Gizmodo’s Mark Wilson highlights the user experience improvements as:

Despite the redesign, you’ll find the experience is remarkably familiar. The basic fonts and menus are unchanged, with a few key differences. Most importantly, instead of seeing one page at a time (like being in Now Playing, then clicking to a new screen with a particular show), you see two pages at a time—a logical design update to the widescreen format that speeds up navigation enormously.

Check out the screen shots below:

TiVo Central

My Shows

Browse Collections

Single competitor shooting with infograhic (from nbc.com)

Two competitors shooting with picture in picture (from nbc.com)

On the actual broadcast, these small information units of hit/miss were stacked up beside appropriate flags to show multiple competitors at once. Although hard to follow the progression, it was a great way to show a lot of information in very little space and in real-time.

• New interface layout and interaction structure (see diagrams below)
• Consistent look and feel across all applications
• Contextual menus providing quicker access to common actions
• Customizable home screen

New Interaction Models in Symbian^4

Below are some diagrams from the Symbian^4 User Interface Concept Proposal (PDF).

Symbian^4 UI Model Diagram (via Symbian.org)

Symbian^4 UI Dialog Diagram (via symbian.org)

Nokia Symian^4 Concept Screens

The proposal to the Symbian developer community also includes concept screens:

Nokia Symbian^4 UI Concept (via engadget.com http://www.engadget.com/2009/12/03/nokia-offers-sneak-peak-at-improved-symbian-user-experience/)

Nokia Symbian^4 UI Concept (via Symbian.org)

Symbian^4 Homescreen (via Symbian.org)

Symbian^4 Photos Screen (via Symbian.org)

Symbian^4 Video Player (via Symbian.org)

Tell us what you think of the Symbian’s new design.

iPhone's Big Problem (created on pixton.com)

In a sentence or two, how would you describe Netvibes (the elevator pitch)?
I have [an elevator pitch] because last week I had to present at a thirty-second pitch, and then I entered the twitter pitch contest. Netvibes is the best online publishing platform that empowers everybody to take control of their digital life, should it be an individual or a business.

Who is your target audience? What kind of segments or personas do you think of?
We try to empower every expert. The same way that Lotus 1-2-3 (a company where I worked for five years and one that I admired a lot) empowered the numbers expert back in the nineties, Netvibes wants to empower every expert in the way that they can express themselves and spread expertise to other people. So, the expert can be you, and it can be just building a place for yourself, and that’s Netvibes.com. It can be you, and you want to share your expertise in a non-professional way with people around you, and that’s the web-wide open publishing that Netvibes offers, and it’s free. It can also be you as an expert, and you want to make a business out of [your expertise], and that’s the professional publishing web tool, and we charge for that. And it can be you as a company, and in fact for the past nine months now, we do install Netvibes within your enterprise, and Netvibes can power your intranet.

So, in a nutshell we want to empower everybody to build pages, using the widgets, and the drag and drop, and take advantage of all the widget creation and the 185,000 widgets that are available, to build a page that is the way they see their subject and the way they would like people to engage with them on that page.

So basically your target audience is anyone from an everyday individual to professionals, and all the way up to whole companies.
Exactly. Netvibes, compared to our competitors such as iGoogle, is the only product that is independent. It’s the only one where the search engine is not compulsory. And its the only one where you can publish your own, branded page. And we are also the only one that doesn’t come with [some browser] or any other machines.

At the other end of the spectrum, we are for the enterprise level as well. We are fighting with IBM and Oracle, and those guys don’t have all the widgets and features that we offer.

So how are you competing with IBM and Oracle?
The enterprise intranet market is a market that we evaluate at $2.5 billion dollars today. IBM is the gorilla, according to Gartner. And according to IBM, they say that they own a good $500 million of that market. The thing is they are basically a task force company for the system that they provide—they provide a task flow to control the system they provide.

So Netvibes is an alternative to that system. We provide personalized pages and save extra internal workflow. And that’s the only thing we do, and we specialize in that. The point is that we are open, as we should be, and we are open to external content that we provide with these 187,000 widgets. We are open with all the technologies that we use. There is no monetary, paid, or licensed technologies inside Netvibes. We only use standard and open-source technology. Being that our users have used Netvibes because of the external content, because you can do more than just managing ERP or CRM that your company has. We help all the employees not only to have content focused inside the company, but also to open it up to the [the public].

