by Bob Glaser, designing user experiences since before they were called user experiences.

When I first started out as a designer, there was a tremendous effort in time and resource that was focused on having designs that are award winning. It was considered a real accomplishment that your work was scrutinized, filtered, and designated as “the best” by a panel of presumably distinguished judges. Businesses frequently placed high value on these accolades. Those that won the awards were often rewarded for their efforts in design. Now when you separate consumer products where the focus of the product is to entertain, to provide aspirational validation, or specifically achieve an artistic acceptance, then these awards are often quite useful as they provide guidance to the purchaser.

Earlier in my career these awards were great for the ego and contained bragging rights in the right circles. Over the years I learned, particularly in business products, that there is a problem with this. The success from a profit standpoint was often made that the product’s success was due to the award. Sometimes this would be true but but less often than you might think as there are many highly successful products that never won awards as there were many award winning products that were not successful in the marketplace.

In the realm of UX, this view of the greater successes of those unawarded products is ignored or dismissed. Even more problematic is that the products that won the awards were unsuccessful because of users/customers either not understanding or not smart enough or not aesthetically educated enough for the design. This places the aesthetics of product design above the effectiveness of a product. Often, way above it.

Educating a user should never be the primary intent of UX design. The exception is when the user’s primary goal is to be educated. When they want to learn. This is often when I become annoyed by the dictum “delight the user”. Most successful business products involve no direct delight at all in their use. In businesses and professions, what tends to delight the users of products is accomplishing a task, NOT the task itself. I’ve never heard anyone who had to fill in a spreadsheet in Excel say “Ooo, I can’t wait to open and use Excel.” They do, however have an indirect, however strong it may be, appreciation that using Excel as a tool provides a faster and/or easier way to accomplish the task. There is always the possibility of delight in discovering a better or faster way to accomplish a necessary task, but that delight disappears quickly as regular use of the product becomes second nature. It is a useful tool that provides more relief from a difficult task than joy in its use. This is not diminishing the value or acceptance or need of the product but rather a realistic view of its place in the users’ tools of productivity. Business productivity tools are generally viewed by regular users as a necessary evil.

Years ago when I was tasked with designing a digital phone keypad, I was literally told the this keypad must “delight the customer” (not the first time I’d heard that.) I said that when a user’s intent is to speak to someone, for example a good friend, the delight that they are seeking is in that conversation, not in the tasks necessary to achieve it. Fortunately, I had user data from testing as well as customer feedback to support my response.

So I started to notice that many awards were far more weighted on aesthetics than in user satisfaction. So when designing products, it needs to be determined if product success is more important than awards. Which is more important, winning awards or making the company more profitable. These are not mutually exclusive by any means. However, it is far easier, faster and more effective to design interactions and task flows and test them without fine aesthetic details than it is to include the aesthetics at the beginning. An easy approach to this would be to ensure that wire frames are devoid of any unnecessary color. There are many times when color is used because it is incorrectly determined to be necessary when in fact a word can be used. Including aesthetic elements early in the design also add time and effort and they can cause problems later. For example, if colors are designed in to represent feedback of levels and then later the number of levels changes due to either user feedback or product capability, then the design alteration that needs to be done can become exponentially larger in time an effort. This is because there may be a cascade effect on the use of the colors in other areas of the product.

When a product’s task flow has been thoroughly researched and documented and the interactions appropriately designed then the aesthetics can begin to be addressed. Additionally, addressing the visual aesthetics (or other aesthetics) at this point is easier since there is an essentially complete map of hierarchy to which the design is beholden.

An associated issue is who is judging these products. Less often than not, the panelists are chosen because their public stature is well known and not from an ability to judge objectively. They pass judgement because they desire the prestige of the judge’s position rather than having an ability to objectively review and select. Granted that no judging position is likely to be completely objective and unbiased, but a genuinely good judge will be able to chose something that they don’t personally like because it is factually and measurably better. Unfortunately, and particularly in areas where aesthetics are involved, judges often seek the position because of prestige. This allows placing uneven weight on the artistic aspect of the product as opposed to the success of the design from the standpoint of the user. Understandably, it can be difficult to assess the adoption of a product before enough actual users have it available to them. I should also point out that the success of a product in not solely on these points as there are business decisions and negotiations that can affect the large scale of adoption by the market. These can include cost, brand loyalty, contract and distribution deals that can override the success of one product over another and they go beyond the scope of this article.

Well established awards is no guarantee of success either. Products like Google Glass, Microsoft Zune, Apple Newton, amongst countless others are significant examples of award-winning products that failed. Consider how often you hear artists lamenting that aesthetically rewarding films are not common. But when you realize that the movie business is just that, ‘a business’, then you’ll see that great artistry doesn’t mean financial success. It doesn’t preclude it either. Popularity and aesthetic achievement are separate accomplishments. While you want both, you need popularity first for financial success so that you can also support aesthetic achievements.

Sure, I don’t mind awards, but I’m far prouder of the products that I have designed that are used by a significant population of the intended users because they feel that it’s essential if not critical to accomplishing their goals. If it’s got a nice look and feel…well that just frosting on the cake.