Designing the User Experience at Autodesk

Prototyping with Indigo Studio

by Tom Vollaro 

In my ten years as a UX designer, I have used many user interface prototyping tools, ranging from paper and pen, to Microsoft PowerPoint, real code and everything between. These days I tend to rely heavily on PowerPoint to aggregate mixed media such as scanned sketches, screenshots and output from other prototyping tools like Balsamiq. There has been an explosion of UI prototyping tools recently and I have tried many of them. I am fairly hard to please, however I recently came across a new player in this space that impressed me with its balance of simplicity, flexibility, usability, features, and price: Indigo Studio from Infragistics. Indigo Studio runs on Mac AND Windows and the file format is compatible between the two versions. In this video I highlight some of the basic features and show examples of a recent project I used it on. How much does it cost? Version 1 has been free until recently. Version 2, which was just released with the iOS pack and other features has gone up significantly: US$495/user/year. But if you buy before October 31, 2013 you can get it for $99 with the promo code INDIGO42Q.

 

Competitive UX Intelligence

by Nathalie Barthe

In our product design and development world, UX practitioners will often look at competition with traditional marketing glasses. We compare our product with similar products in terms of features (current and future) and branding qualities like desirability and customer satisfaction. At UxPA this year, I attended a presentation by Beverly Freeman from eBay titled Competitive UX Intelligence: A Primer that proposes a new and interesting way to include user experience in the competitive intelligence mix.

In addition to product, strategy and brand lenses, Mrs. Freeman argues that a UX lens can “enrich the story” of our competitive intelligence analysis. Through the UX lens, she encourages us to look not only at the direct user experience of a competitor product but also at the experiences that are around and having impacts on your product UX, from start to end. She categorizes those experiences into 4 types (in orange below).

Source: Freeman, Beverly. Competitive UX Intelligence: A Primer, UxPA 2013.

An upstream competitor is “someone or something that makes people choose not to use your product because of what they have to deal with before using your product”.  Drive-thru Starbucks or grocery stores with close-to-entry parking spaces that are reserved for family are examples she gave to illustrate competing upstream user experiences.

A downstream competitor is “someone or something that makes people choose not to use your product because of what they have to deal with after using your product”.  As an example of that type of competition, Mrs. Freeman talked about how some cloth baby diapers providers are offering a pick-up service to avoid environment-conscious parents to have to wash their darlings’ dirty diapers.

A companion competitor is “someone or something that makes people choose not to use your product because of what they have to deal with while using your product”.  Good examples discussed by the presenter are how ladies’ fashion stores have put comfy chairs beside fitting rooms for a shopping friend or spouse. Or just think about Ikea Småland, where kids play while you shop.   

An analogous competitor is “someone or something in a different domain that provides inspiration for or impacts people’s expectations of your product”.  Mrs. Freeman gave the following examples of analogous competitors for any products: online car insurance quotes that are offering more transparent price setting; Virgin America, who is now showing a funny video on A320 safety at the beginning of flights to make it less boring and promote attention.

 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eyygn8HFTCo

In addition to this fruitful, in my opinion, UX competitive intelligence framework, Beverly Freeman quickly presented some other methods to include UX in competitive analysis. I summarize those in the table below.

Usability add-ons	Add tasks for competitor's products to your existing studies.
Mental model diagramming	Add a competitor layer to a visualization of user’s thoughts, feelings, and behaviors.
Competitive benchmarking  The Golden Circle, S. Sinek	Compare your product to the competition based on: usability metrics like success rates, errors, and satisfaction  the 4 elements of a UX model of value, usability, adoptability and desirability “The Golden Circle” where the “Why” (the producer’s beliefs) is an important reason for the customer's adoption of a product or a brand.

Finally, Mrs. Freeman talked about the traps one can fall into when doing UX competitive intelligence. She talked about “starting with the wrong goal” by only trying to identify other product’s mistakes, coupled with “being too competitor-focused”, which is resulting in “fixing” your product by adding the competition’s features and benefits instead of using competitive intelligence to create real product experience differentiators.