How do you see combining the two paradigms (personalized aggregator tool and publishing tool) into a coherent experience?
I think the combined paradigm is already happening as users can publish their own pages and create their personalized pages. The reader is the publisher.

How are the different segments that you spoke about distributed or related to your current customer base?
In terms of users, we have about half and half. We have about half  of our users that [create content on] Netvibes.com, and we have a half of our users that are using a page that was built by someone else.

What Netvibes does is help people take control of their digital lives. What this means is that you can create your page from scratch on Netvibes.com, but you can also take someone else’s page built with Netvibes and say on that page: “I like this. I don’t like that. I prefer it in blue.”  We think 2 or 3% of our users personalize their page, and 97% of people just read. It’s kind of the same 90-10 rule like you have on Twitter, or any blog or authoring tool. You want to have the power of these 2-3% of personalization. Rather than reading a regular page, we want our clients to build and publish their page, using our platform so that their audience will engage with their page a lot more.

What would be the value proposition for those people that create their own page?
Firstly, personalization is the ultimate form of engagement. Every company and advertiser wants its customers to engage. As a reader, the only thing you can do is read, print or save something someone else created. With Netvibes we have a fourth empowerment: to set priorities of what you see. It’s a democracy where people can say: “Yeah, I like it, but I like it this way.”

How has Netvibes evolved since its inception in 2005?
Netvibes has evolved a lot from its personalized content stage into a personalization publishing platform. It has been morphing to not only allow you publish what matters to you, but to also allow you to publish to others. That’s what we’ve done in the past 18 months. We continue to add into this element of Netvibes.

You can create custom widgets yourself as well. For instance, we released a simple HTML widget, which simulates publishing to a Blog. It allows you to add your own content to your personalized page. You can also use the wizard to create your own widget from your own or someone else’s RSS. Finally, you can use the UWA (universal widget API) which is open source to develop your own widgets. Today, we have the biggest gallery of widgets of which we have developed only 41.

We also allow you to have multiple pages. We were one of the first to introduce tabs into the UI to put some hierarchy in the widgets that are on your page. The additional pages allows users to add a third dimension to their content. People have so many dimensions, from professional life to personal life and the many roles within them, so why wouldn’t you add a page with all the content for those various matters. This third dimension was a necessary evolution from an end-user perspective, and it was extremely useful for us as a business. It is the only enterprise solution that supports this.

What classes of widgets are most popular?
It varies. 60% of the widgets used by our customers are RSS. This shows that there is much more than RSS in people’s digital lives. The most popular are Twitter, Facebook, the weather, and then it depends on the product and region. For instance, in Paris, an extremely popular widget is one that locates, in real-time, the bicycle rental stalls by neighborhood.

From the end-user perspective, are you concerned with the performance impacts of using more rich interaction-based widgets?
We employ cached pages, and performance optimizations to enhance the interaction. We also save time for the user by leveraging the fact that other readers are using the same widgets. Whenever we ping the server of one of the RSS feeds and receive new posts, we cache these so that when another user accesses a page with this feed, the new posts are immediately available.

We also take advantage of web RSS clouds that have a similar impact from the publisher standpoint. We are currently working on this completely revolutionary infrastructure to remove the burden of going through peer servers. Every month we serve 4 billion diferent RSS feeds, and we are constantly working on getting and updating these widgets onto our servers so that things are refreshed quickly and in real-time, as you see on Twitter.

You offer a vast array of different kind of widgets. Do you have any concerns that there are too many types and this might be a double-edged sword (barrier to action)?
Firstly, we do offer a program for those publishers that want to push their widgets to our users, and this is a revenue generation model for us. Secondly, in early July we introduced a recommendation system for widgets. Every week, we re-compute all the widgets that you have on your  page and we build for every account a spectrum of interests across the nine categories of widgets. We match your spectrum with people the have the same interests to propose eight new widgets per week that you may not have discovered.

Where do you see Netvibes going in the near future (1-2 years) and the longer future (3-5 years)?
The way we see the future is just as readers can print pages, the user should be able to personalize pages. That has two consequences. One is that the guiding star for our future is the personalization of the internet. We believe that every page on the internet should be personalizable. It shouldn’t be 100% of every page necessarily, but at least a fraction. The second is if you start to have a personalized internet, it means that you as the user have to learn it yourself and own your digital experience all around.

