for mission critical applications. These interfaces enable workers to interact with equipment via an interface rather than mechanical gauges, switches and levers.

For example, for a biotech firm we designed and validated the user interface that controls diagnostic systems for analyzing tissue sample pathologies and drug discovery. For an energy optimization and management company we designed the user interface for instrumentation that controls and monitors real-time fuel inventories and environmental compliance. For a security system we designed the user interface that controls security cameras and alarm controls.

The user interface for these kind of instrument control is the link between the operator and decisions that affect critical infrastructure or even life and death medical situations.

So what are some of the challenges when designing these kinds of interfaces?

• Displaying data is not the same thing as displaying information
  Just because you think the interface shows it, doesn't mean operators see it, understand it, know how it correlates with their behavior, or feel motivated to take action.
• It isn't always obvious what to measure
  Determining what exactly are the critical pieces of feedback and environmental cues that operators really on can be challenging. You need to translate the operators "intuitive" understanding of the real world process and cues into an abstracted software interface. Since operators adjust systems according to the information they receive, if you're measuring the wrong thing, their decisions may have less impact or even the wrong impact.
• How do you optimally communicate the information
  Which type of displays are more effective for conveying information for particular tasks? Words, flashing lights, animations, charts and graphs, images, auditory cues, etc.? Different information requires different presentation modes and can engender measurable difference in reaction times.
• What are the most effective ways for the user to interact with the information
  Touch interface, gestural input, mouse, keypad, speech recognition? Which is going to be appropriate so the user interacts more with the task and less with the equipment?
• What are the social and collaborative possibilities
  How can the interface be designed so that it is easy to get outside feedback or collaboration. Can comparison data quickly be pulled for "expert" validation?
• How do you make the interface more engaging than the real world
  Instrument Control Interfaces are primarily about increasing productivity. But to achieve a real productivity gain, operators must use the new interface preferentially over existing systems. A poorly designed and validated interface could very easily be viewed as "Yet another damn display". So it is essential to make the display natural, workflow-useful, and engaging. Otherwise operators will find workarounds and the interface will be of much less value.
• How do you make the interface responsive
  If an instrument control interface is perceived as slow to respond, it will not be optimally used. Actions must be cancel-able, screens should load incrementally, the number of actions to complete a task should be streamlined, etc.

The above just scratch the surface of the challenges that are unique to instrument control user interfaces and application design. Biotech, manufacturing, and energy production/management are the areas where we are seeing the greatest growth in the demand for instrument control interfaces. We design these interfaces using modular, reusable UI, so that they can be re-purposed to other equipment or enhanced without code rewrites. As more and more devices gain embedded processors, the market for interface control will continue to expand at a rapid pace.

I just noticed that the Velocity Online Conference is coming up next week. This conference is focused on best practices in performance and operations for web applications to improve the user experience as well as a company's bottom line.

I've written previously about the importance of perceived performance in the design of a SaaS application. For SaaS, where customers can easily switch to another provider, user satisfaction is critically important. Low perceived performance can lead to low satisfaction and high customer churn. High perceived performance can result in high customer satisfaction and stability.

But what is the empirical evidence and how much of a change in perceived performance is necessary to have a significant impact? Well I just came across some hard data - metrics for page views, amount of interaction/use and online revenue presented at Velocity 2009 from some data-heavy players.

The empirical data on the impact of web application performance

Microsoft reported that with Bing, a 2 second slowdown in response time reduced the number of searches by 1.8% and reduced revenue/user by 4.3%. That a lot of money left on the table.

Google reported that as little as a 400 millisecond delay resulted in 0.59% fewer searches per user. But perhaps more interesting, even after the delay was removed, these users still had 0.21% fewer searches, indicating that a slower user experience affected long term behavior. While Google did not report revenue directly, fewer searches likely means fewer AdWord clicks.

Shopzilla had the most complete data on the impact of performance on the bottom line. A year-long performance redesign reduced response times by 5 seconds (from ~7 seconds to ~2 seconds). This resulted in a 7-12% increase in revenue.

But it's really perceived performance that matters

This empirical "bottom line" data becomes even more interesting when it is reviewed in the context of the study 'The Truth About Download Times. This study found that users do not rate the download speeds of Web pages based on the actual stopwatch-clocked download speeds. Perceived speed is dependent on how well "users successfully complete their tasks on a site."

In other words, it's not just page load time that matters. It is the time it takes for a user to successfully complete a task that has the real impact. In the case of the Velocity 2009 data, users couldn't interact with a page until it loaded. Those few milliseconds of additional time, prevented users from accomplishing their search tasks. That signficantly impacted the bottom line.

Designing RIAs for perceived performance

So how do you design a SaaS to enable the user to perform real work more productively - to feel fast, responsive and streamlined. Our RIA designers focus on a number of application flow and design areas.

• Determine the high value scenarios and then reduce the number of actions required to accomplish them
• Minimize the need for complete page refreshes and reloads - the waiting between screens creates serious friction with the user
• Incrementally add information and functionality to a page, based on an analysis of how users process the information (e.g. load a modular component only when needed or in the background based on predictive analysis)
• Progressively download data locally to avoid round-tripping to the database (HTML 5 is a great development here)
• Validate designs (visual, information, interaction and architectural) to determine where users perceive adequate performance vs. where they get slowed down and wait for the web application to catch up
• Enable queries or actions to be canceled - it gives the user a feeling of control and lets them move on to something else they consider more important than waiting
• Add reliable indicators of progress on activities (i.e. don't let users get frustrated in front of a screen not knowing how long something will take)

RIAs are about more than features, graphics and nice visuals. Optimizing perceived and actual performance has a real and quantifiable impact on the bottom line. The more productive an RIA/SaaS design, the more users interact with software.

