Every now and then I find an interesting article worth sharing and in this post I would like to share some of my top picks from this week.
This week I’ve listed four of my favourite reads:
- Net Promoter Score Considered Harmful (and What UX Professionals Can Do About It)
- Stop talking about empathy
- The best way to a great product is to focus on what really matters
- 10 Small Design Mistakes We Still Make
What’s wrong with the Net Promoter Score (NPS)
Executives love to see numbers. They want to see reports on reports that show and prove that the business made some significant positive changes overtime.
And the truth is that they should demand it rightfully. After all, if the business doesn’t make any progress, that’s a clear red flag.
The problem is that they are also expecting to see a number that could measure the overall user experience for a product or service.
In the last decade that number has been falsely represented by a single question that ask the users “how likely would they recommend a business to someone else?” — Its called the Net Promoter Score (or NPS).
Everything that is wrong with what NPS try to achieve is summed up nicely here in this great article.
We can’t measure the users experience with a single vague number that asks them to predict their future behavior. Or as Jared Spool put it:
“Customer experience is the sum total of all the interactions our customers have with our products, sites, employees, and the brand. Every sequence of interactions will differ for every customer.
People who believe in NPS believe in something that doesn’t actually do what they want. NPS scores are the equivalent of a daily horoscope. There’s no science here, just faith.”
Net Promoter Score Considered Harmful (and What UX Professionals Can Do About It)
Empathy is more than a step in the design thinking process
Empathy is not just another step in the design thinking process, you either do or do not care about your users. Instead make it a priority to understand the users, the thing they try to achieve and the value they find in your business over the competition.
A great read that question the concept of ’empathy’ as being just one step in a process that aim to understand and solve the users problems:
“Try to understand your target users. They don’t need a hug (OK, some do), they just need tech to work better”
Prioritize what really matters
“Ideas are dime a dozen” as we all know very well in the design and product world.
But they are not always the right thing to do or at the right time to do them.
So do you prioritize? How do you decide on what should we work next and can bring the best value for the users and business?
This article list out a few good practices to help prioritise features and tasks that any team can apply to existing or new projects:
The best way to a great product is to focus on what really matters
Avoid these 10 mistakes in the user experience design process
We all make mistakes, and though these can be quite obvious good practices, we tend to forgot some of the most basic best practices we should follow while designing the user experience.
This post from Uxplanet list out 10 of these mistakes and how to avoid them:
10 Small Design Mistakes We Still Make
That’s all for this time.
Did you find a good read that is worth sharing or maybe wrote one yourself? I always love reading new stuff! post it in the comments below and I will feature it in the next update of my reading list.