As a company, our main focus is in three areas:

1. Distribution of widgets (We want to be the widget resource center.)
2. Software solution for publishing pages
3. Enterprise intranet solution

How do you migrate users that are mainly creating their private, personal pages into publishers?
We send a newsletter to explain how to start publishing and use all Netvibes’ tools. We hope to inspire people to share their pages. Other publishers create and share the content, and by consuming this content, they are exposed to the benefits of sharing your content.

Let’s shift focus from strategy to the user experience design process at Netvibes. Do you have a distinct user experience design/usability department?
We have one head of the user experience, and two designers.

How does the user experience design team work with your product marketing and engineering teams?
It’s very simple. We have five directors, and they colloborate on everything from A to Z. They have to all agree. These five directors include the lead designer, user experience logic head, chief architect, strategy director and the QA and support director.

So, is the executive level involved in reviewing the product designs and providing input?
Yes. Since we spend three weeks per month in the US and one week in Paris, where the product is developed, we are very disciplined about reviews. We spend three half-days every month reviewing:

1. The situation of the current project and where we are
2. What is going to be released in the next two months
3. Brainstorming where to put our resources: where de we want Netvibes to be?

We are also open and have a lot of shared documents across the company to keep us informed.

And is this typically how you come up with new features, in these half-day brainstorming sessions?
Yes. We want people at all levels to know where we are and be part of the product development. You have to have the two components involved in everything you do to be successful: business and design.

How do you gather user needs and issues?
We do some user testing. We also employ a wishlist feature so that users can say what they are looking for. We want the community to be fully involved in everything—the widgets, language (we have 95 languages), and the design (themes).

How do you measure the success of new features at Netvibes?
That’s a very tricky question. It depends on the goal that we set ourselves, and its not always about traffic. The popularity does give a good sense, but we also know that somethings won’t be immediately popular. For instance, the multiple pages. We knew it would take time to be understood. It was more aimed at the very end-users and the business users; so the feedback from these groups indicated the success.

The interview took place this past September. Many thanks to Mr. Mini for sharing his thoughts and experiences with the product strategy and design community.

For Boston, there are a series of events at South Station, titled “Connecting the Dots”
In San Francisco, check out: Design Matters: An Open House to Celebrate World Usability Day

And of course, please do comment/share any events you have or plan on attending this year!

What Can Product Developers and User Experience Designers Do Better

The instances where product developers and user experience designers collaborate poorly can be easily ameliorated. Overall, this means incorporating a more dynamic and integrated product development process where both teams work together on key phases and in shorter and more frequent cycles rather than long, inflexible phases. The particular steps that need to be taken to accomplish a more integrated process are outlined below.

• Both teams should utilize an iterative and dynamic product design process instead of rigid, linear approach.
• Both user experience designers and product developers should be involved in identifying opportunities, competitive analysis, market and user research, feature design, design refinement, implementation.
• Product developers should not seek to define how each feature should work, but should rather define the broader project goals and product requirements.
• User experience designers should stick to constraints defined by product developers, should consider the viability of their design in the context of implementation and marketability, and should consult with product developers on viability of features.
• Both the user experience and product development teams should garner more frequent feedback from each other.
• Treat the specifications documents and user experience design collateral as living documents.

Iterative and Dynamic Process

The most important optimizations to the product design process is incorporating shorter and more frequent product development cycles as well as involving each team in key phases. Although one team may take the lead in a particular phase, both teams should be involved in tasks that can benefit from both sets of expertise.

An Iterative and Dynamic Product Development Process (This abstraction does not include implementation.)

A more dynamic and iterative process will force greater exchange of ideas and more frequent checkpoints. This means that the product design can change tack regularly, allowing the design to incorporate requirements and input from both teams instead of heading in a wrong direction for long periods of time and wasting time and resources.

The user experience design and product development teams can collaborate on many key stages in the product development cycle.