Like everyone, I want to believe that cutting-edge Cleantech will provide the solution to most or all of our environmental and energy problems.  Whether it’s wind, solar,  geothermal, algae-produced biofuels, laser-powered nuclear fusion, or something even more exotic, most efforts to move the world to a low-carbon, low-resource economy view the sustainability challenge in technological terms.  Much of the dollars are flowing this way as well.

But I am increasingly skeptical.  Notwithstanding the closing scene of 1985’s “Back to the Future,” in which Doc Brown returns from the future and refuels his time-traveling DeLorean with a banana peel, beer can and other garbage, for us in the present, a universal power source that consumes our waste and garbage and turns it into clean energy to power our electrical grid and transportation needs, simply does not exist.

Moreover, even with technological breakthroughs,  Cleantech will struggle to compete head-on against incumbents in established markets. It will take time to take root and become widespread outside of niche environments. But time is one luxury we are lacking if we are going to mitigate climate change.

Sustainability as a parallel track to Cleantech

So I see the need for a parallel sustainability track focused on using software and hardware to optimize and manage existing energy and waste/resource management technology. This may not be as “glamorous” as the Cleantech vision of cheap, inexhaustible, carbon-neutral power, but it is likely far more efficacious in the short term, and completely transferable to any new tech in the long term.

As I’ve written previously, companies need to reduce their resource use and waste production in order to:  lower costs across internal operations and their supply chain; meet regulations; and document their sustainability efforts to an increasingly aware consumer.  This requires investment in and development of web applications (specifically SaaS solutions) in order to track, manage, and determine ROI of energy/resource optimization actions.

Innovating the user experience of sustainability

In contrast to Cleantech, the challenge to successfully implementing SaaS-based sustainability solutions is less about designing new technology and more about designing new ways to motivate behavior.  For sustainability SaaS to succeed we need to innovate with user experience. The basic functionality of monitoring and tracking resource use does not really change, but the meaning of the application and the way the user interacts with the application, must be unique and valuable.

Examples of user experience changing the meaning of the mundane abound.  15 years ago, organic food was associated with co-ops and lower incomes.  Along came Whole Foods which changed the experience of shopping organic. The basic product stayed the same, but the meaning and value of the product changed.

The iPod is, of course, a classic example of user experience changing meaning. The iPod was not just an MP3 storage device, it offered a seamless experience for finding, buying, organizing, sharing and listening to music through an intuitive, rich interface.

Design Sustainability SaaS RIAs to be more than record management

As we design SaaS sustainability applications, we need to design the same shift in meaning.  We need to identify propositions so compelling that the customers/business could not have possibly asked for them (user-centered design be damned). This kind of innovation is “push” not “pull” and is based on compelling vision, Rich Internet Application (RIA) design, and the ability to seek inspiration outside of current application.

I had planned to get away without having to write a predictions blog this year, but my topic for this week's blog, turns out to also be a prediction.

I've been meeting with many VC firms, investors, and industry leaders in the Valley and it is readily apparent to me that sustainability is a topic on everyone's mind and and a business opportunity on which many startups and established players will focus over the next 5-10 years.

The motivations are very compelling:

• Energy and commodity costs will continue to increase and companies need to reduce their resource use and waste production to lower costs across internal operations and the connected supply chain. (As one colleague put it: "The days of cutting costs via off-shoring are coming to an end. Resource optimization is the future for achieving cost savings").
• Environmental regulation will certainly increase and companies will need to document, track and report their compliance for emissions and waste reductions (as well as potentially monetize their reduced carbon emissions)
• Consumers are becoming aware of and requesting information on corporate sustainability efforts. Brand value will depend on providing transparency into sustainability initiatives.

Sustainability applications will be SaaS

Clearly, companies (both large and small) are already on the move to decrease large expenditures on in-house projects and software installations with a fifth of all enterprises planning to have no internal IT assets by 2012. Instead the move is to cloud computing and SaaS - with no software to install or maintain or upgrade.

So it is a no-brainer to predict that on-premise solutions for sustainability will be rare. Instead businesses (and consumers) will be looking for SaaS solutions that can be easily accessed by employees from desktops, laptops or smartphones.

Since SaaS is inherently "connected in the cloud", a sustainability service can be effectively designed across organizational boundaries, incorporating the entire extended enterprise - partners, suppliers and customers.

Success depends on much time people devote to use

The other no-brainer is that user experience will make or break these SaaS applications. They key to making sustainability applications work, is how compelling and easy they are for users to enter information, how well they are on-boarded, and how easy it is track the impact (visually including mapping, as well as numerically). The user interface should be designed around a clear conceptual model, high value scenarios with desktop levels of performance using RIAs (Rich Internet Applications).

I'll write more about the sustainability topic in the future, but if you were wondering what the application design crystal ball holds for 2010 (and beyond), think SaaS-based energy and environmental optimization software with a compelling cross-device user interface.