Designing User-Centric Mobile Experiences

Slicing the population by age 14 and above, there are 5 billion mobile subscribers, 4 billion active smartphones, 75% Android, and 25% iOS.

### The Growing Gap Between Companies and Customers in Product Design
* 🌐 Luke Wroblewski discusses the "mobile opportunity," emphasizing the importance of **delivering user-centric experiences** to the **4 billion active smartphones globally**.
* 👥 Despite organizations' claims of practicing user-centered design, many websites and products are increasingly user-hostile, reflecting a growing **"company-customer gap."**
* 🏢 As companies expand, decision-making moves further from end users, resulting in products that mirror organizational structures (**Conway's law**).
* 📈 Design choices are often made based on "**what everyone else is doing**" or short-term A/B test results, rather than the **long-term impact on customers**.
* 🛴 High-contrast tests with the potential for **meaningful changes** are more effective than **low-contrast changes**.
* 📚 Many companies use design systems to scale design impact, but blindly applying off-the-shelf components does not guarantee a **customer-centric user experience**.

### Bridging the Gap: Strategies to Create User-Centric Experiences
* 🚧 As companies grow, decision-making tends to move away from customers, with people often doing things for **reasons other than the customer**.
* 📊 "You are what you measure," so it's crucial to spend time setting the **right metrics**, focusing on **long-term, user-centric ones**.
* 👥 Spending time with customers is **invaluable**, and it's essential to find ways to bring **user voice into the organization**.
* 🛣 The gap between what a product is and why it exists can make it challenging for users to **understand its value and become fans**.
* 👁 The mental model users form of a product early on has a **significant impact** on how they perceive its **value and purpose**.
* 🎯 Three key strategies for closing these gaps are **awareness, metrics, and spending time with customers**.
* 📈 Many examples illustrate that **doing the right thing for the customer** often leads to **positive business outcomes**.

Mind the gap, user centered design in large organizations with Luke Wroblewski

Conversions

The Mobile Opportunity: A User-Centric Perspective

The global mobile opportunity is massive, with around four billion active smartphones on the planet, offering a planet-scale potential for reaching users.

However, the current mobile web experience is often filled with ineffective and intrusive techniques, such as app install ads and interstitial screens, despite their seemingly high conversion rates.

Removing app interstitials can significantly boost daily active users on the mobile web, proving to be more valuable than increasing app installs.

Shifting the focus from button clicks to active users can lead to a different perspective on what defines effectiveness in the mobile user experience.

The Frustration of E-commerce User Experience

Customers struggle to find the "add to cart" button on websites, often due to intrusive app install ads.

E-commerce sites, including Under Armour and Overstock, are losing sales due to poor user experience with product filtering and viewing.

Despite claiming to prioritize user-centered design, many companies prioritize business goals over user experience, ultimately harming their own metrics.

Joe Gebbia's creation of CritBuns, a cushion for design students, addressed a real pain point and was a user-centric solution, leading to the birth of Airbnb.

The story illustrates how being the user of a product can bridge the gap between the maker and the user, leading to success.

As companies grow, the distance between decision-makers and customers widens, creating a customer-company gap that hinders user-centered design.

This gap leads to competing agendas and perspectives, as different departments interpret user needs differently, impacting product designs.

The Impact of Organizational Structure on Product Design

Organizations often reflect their internal structure in their product designs, leading to a disconnect from user needs.

This results in a lack of user-centric experiences and a focus on organizational requirements rather than customer benefits.

Scooter and bike sharing companies justify their design choices by following industry standards and competitor practices, leading to a repetitive and often cumbersome onboarding process.

The gap between what users need and what the organizational structure dictates creates a significant challenge in delivering truly user-centered product experiences.

The Ineffectiveness of Intro Tours and Sign-Up Requirements

Intro tours in apps often do not engage users effectively, as seen in the case of Vevo and Google Photos, leading to their removal.

Sign-up requirements, such as those used by Hotel Tonight, can act as a barrier to user conversions, with the removal leading to a 15% increase in conversions.

The common practice of making design choices based on A/B testing results is critiqued for often providing short-term gains without considering long-term impact.

Maximizing the Impact of Testing and Experimentation

Higher contrast testing can lead to a dramatic change in the purchasing experience, shifting from a multi-step checkout to a single double-tap with biometric authentication.

Using experimentation to roll out features allows for monitoring performance and easy adjustments if something goes wrong.

Applying design guidelines and consistency without deep understanding of the user's needs can lead to product decisions that are not aligned with customer wants.

Closing the Gap Between Product Function and User Value

Scooter sharing services have a clear and fast hardware-based process, but the software design often struggles to provide the same seamless experience, leading to a disconnect between the product's function and its purpose.

By using a web-based approach with no need for a native app, the process of accessing the scooter's value can be significantly expedited, bridging the gap between what the product is and why it exists.

This design principle is also applicable in e-commerce, where optimizing the visibility of category pages can lead to a substantial increase in completed orders, demonstrating the impact of closing the gap between product presentation and user value.

The Impact of Icon Design on User Experience

Many commonly used icons are not universally understood, leading to confusion among users.

Companies like Amazon have had to add text explanations to their icons to clarify their meaning for users.

Simplifying the design by removing unnecessary elements can improve the user's mental state and make the product more appealing.

Long pages outperform above-the-fold calls to action in converting users.

Integration of value propositions into product design is more effective than making them stand out.

The presence of mistimed promotions and app install banners, driven by company agendas, creates a gap between the initial user experience and customer satisfaction.

The Significance of Mental Models in User Experience

The "Time To Toilet Paper" metric was used to measure how quickly people fixated on a specific aspect of a product, impacting their perception.

Users developed two distinct mental models of the product: one for private use and one for public use.

Those with a private mental model found the product more useful, highlighting the significance of the initial mental model.

The effort to emphasize the private aspect led to an increase in the percentage of people adopting the private mental model, demonstrating the importance of setting the right mental model for users.

Bridging the Gap Between Companies and Customers

Companies often lose touch with customer needs as they grow, leading to a disconnect between the product and its purpose.

To improve this, it's important to increase awareness within the company of decision-making that doesn't prioritize the customer.

Additionally, focusing on long-term, user-centric metrics and regularly spending time with customers can help bridge the gap and refocus the company on the value it provides.

This approach of bridging the gap applies to all the different layers and reasons behind the disconnect.

The Power of Staying Close to Your Customers

Staying close to customers and understanding their needs led to the success of Airbnb and other companies.

Direct empathy and spending time with customers are crucial for bridging the gap between the product and the customer's values.

Simple techniques like awareness, measuring the right outcomes, and customer interaction are essential for creating a better user experience and a successful business.