At the same time, ensuring that both the product development and user experience teams are involved in tasks that require both sets of expertise can ensure that work is not duplicated and that solutions are more robust. Both the product development and user experience design teams can collaborate on such tasks as:

• Determining business objectives
• Identifying markets, customers, and their needs
• Analyzing the competitive landscape
• Conceiving a product strategy
• Vetting unsound ideas
• Defining and designing product features
• Conducting and analyzing user and marketing testing
• Refining product features and design
• Ensuring accurate implementation of product design

Not only does cooperating on the above tasks lead to greater efficiency but also to a better product strategy and design.

The Discovery Phase and Fuzzy Front End

The conventional product development process does not intensively involve user experience designers in the fuzzy front end, where their expertise can be very beneficial. It is the product developers that typically analyze users and their needs, conduct competitive analysis and market research, identify product opportunities, come up with feature ideas, vet those ideas, and document product requirements. In all these tasks, user experience designers posses competencies that can be leveraged to improve the final outcome of this discovery phase of the product development process. User experience designers should be incorporated throughout the above tasks, or the fuzzy front end should occur in multiple spurts, where the teams alternate working on the product strategy.

The ultimate outcome of the discovery phase should be a robust product strategy articulated in the product requirements document that defines relevant information for the design and development phase. The PRD should capture such things as market opportunities, constraints, user types and use cases, and feature requirements. The discovery phase should end at this point, and product developers should not define how specific features must work; that is primarily the responsibility and competency of the user experience design team.

Finally, the level and nature of specification in the user experience design and PRD must be appropriate for its function and audience. The PRD should define the strategic outline as well as relevant information and should not seek to define the user experience design before it occurs. The product requirements document should lay the foundation for the user experience design team without duplicating their work.

Design and Development

Once the high-level product strategy has been defined in the PRD, the specific features comprising the product must be further detailed. The user experience design team is chiefly tasked with this as they have the training and expertise particularly suited for designing how features function as well as work together toward a coherent product experience. However, user experience designers should not operate in isolation for long stretches of time. Such an approach exposes the potential for wasting time and resources on designing features that are not in line with the product requirements, are not viable in the marketplace, or are not practical to implement.

As in the discovery phase, both teams should be involved throughout. Despite user experience designers taking the lead on the actual design, product developers should be more involved in reviewing the design and adding their input. Design should occur in short spurts with frequent checkpoints with the product development team.

While a more recursive process that involves both teams can improve the efficiency and effectiveness of the product design, adopting a more responsive mode is key to ensuring that the most valuable designs are incorporated. This means that product developers must be open to refining feature requirements based on user experience and usability considerations. At the same time, user experience designers must welcome augmenting their design based on market and implementation factors.

These elements translate to the product strategy and design documentation. The product requirements document should be treated as an evolving document. During the overall product development process there constantly are new ideas, feedback, and data that lead to refinements which must be documented. At the same time, the user experience design should articulate how each feature will function and any relevant implementation details, so product developers can more easily evaluate them and ensure their proper implementation.

Product Experience Development

Adopting a more dynamic and iterative process and incorporating both teams throughout the product design process promises to produce a more robust and accurate product design within a shorter timeframe and with less inefficiency.

But beyond changing specific practices, I believe that product developers and user experience designers need to start thinking of the entire process in a different light. Product developers need to think of experience design as a critical and integral part of the product development process. At the same time, user experience designers must not consider their work to be insular, but rather an intimately connected facet of the entire product development process, which is directed and influenced by all of the other parts from market research to product support.

Moreover, I believe that the optimal product design and development process necessitates both product development and user experience design methodologies. I call this approach “product experience development” to emphasize the equal rolls of both fields in the overarching process. Product design and development focused on only one of the fields is incomplete and ineffectual.

Further Reading and Resources

—. Product Development and Management Association (PDMA) Website. <http://www.pdma.org/index.cfm>.

—. “Product Development.” Wikipedia.org. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Product_development>.

—. “User Experience Design” Wikipedia.org. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_experience_design>.

Cooper, Robert G. Winning at New Products. New York, New York: Perseus, 2001.

Crawford, C. Merle and Anthony DiBenedetto. New Products Management. 9th ed. McGraw Hill, 2008.

Kahn, Kenneth B., Editor. The PDMA Handbook of New Product Development. 2nd ed. Wiley, 2004.

