Why place the user at the center of the design of new products, tools or services?
Talking about user experience means talking about the interaction between a user and a product and/or service. Each experience leaves us with a positive or negative memory, linked to pleasure or pain, reward or frustration. From there is born a quality of relation privileged, or not, with the object of the experience.
Talking about innovation inevitably brings to mind the global successes of the GAFA (Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon), disruptive innovation from the Apple Store to Skype or BlaBlaCar, from downloading to streaming, but also incremental innovation, the kind that happens every day in our companies, the kind that gradually improves and transforms products, tools and services, interfaces, their look and feel, their functionalities, their practicality, their intuitiveness, their suitability for use…
In all these forms of innovation, the role of digital technology and user experience design is central. In all cases, we must keep the new paradigms in mind:
> Flexibility, personalization, acceleration of cycles, association of products and services enabled by digitization.
See the well known My M & M's ou My Evian, but also for example Longchamps and its personalized bags or printing our 3D creations with Sculpteo.
> Interconnection and therefore real-time circulation, sharing, copying, which results in a certain professionalization of amateurs.
Taking users into account becomes essential, either because they intervene directly, or because listening to them and analyzing their needs places them at the heart of projects. We know the success of Trip Advisor, BlaBlaCar, Airbnb. Moreover, open innovation and co-design have given wings to Lego and we have seen co-creation spaces appear, such as at Decathlon for example. Do It Yourself has entered into our customs.
> Rise in taking into account social and environmental issues that established structures have difficulty in exploiting, and which leads to innovation well beyond technology.
See for example le wave project which aims to exploit the collective intelligence carried by associations, social networks or start-ups.
The days are gone when innovation emerged almost exclusively within the company, with selection happening downstream and the user needing to be won over and educated. Today, it unfolds through a multidimensional approach—technical, social, organizational, and commercial—in products and services. Not only do users choose and eliminate , but in many cases, it is users themselves who generate the ideas adopted by established companies or startups. We must therefore embrace creativity, experimentation, and controlled risk within processes that foster their expression.
Marie Serindou, UX-Evangelist @UX-Republic
