UX leadership insight #4: Appropriately radical

(See my earlier posts for introduction to the series.)

If you are lucky, you can be in charge of a design project where many fundamental areas of the UI will need to be changed compared to the old products. For example, in mobile devices or any embedded (non-PC) software, you may need to design both the hardware and software UI at the same time. In such projects you may be tempted to change everything.

However, think about the consumers or customers you are designing for. If they will see no familiarity in the product whatsoever, you need to practically educate them again to the new usage conventions, mental models, etc. With good design you can ease this threshold, but it still requires a lot from the users. Think of mobile phones: about three billion people in the world know how to switch a mobile phone on and off. It requires a long press of the power button. It is not particularly intuitive: you just need to know that a short press won’t be enough. Or about one billion people know that when their mobile phone is on, pressing briefly the power button will show the menu for ringing tone profiles. What if you would need to invest, say 1 € for each of the three billion users to re-educate them that power button will work differently? That would be a costly change in the UI!

So think of what your customers already know about your UI as an asset that you need to take care of. It’s not unlike the value associated with your brand. Use it, cash out by using the same conventions, but also carefully accumulate new funds by educating them about something new. Maybe you can share some of this with other companies in the same market, through standards or simply copying with pride.

Understanding your user base as an asset will make your work easier. It’s a relief that you don’t actually need to – or actually must not – redesign everything. Once again, select where you invest your time. Create radical innovation in the UIs in those areas of your product where it truly brings value. For a mobile phone company, for example, innovating extremely fluent UIs for novel social communication features makes a lot of sense, but redesigning the keypad layout probably doesn’t.

Remember, that you also don’t need to change everything in one go. It is much smarter to leave some for the next products. Introduce new things gradually. Plan the renewal using a roadmap. This will ensure that your users will grow with you.