Kotler, Philip and Gary Armstrong. Principles of Marketing. 11th ed. Upper Saddle River: Prentice-Hall, 2006.

Norman, Donald A. The Design of Everyday Things. New York: Basic Books, 2002.

Paluch, Kimberly S. “What Is User Experience Design?” Montparnas.com. 10 October 2006. <http://www.montparnas.com/articles/what-is-user-experience-design/>.

Eye Tracking Gaze Plot

Ross states that eyetracking helps to solve issues, including:

• why participants had problems performing a task
• where participants expected to find certain elements
• whether participants noticed a particular element [...]
• whether elements are distracting in a negative way [...]

And, summarizes:

If you know how to use eyetracking effectively, it can provide additional insights to usability testing that can help you find problems and answer questions about user behavior. Eyetracking is not essential to usability testing, but if you can afford it and have the time to learn how to use it effectively, it is definitely worth it.

How Product Development and User Experience Design Fail to Work Well Together

As described above, there are many intersections in the product development and user experience design methodologies, and where those methodologies meet, they approach the same problems and similar tasks from different perspectives and with unique competencies. This means that solutions derived collectively should be more robust and accurate. However, the two groups fail to effectively work together during key stages of the product design cycle, and many inefficiencies are introduced into the process. The following are phases where synergies should but fail to occur.

Finding Technology-Based and Market-Based Opportunities

One of the areas where great strides can be made is in identifying opportunities for new products and product improvements. Both product developers and user experience designers are adept at spotting opportunities, but they do so differently and often do not find the same ones. Sadly, combining both sets of identified opportunities is often overlooked, and new products lack the full set of potential improvements.

Product developers are particularly attuned to the industry and the general market place. They study market and industry research and have an outstanding grasp of the broad trends and opportunities present in the market. Product developers also stay abreast of prevailing technological trends, and their knowledge extends to the macro level to product testing, implementation management, and market research. Most importantly, product developers have the skills necessary to analyze market opportunities to determine which hold the greatest business potential. In addition, their expertise extends beyond the big picture to the granular level; product developers are knowledgeable with specific user types and needs as well as with the technologies particular to their product portfolio.

User experience designers are not only well aware of the general market place, but they also have an exceptionally strong understanding of opportunities at the micro level. A great part of their job is identifying customers, interviewing them, and listening to their needs and desires. User experience designers tend to have a healthy obsession with optimizing individual products or classes of products. They voraciously consume related knowledge in the form of user testing, research, and industry best practices. Beyond delving into comprehending users and their needs, user experience designers tend to strictly follow the latest technological trends and innovation, seeking opportunities to fruitfully incorporate the latest technology in their product designs. Further still, because competitive analysis is an integral part of their process, user experience designers have a very broad knowledge of competing products, the technologies they use, as well as opportunities for surpassing them.

Combining the two methodologies should lead to a holistic approach that leverages both the macro-level understanding of product developers and the micro-level knowledge of user experience designers. But even though there is great potential from the two fields collaborating to identify opportunities, they rarely do. The knowledge sharing between the two groups and cooperative brainstorming are often lacking.

Conceiving Features and Specifying Their Implementation as a Product

Although both user experience designers and product developers generate ideas about product features and specifications, the former are steeped in defining and designing the interactive elements that comprise a product. User experience designers are not only adept at identifying product features that will address market opportunities, but their specialty is designing optimal implementation of those features such that customers will derive the maximum benefits and enjoyment from using them.

For example, both product developers and user experience designers can recommend that a playlist feature should be added to a personal music player, but the latter can also specify how the playlist should look and function such that it is easiest to use and most enjoyable. Not only that, the user experience designer may be able to conceive additional sub-features that can make the playlist truly stand out from the competition.

This is not to say that product developers cannot do the same; they can. But user experience designers are specialists in this realm. They are trained in designing products and they live and breath customer-centered design. On the other hand, product developers can determine the likely commercial impact of a feature, whereas user experience designers typically are not trained to do so.

Another important part of the overall product design process is vetting unsound ideas. Product developers tend to vet them based on marketplace and implementation viability—perhaps a promising idea isn’t likely to generate substantial profit or perhaps it will be prohibitively expensive to implement. User experience designers vet ideas based on how customers are likely to respond to them. They might get rid of features that are likely to confuse users or be otherwise detrimental to the overall product experience. Both sets of inputs into the vetting process are necessary to ensure that resources are not wasted on developing ill-fated features.

