UX Design is objective and measurable

To understand if UX design is indeed objective and very much measurable we have to go through the following real life scenario where the design maybe be considered as subjective. This is mostly because not many UX practitioners consider the objective part of design as it should be but rather give in to the aesthetics, graphical elements, the visual properties of the design.

While we were working on a lengthy customer request form where the customer needed to fill in necessary information around their requirement so that the customer success team can get back to them with the appropriate solution, product offerings that they actually need.

Designing web forms can be both tricky and challenging as we didn’t want the customer to abandon the form seeing so many fields. This was particularly important since we have so many technically diverse products that understanding the customers need and what we can offer was really important.

We had to come up with a solution which was easy for the user to understand, asking for all the relevant information (that we needed for the marketing, sales, account management, customer service, integration and technology groups ) the customer could provide and get them to complete the form in the shortest possible time frame. There needed to be a balance between what information we needed, the customer could provide and the time taken by the customer without abandoning the form in between.

Based on the user and business goal we need to find out which data points will be useful and needed and which ones we can do away with whether it is from a business perspective, marketing, sales, technology, third party integration, verification, or a combination of all of them put together and only those fields needs to be filled up by the job seeker which are relevant, synonymous and useful.

If the job seeker wants to create their resume online, the resume should be divided into different parts such as personal information, professional summary, employment history, education, achievements, social links, etc. which are categorized into separate tasks and the lesser amount of time taken to complete a particular task determines the design is both useful and effective.

Here the large form needs to be broken up into multiple tasks with each of them explained along with the steps and respective error handling so that the users can quickly understand and enter the required information and complete all the steps one after the other and finally submit the form.

There are broad requirements:

1. The user needs to fill up all the important, mandatory fields
2. The user needs to be shown concise error messages clearly where ever he enters incorrect information
3. The user needs to fill up the right or correct information without feeling discriminated or compromising on the quality of the job application
4. The user may save the form and come back later once he has the necessary information ready to feed it into the system
5. The user understands the terms and conditions mentioned within the form before giving his consent wherever needed

The objectives of the form design are:

1. To fill up the complete form in the shortest possible time
2. To complete the form fields consisting of all the tasks and sub tasks
3. To make sure that the user understands and fills out the form correctly
4. Captures the employer's requirements adequately without leaving out any necessary information
5. The user can skip and navigate the form quickly so that he can come back to the empty fields

To measure the success between let us say two different designs we need to assign each such part as mentioned above into tasks the user needs to complete. Once the task is completed the user can save the form and then proceed to the next task and once all the tasks are completed the user can submit the form.

A working prototype of both the designs are put in place using a prototyping tool accessible online similar to how the end product would behave.
Based on the job seeker's persona, users are shortlisted and asked to use the prototypes to build their resume online. Users have to complete all the tasks to complete their resume online using both the designs on two separate occasions. Time taken by each of the users to complete a task is recorded.

We will take a look at two such tasks across two different designs which were completed by the users and their metrics recorded.

Task 1. Candidate needs to fill in their personal information.

Task 1 - User Metrics

Task 2. Candidate needs to fill in their employment information.

Task 2 - User Metrics

Adoption of the form (design A) which takes lesser time for the candidate to fill was far greater than the form (design B) which takes more time for the candidate to fill.

The above holds true for all the identified tasks and the overall time is taken to complete all those tasks within acceptable time-frame considering the total time saved it is extremely useful for both the job seeker to submit the relevant information and the employer to shortlist the candidates who fulfil the shortlisting criteria in a lesser amount of time.

The UX practitioner measures and come up with a comparative analysis of all the tasks and specific time taken to complete the tasks as shown in the above example design A vs design B where we see that design B, although looks simple, has a few hidden fields which the users takes additional time to figure out, understand and then fill them out. Therefore the time taken by the users is more while filling up the resume building form using design B than the time taken using design A.

Users time and effort have value and this should never be ignored both while defining the task and designing the interface.

Every time we take cognizance of UX design the first thing that comes to our mind is whether UX design is subjective or objective. Is it the visual design or the information design or the interaction design or the functional design (functions of the features) meeting the users and business goals. To achieve the objective of a product, the design has to be innovative, aesthetic, useful, understandable, unobtrusive, thorough, detailed, minimalist, simple and last but not the least measurable.

I would love to hear your ideas around the approach, processes, strategy, teams involved around measuring UX design.

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