What are the two qualities of brilliant UX?

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The following is an edited excerpt from The Lean Product Playbook: How to Innovate with Minimum Viable Products and Rapid Customer Feedback by Dan Olsen. The excerpt was provided by Wiley Publishing. You can buy a copy here.

We have all experienced products with either a fantastic or a poor user experience. The latter feel unintuitive and hard to use. You can’t find what you’re looking for, and you’re not clear what to do next. You may navigate to a dead end or receive a cryptic error message. It may be hard to read the text, or the design may not be aesthetically pleasing. All of those problems are symptoms of bad UX design.

In contrast, a product with a great UX feels easy to use. It’s effortless to find what you’re looking for and to figure out what to do next. You don’t even notice the user interface and are able to focus on accomplishing the task at hand. The product may even be fun to use and convey emotional benefits such as confidence in your abilities or peace of mind. A great design may lead you to what psychologists call a state of “flow,” where you are completely immersed in using the product.

In this state, everything else falls away, and you experience full involvement and enjoyment of the task at hand. An incredible UX can be a strong product differentiator.

So what leads to an exceptional UX? No matter how easy to use or beautiful a product is, it can’t deliver a great user experience if the customer doesn’t value the benefits the product provides. The customer benefits that a product aims to deliver live in the value proposition layer, which is two levels below the UX layer. These benefits are addressed in the solution space by the feature set the product team has chosen.

So, one way to evaluate UX is to consider how much it helps or hinders the functionality in conveying the desired customer benefits. Poor UX gets in the way, preventing the user from realizing the benefits. Great UX makes it easy for the user to realize the benefits that the product’s functionality offers. In addition to addressing benefits that customers find valuable, a great UX also achieves a high degree of usability and delight.

Usability

The first key attribute of a great UX is usability, which indicates how easy it is for customers to use the product. Usability focuses on the users’ goals and the tasks they need to perform to achieve those goals. What percentage of users are able to successfully complete each task? What percentage are able to do so, but encounter problems along the way?

You obtain answers to these questions through usability testing, where you ask users to complete key tasks and observe what they do. Beyond the successful completion of tasks, usability also includes efficiency. If customers are able to figure out how to use a feature, but it requires too many steps or takes too long, that results in poor usability. Efficiency is easy to assess by measuring effort. You can simply count the number of clicks, taps, keystrokes, or other user actions required to complete a task in a certain UX.

Likewise, you can measure how much time it takes users to complete each task. You should compare these efficiency metrics as you evaluate different designs or try to improve a given design.

In addition to actual physical effort such as clicks and keystrokes, perceived effort is also important. You should be mindful of the cognitive load that your UX places on the user. You can mentally overwhelm users by showing them too much information or giving them too many choices. You can also tax their knowledge or memory.

A great UX avoids requiring users to exert much physical or mental effort. The likelihood of a user successfully completing a task is directly related to the amount of effort it takes. After observing usability tests and analyzing usage metrics for many products, I came to a general realization I call “Olsen’s Law of Usability”: “The more user effort required to take an action, the lower the percentage of users who will take that action.”

The less user effort required, the higher the percentage of users who will take that action. I have seen this law ring true time and again when evaluating user experiences.

It is valuable to keep this principle in mind not only for achieving better usability, but also to improve the conversion rate for user actions that are important to the success of your business. Examples of such actions include submitting a registration form or completing a payment flow.

Delight