Clearly, the fuzzy front end of product development calls for both sets of expertise to establish features that promise to be both viable in the market place and gratifying for customers.

Definition and Documentation

The detailed specification and documentation of the product by the two groups can also lead to a breakdown. Both product developers and user experience designers aim to define and design a product, and there can often be considerable overlap between the two. In the product development process, the final outcome of defining the product is the specification document, which is often called the product requirements document (PRD). The PRD typically contains the following sections:

• Business objectives and scope of the project
• Market needs and opportunity assessment
• Target market segments
• Use cases
• Product objectives and overview
• Timelines
• Constraints
• Functional requirements
• Assessment and metrics
• Additional information such as stakeholders, technical requirements, etc.

While the majority of the sections in the PRD are best defined by product developers, user experience designers can be a great resource for articulating other elements of the specification document. I have already covered above how user experience designers can lend their expertise to defining market segments, identifying customer needs, and generating ideas for addressing those opportunities. Naturally, user experience designers can be engaged in defining and documenting these sections. For example, user experience designers are experts in user-centered design practices; they are therefore perfectly adept to define and document use cases.

It is the functional requirements that tend to present the most challenges in the dynamic between product development and user experience design. Often product developers believe that it is their duty to fully define what features should be included in the product, how they should work, and in some cases, how they should look. However, it is the user experience design team’s expertise and responsibility to define how features should work. This means that by defining how features should work, the product development team has already set an expectation that may be difficult to overcome if alternative solutions are proposed by the user experience design team. This also means that those most qualified to design how the features should function are not doing the work, and productivity suffers as a result.

Just as product developers short-circuit the process by attempting to perform design tasks, user experience designers cause inefficiency by being unaccommodating to business requirements and needs, which are often at odds with an optimal user experience. User experience designers can become dead-set on a particular solution and be unwilling to veer from it, despite business-driven input from the product development team. User experience designers sometimes forget that their major stakeholder is the business and not the user. This means that the optimal user experience must, at times, be compromised due to business considerations.

To illustrate this point, allow me to use a classic example that I often mention. Advertisements in online and mobile applications are often detrimental to the overall user experience. In general, users dislike advertisements and would much prefer to avoid them. However, advertisements commonly are incorporated into a product design based on high-level business goals.

Another point where the process breaks down is in the immutable nature of the specification document. There should obviously be a lot of collaboration between product development and user experience design, and there should be constant refinement to the product specification. However, the PRD is sometimes considered an unalterable document. This is a mistake because the design process also generates many new ideas and excludes others. The PRD should be a living document that changes as refinements are made.

Conducting Testing

Many product developers have experience with market and product testing methodologies. They have the know-how and experience to conduct market testing that includes such activities as focus group research and customer surveys. At the same time, most user experience designers are specifically trained in usability (product) testing methods and have extensive experience in designing and moderating tests as well as interpreting findings and coming up with solutions. User experience designers are also best qualified to interpret test results and find optimal ways to improve the functioning and design of specific product features.

It turns out that many of the questions asked in usability testing are similar if not the same as those asked in market testing. In many cases it makes more sense to incorporate market testing in the usability testing protocol.

Once again, although both groups can benefit from each other’s competencies, collaboration and sharing of findings is rarely sufficient in the testing phases of product development.

Collaborating Frequently and Intensively

The central theme that runs throughout the above examples is a lack of collaboration in many key phases of the product design process. This is primarily caused by the fundamentally rigid and linear nature of the product development cycle. In the current process, the product development and user experience teams have strictly designated parts that marginally interface and occur linearly in scant proceedings. In other words, each team functions within a defined phase that is discrete from the other, and they occur separately and in a predefined order. Typically, the product development phase occurs first, followed by the user experience design phase, followed by testing, followed by a revision phase, followed by implementation.

The result of the current process is segregation of the two teams and the synergies that exist between them.

Standard Product Design and Development Process with User and Marketing Testing (This abstraction does not include iterations and testing during implementation.)