In summary, I found this presentation enlightening, pointing out how we often analyze the UX of our products in a vacuum. With her UX competitive intelligence framework and add-on analysis methods, Beverly Freeman clearly demonstrated how a UX lens can expand one’s comparison with competitors by looking at the holistic experience of a product. I believe this approach can better enable UX practitioners to surpass the competition by really innovating rather than only adding to the feature sets and ease-of-operation of our products.

References:

Freeman, Beverly. UX Competitive Intelligence: A Primer.

Sinek, Simon. How great leaders inspire action.

Consumption Economics: Implications for UX

A book review & proposition
by Susan Wilhite

Our chance to change the world is arriving. We don’t even have to squint to see it.

Robert Fabricant of frog design has written of the emergence of user and product centricity and the decline of customer centricity. It’s no longer about the buyer and the sale.

Jared Spool of UIE is giving talks in advance of his forthcoming school for maker designers. He expounds on the necessary retreat from the retread of invention to the riskier moves toward innovation, all driven by design – both product/service and business model design. (Luke Wroblewski’s notes from the An Event Apart presentation, Seattle, April 2013).

Fortunately, there’s a backgrounder on the rise of UX in Wood, Hewlin and Lah’s book Consumption Economics: The New Rules of Tech (2011). UX people can zero in on Geoffrey Moore’s Forward through to Chapter 6.

Here’s the gist – Cap-ex vs. Op-ex

The tech business is shifting its adoption model that moves the risk of ROI from the buyer to the seller. Rather than landing a big sale up front (capital expenditure/CapEx), the seller is paid if and when the product is used (operational expenditure/OpEx). Put another way, payment is dependent on value seen by the buyer, so the product must appreciate, not depreciate, in value over time.

The product is no longer a thing. It is a dynamic resource.

Consistent and increased use depends on great (read: simple, clear…elegant) product design.  This concept synchs with a metered business model.

To wit: a taxi rider pays by the minute or the mile, or pays not at all if the taxi doesn’t arrive at the desired destination. Moreover, a rider is unlikely to tip or use the cab again if the trip was unpleasant. In taxis we pay for the duration of the service but we come back for the smile.

Metered product use is logged and paid for one microtransaction at a time. Users pay just for what they use – no major upfront costs. (For a new screed on making those microtransactions delightful, see Dan Saffer’s new book Microinteractions. 

In this way, steady use that may lead to mastery instills greater product loyalty and promotes adoption of add-ons and further services. Again, the seller is paid when the product or service returns value in the wild.

Still, the full power of this trend will transpire faster and smarter as UX practitioners understand and fully leverage this emerging opportunity.

Riding the wave

Until recent years responsibility for a customer’s successful adoption of a product rested mostly on the customer.

More recently we hear about nurturing the customer. In the CapEx days, any nurturing or massaging of the adoption fell to the seller’s “front line”: sales and consulting. These people held the customer’s hand (for a price) and sold add-ons as the customer/buyer endeavored to incorporate a technical product and extract the value of the initial and ownership costs.

The sales and consulting roles were often not effective for ensuring adoption success.

Now, with the OpEx model, the products themselves and the use models are designed to nurture the end users, prompting microtransactions and promoting advanced use.

UX Design is now driving. Along with the standard studies and iterative design, UX can craft and track intelligent, responsive designs that evolve organically as end users individually and collectively discover their most effective practices and techniques, within the product/service and as part of their total work ecosystem. Think of products and services acting like simulation games. Big Data and crowdsourcing inform this approach.

Which users should UX designers work with? If user nurturing is to stem from product/service design, it behooves us to partner with users experimenting with evolved processes and practices as they work within their domains. This alliance nourishes a grounded understanding of the larger work landscape and how products/services support users’ work.

One thing is clear – with product abandonment and adoption costs running closer to zero, the end user’s experience is more critical than ever in securing business or driving it away. UX researchers and designers can make the OpEx model come alive by infusing our unique philosophies, goals, and
practices into emerging business requirements.

Note

*Autodesk is a member of TSIA, the organization that produced this book.