Dan Wascovich has been designing products since 1996, when he was one of the first designers at Citysearch. Armed with a background in information design, Wascovich has seen design landscape changing over the years.
Wascovich was the head of User Experience Design in Yahoo! Southeast Asia until last year when he went into consulting. He’s had years of experience in interaction design, usability testing, visual design, information architecture and user experience research for large scale web sites and native/web applications, in both consumer and B2B spaces.
In an interview with e27, Wascovich shares about what user experience design (UXD) actually stands for, how to start designing a product and some pitfalls faced by most products.
What is UXD?
One of the things that I hear is that what is UXD? Is it User interface or visual design? It’s sort of everything. User experience is the product. What people do with what they are making, wherever they are – that’s the user experience. User experience entails what the product does. In terms of user experience, I would like to focus on usefulness, usability and then attractiveness in that order.
How does one get started?
The biggest thing is knowing who the users are and making a product that satisfies what they need. Sometimes you are firmly in that domain. You could be a business manager, event planner or game designer. When you’re not part of the demographic, then it will get difficult.
How do you make a product for a heart surgeon when you’re not going to cut anybody. It’s also useful, when you’re part of domain to go outside, talk to people and not bring so much of your own into it and really spend a lot of time with people whom you want to use your product.
Changing of design landscape
Technology has enabled Rich Internet Applications (RIA) that do more, act more intuitively. Design patterns are changing as people become savvy users — there’s a certain expectation now. With that, developers can look at higher quality designs and patterns are getting widely known and used.
Part of my job at Yahoo! SEA was to build a UX design team and also to get the Singapore office products more user focused. We covered 6 countries, we have representation of all 6 countries in our office. Really good people, very good representation from these countries. Sometimes companies will rely too much on their internal people. And so my goal was to go into the market to learn more about the motivation of the audiences. It really depends on the product you are creating.
It’s interesting though that global products were not meant to be created that way. Facebook’s goal was not to become a huge hit in let’s say Singapore, but they are extremely propular here. There are some commonalities within culture.
On Singapore startups
I think there’s a lot of very exciting things happening in Singapore. From my conversation with startups here, focus on user centred design and mentality or methodology, they are not really far off. I’m seeing some interesting things.
I think that in Singapore because startup arena is still fairly new, I think that startups can look at examples out there, creatively borrow and that will get them pretty far. I think eventually, the space will be crowded where they will have to push the envelope a little bit more. Then it become a talent issue. In terms of uxd are pretty expensive. Even in Silicon Valley, there are not enough.
Best designed products?
I think Apple products are fantastically designed. Another example of fairly ugly but useful product is craigslist. I think they could improve it much better.
I think Facebook is good looking enough. Facebook is very useful in terms of connecting people. But I’m really getting scared by their privacy policies.
In terms of visual design, I like JetSetter and Gilt are pretty good looking. Groupon is a pretty good looking product too.
Designing Mobile applications
I think that in terms of overall design process, there are a lot of presentations on it. It’s sort of the new thing to present on mobile-first design, how you can apply that to your website.
I’ve always designed from the perspective of most useful or critical features first. I think Mobile actually forces that prioritization which is a good thing. Your mobile app, if it’s a companion to the website, mobile app should do the most important things easily. Simply because of less real estate, you are forced to concentrate on the key features. Sometimes it’s a valuable exercise to take that back to the website — are we really focusing on key features?
Pitfalls
In terms of portals or large scale sites, depeneding on the culture, some of them want to see a lot going on. This is in particular with China and Thailand. They particularly want to see a lot on their page.
But outside of that, sometimes business objectives can get in the way of what you really want people want to do. That can be sort of the pitfall. You start to lose the ability to steer people down the path you want them to go down.
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