Interaction South America 2015

When bridging the gaps between designers and product managers, a quantitative approach to understand the UX seems to be one of the preferred arguments. Like the Little Prince, as designers often disregard this numbers as not capturing the essence of the problem: 

+++ Grown-ups like numbers. When you tell them about a new friend, they never ask questions about what really matters. They ask: "How old is he?" "How many brothers does he have?" "How much does he weigh?" "How much money does his father make?" Only then do they think they know him. +++ 

Since perceived user experience and end-user value is “psychological” in nature, it requires a behavioral science approach. Behavioral sciences researchers have made substantial inroads toward driving the creation and measurement of platform user experiences and explaining how it works. 

In our presentation we will explain the usefulness of setting UX quality milestones (a.k.a. UX Key Performance Indicators), and measuring against these goals using experimental psychology, experience research, and human factors techniques. 

These indicators became a cornerstone in the relationship of designers with product managers, providing to the former the level of insightfulness necessary to drive user understanding, and to the latter a quantifiable approach to understand UX. Each UX milestones explicitly sets target UX constructs, link these to the key usages per market segment, and comprehend what will be the important the “moments of truth” in the user experience. Data is collected to support design, validate intended UX, and to compare the UX to other products. The overarching goal is to better target and control the quality of the end-user experience.