This methodology also leads to inefficiencies caused by long periods of design and definition where one team embarks on a direction that is ultimately not viable or at odds with the work of the other team. This means a ton of wasted effort that could be avoided by a more dynamic process with shorter phases as well as more frequent communication and feedback.

For example, one would think that user experience designers would be a tremendous resource in the fuzzy front end of product development, but they are not typically a part of this stage. Rather convention dictates that they are integrated into the process a lot further on, once most of the features and specifications of the product have been defined. This presents many lost opportunities. Perhaps the initial product specification has missed some features that could have been true winners or introduced some that are not viable from a usability standpoint.

At the same time, once user experience designers are included in the product specification and design, there is rarely enough of a feedback loop to establish that designs are viable from a market perspective. This can lead to lost productivity when user experience designers work on elements of the experience or directions that could have been immediately disqualified by the product developer.

Summary of Shortcomings

Overall, the breakdown in an effective partnership between user experience designers and product developers occurs in a handful of instances. The two groups tend to

• Not collaborate when searching for technology-based and market-based opportunities
• Work independently when identifying consumer types and their needs
• Not cooperate to conceive features and their implementation to address market needs
• Vet feature concepts at separate points in the overall process
• Separately define, design, and document the product
• Conduct marketing and product testing independently of each other
• Disjointly refine product design based on test findings and feedback
• Redundantly do each other’s work (e.g. product developers creating wireframes of functionality)

The failures in the process phases coupled with a rigid, linear methodology introduce the great majority of inefficiencies in product design and development.

Check in next week for the final part of this series. In part 3, I will address

• What can product developers and user experience designers do better
  
• Product experience development
  
• Further reading and resources
  

User experience design is a relatively new field that has gained mainstream recognition in the past decade, and consequently, there has not been a lot of time to establish best practices for product development and user experience design to work most effectively together. The good thing is that it does not take a huge paradigm shift but rather an evolution of the current model to attain a more integrated approach to product strategy and design.

How the Process Works Right Now

Currently, the product design and development process typically starts with a product developer or a team of product developers being tasked by the executive management to conceive and oversee the production and distribution of a new product or suite of products. The product management team will conduct market research and competitive analysis, engage in fuzzy front-end brainstorming, conceive features, and will compose a long document specifying the product.

The specification document will then usually be passed on to the user experience design team, which will further define the product by designing how features will work and elements will be structured. The user experience designers will recommend new features, improve others, and redact a few.  Their designs will be articulated in specialized formats that are great for capturing elements of the design, but are not easy to understand for executives.

Subsequently, mock-ups or working prototypes of the product design will be created and tested by the user experience design team or a related team such as usability researchers. Once data and feedback have been gathered, the product developers and user experience designers will work to refine the product design. Usually, the designs produced by the user experience designers will be incorporated into the initial specification document.

At this point, or in conjunction with the user experience design, the product developers will formulate a strategy for making and selling the product. Finally, they will then manage the implementation, marketing, and distribution of the finished product or suite of products.

The standard product strategy and design process is quite linear with long phases. (This simplification does not include testing.)

This process is usually quite linear, and the constituent parts tend to be quite discrete from on another. Knowing that they only have one go at it, both the product development and user experience design teams fight for influence. Consequently, there tend to be many missed opportunities, inefficiencies and bruised egos along the way.

How Product Development Is Related to User Experience Design

The product development and user experience design fields are very related. In effect, they address the same problem—that of designing successful products—from slightly different angles. The main difference is that product developers go about the process of designing and defining products through a formalized process backed by marketing theory while user experience designers employ user-centered design methodologies. Another main difference is that product developers not only define the product, but they also manage its creation, distribution, and support.

Product Development

Product development is largely grounded in business theory. It seeks to identify market opportunities and to find specific and profitable ways to address those opportunities. Beyond identifying opportunities and defining products, product development also includes actually bringing those products or services to market. The Product Development and Management Association (PDMA) defines new product development as

The overall process of strategy, organization, concept generation, product and marketing plan creation and evaluation, and commercialization of a new product. Also frequently referred to just as “product development.”

The process of product development consists of three main phases: discovery, development, and commercialization.

