Is this the era of "Success by UX"?

Jared Spool's article "Market Maturity" [1] published in 1997 is a very good way to understand what kind of experience is required for success. He argues that success depends on market maturity which roughly follows four stages: 1. Basic deliverability war, 2. Feature parity war, 3. Productivity / "ease of use" then finally 4. Price war.

Stage 3 is generally where UX becomes a priority. For a consumer web product or startup this generally makes sense as a marker for market maturity as delivering technology and shipping features has become easy and cheap. Crafting UX is difficult but probably won't be for long. For example Twitter Bootstrap seems to be lowering the cost of boilerplate UI which in turn lowers the cost of UX in general.

[1] http://www.uie.com/articles/market_maturity/

As a UX person, I have a little secret to tell you: if the product idea is really good, the UX part is really easy.

Hiring a UX person isn't going to make your product take off. It's not going to make your users love you. It can make it easier or harder for them to love you, but it's just a modifier.

Design is how it works. Your idea is how it works.

Unfortunately, the idea, the technology, and the UX are all tightly intertwined. New technology lets you do things that were never possible before, enabling new ideas. New ideas need to be massaged through a few UX wash cycles before they come out looking the way they should. UX must live within the technical confines of what is possible.

You need all three. Companies fail because they don't care enough about one of them (or two of them). Traditionally, UX has been the most commonly neglected. That's starting to change - but that doesn't mean that UX is the source of success - it's 1/3 of the source of success.

Great UX may make for a great tech story, but by itself it won't lead to huge traction. Great UX doesn't mean great marketing, and word of mouth. In the end, it comes down to providing something that taps into a need, and marketing. The UX part is what makes your product sticky, so people won't leave but it can't attract newcomers.

There are 2 sites that are hardly looked at in the tech space: CafeMom and SparkPeople. Take a look at them, and you can hardly say they have good UX - it's messy, and cluttered. Yet both have over 5 million uniques per month.

I think we are past the point of disruption: a usable product is an absolute minimum now. Aarron Walter wrote an excellent book on designing for emotion, where he argues that usability is just like a commodity and low on the user-need pyramid. Higher up that pyramid is a product that has personality and invokes the right emotions. You can read an excerpt here: http://www.alistapart.com/articles/personality-in-design/

I'm a product designer and love the thesis, but this article is seriously lacking in argument.

- Many of the big "UX" benefits would not be possible without massive changes to entrenched business processes. e.g. Visual voicemail was something that AT&T needed to support. Likewise, unbundling all the "Crapware" is another area where Apple forced the carriers to change their business processes.

Apple had the ability to do this because of their momentum. In 2007, Apple had revolutionized the music industry, was on its way with TV and movies, and clearly someone at AT&T wanted some of that momentum or certainly didn't want Verizon to have it.

If anything, the launch of the first iPhone showed UX alone wasn't enough to dominate the market. The G1 iPhone sold well, but not to the scale it is now. Only after the price got chopped did people move to it en masse. Apple was able to do this by having the world's best operations team and forcing extra-subsidies from the carriers.

Now the UI did get people excited and you can't separate the success of Apple from the strength of their UI, but this article would make you think that the great UX was the primary reason Apple has succeeded.

Design is important, but Dribbble is full of beautiful app designs that sell 10 units a week, where as you will find many horribly designed, modern sites, that are dominating new markets.

I think that one important thing to keep in mind is that user experience is much more than just the interface of the product.

Sometimes, a simple shift in metaphor i.e. Hipmunk's gantt chart is enough to substantially improve the UX, but sometimes it requires an entirely new product strategy to do something revolutionary. Consider Amazon Prime. Is the user interface particularly pretty? No, but the experience of using the service truly is revolutionary, and so far no other retailers can match it because the experience is only made possible by supply chain management and distribution that Amazon has in place.

The iPhone UX was revolutionary because it challenged the entire model of interaction between user and phone. The experience of using an iPhone is the sum total of an astounding number of innovations, only some of which have to do with the UI. Consider the hardware innovations from the glass screen to the proximity sensor, to the hi-res screen in the iPhone 4 that no one expected or anticipated. Then there is the ecosystem aspect, which required not only a fundamental re-thinking about how both users and developers would interact with technology, but also massive distribution which was already in place through iTunes. Of course, the multi-touch interface, and the laser focus on developing quality software for email, messaging, phone, and music, played a huge role in overall UX, but they would not have been possible without the other innovations.

I guess it really all just goes back to the fact that design is how it works, not how it looks, which requires a deep understanding of the problem and needs of the customer, not just the ability to arrange pixels in a pretty pattern on the screen.

I see the value of UX, and I haven't decided how important it is to me yet.

I do feel like the conversations in tech circles seem to be overselling its benefits. I get skeptical when hearing bold, blanket assertions like "A UX person is one of the critical components of a startup today. You need a [hacker, hustler,UX person]".

I don't disagree that some startups need a UX person, but that flavor of claim strikes me as overreaching, and possibly just UX guys talking up their book. /not saying this is necessarily the case, but I can't tell that its not/

Specifically regarding the Hipmunk case, since its often cited as an example of how newcomers superior UX/UI can oust established players: Why are non-Hipmunk sites still in business, or even more, why are they still the dominant players in the market?

Its undeniable that there are examples of "bad UX companies" succeeding and "great UX companies" failing. What experiments can be/have been done to isolate the impact of just UX as a contributor for startup failure/success?

(I don't consider "split testing UX on a given site" sufficient. This generally finds local maxima and incremental improvements to the business. It generally makes you succeed more or less, but I want to hear about why the UX guy is a critical pillar to the existence of a company (and then, most companies))

Lets not discuss UX as if it's some well defined term.

Hipmunk is an innovation in user interface design or information design, not something that sprung out of what is normally considered a UX process.

The user experience is everything from how it's designed, to how well it's programmed. It's everything and therefore it's nothing.

It's an industry term not a skill as such.

Nope. It's the era of success by marketing and luck, as it always has been and always will be.

Engineering is, as usual, pretty much irrelevant to success. That includes UX.