Standard Product Development Process

Discovery Phase

The discovery phase begins with searching for and identifying opportunities, whether technology-based or market-based. This includes identifying customer types as well as their particular needs and challenges. This is followed by the “fuzzy front-end”, a formal period where ideas for meeting those needs through features and functions are conceived and screened to eliminate unsound concepts. Further, these features are synthesized into a concrete product and defined within a formal product specifications document, which also includes all of the planning and strategy to bring the product to fruition.

Development Phase

The second phase is centered around clearly defining the product and bringing it into being. Product developers expand on the product specification document and seek to further detail and refine the product. A big part of this is market and beta testing to gauge viability of potential features and to identify any design problems. After some iterations of testing and refinement, the product is defined in its final state and is ready for inception. Also, a sketch of market possibilities starts to emerge from competitive analysis and testing; rough ideas of price and market size are defined. Product developers then plan how the product will be made through detailed resource, engineering operations, and logistics planning and management. They then oversee the product’s inception. This phase concludes with the commercially available product.

Commercialization Phase

The commercialization phase is primarily about selling the final product. This begins with marketing and introducing the product to the prospective market. Product developers also manage effective distribution and support.

User Experience Design

The field of user experience design is mostly based on user-centered design, which aims to design products that are effective and easy to use—two qualities that are certainly key to commercial success. With the same goals as product development, it is perhaps not surprising that the user experience design process is quite similar to that of product development. Although there are many ways to break up the total user experience design process, it can be considered as also consisting of three parts: discovery, development, and implementation.

Standard User Experience Design Process

Discovery Phase

The first phase consists of defining the problem by determining business objectives and identifying opportunities. In user experience design, identifying opportunities almost always involves defining various user types and investigating their needs. This step may also include competitive analysis, market research, and testing of existing products. After identifying opportunities, user experience design then aims to come up with a broad strategy articulating how to address the users’ needs. Those ideas that are detrimental to the product experience are excluded. The final strategy usually includes an outline of the product including organization, features, and rough design goals; it is captured in a user experience design strategy document.

Development Phase

In the development phase, user experience designers seek to precisely define and design all features and interactions that will comprise the final product. Designers architect the structure of information, the relationships of features, and the specific way the features will function. These designs are manifested in information architectures that map the organization and relationship of information and features as well as in wireframes (blueprints of interface) that map each user and system interaction. From this, prototypes or mock-ups can be created and tested for appeal, usefulness, and ease-of-use. The detailed design is subsequently refined and updated; this cycle can go through many iterations. The culmination of the development phase is the final documentation articulating the full design, which includes information architecture, wireframes, and user flows.

Implementation Phase

The user experience design is not the end. There remain two critical components, which admittedly are missed by some designers: transferring knowledge and ensuring accurate implementation of the design. The entire user experience design must be presented and explained to all the stakeholders involved in the broader process of creating the commercially available product. In addition, user experience designers should remain engaged in the product implementation to ensure that the design of the final product is not altered without merit.

Product Development & User Experience Design Practitioners

As should be apparent from the above summaries of the product development and the user experience design processes, there exist tremendous similarities and overlaps between the two disciplines. However, practitioners of the respective fields approach their tasks with very different methodologies. This is primarily due to their education and background.

Many product development professionals have MBAs or other business learning, and those that don’t usually have extensive real life business training. User experience designers usually have very different training. In fact, user experience professionals tend to possess varying foundations since the field itself is based on principles from such diverse academic disciplines as human-computer interaction, psychology, graphic design, information science, and cognitive science among others. However, they all are well versed in user-centered design principles and are usually trained in usability testing methodologies. The critical difference is that few user experience designers have strong business backgrounds.

This is a very important fact because the disparate training and dissimilar foundational philosophy of the fields means that practitioners of each field have very different strengths. Fortunately, their strengths complement each other and leveraging each at the right times can lead to great strides in their combined effectiveness.

An aside: Since user experience design is a relatively new field, it is still taking shape, and there are many sub-groups and factions within the profession. However, whether they are called user experience designers, usability engineers, or interaction designers, they do essentially the same thing: they practice user-centered design methodologies to architect and refine products. For the purpose of this article, I will just refer to them as “user experience designers.”

Check  in next week for part 2 of this series. In parts 2 and 3  I will discuss:

• How the two fields fail to work together - Part 2
  
• What can product developers and user experience designers do better - Part 3
• Product experience development - Part 3
• Further reading and resources - Part 3