How To Develop A Best In Class Product: Building A True Product And User Experience

Travis George at UXDX EMEA. Video: https://youtu.be/ya2HRl4kZMI

Readable transcript: edited from the recording's captions for readability (fillers and false starts removed, punctuation and section headings added). Wording is the speaker's own. Timestamps are positions in the video. Names marked [?] could not be verified against the audio.

Resonance and knowing your audience

[00:00:14] At the end of the day, what you're trying to do is make sure that your players, your users in this case, are having a great time. If your players are having fun, you did a good job as a games maker [?]. I've been very fortunate to be able to turn my passion into a career from early on. The idea in brief is to create something customers love: be the customer. Wait: sympathy, which is "I feel something for you," is not the same as empathy, which is "I feel the same thing as you."

[00:00:40] Resonance is the idea that a great user experience is about more than smooth user flows. It's about a connection. It's about when a product, service or media speaks to you. They've all used the product, they've all experienced something before that triggers an emotion, but when that emotion is positive beyond just simple appeal, that's resonance, and that's what makes something sticky. Resonance is when someone plays, in my case, or uses something and thinks, "This was made for me." Once the novelty of something new wears off, especially in gaming, or think about any leisure time, unless there's a connection, unless there's something deeper, chances are you may not have much time to play with.

[00:01:23] Know your audience, make sure your team is the audience, and then you have to actually be the audience. Most core gamers have at least one experience that they'll remember forever, and if you try to talk to them about that and try to relate with them, and you haven't had that same depth of experience, they're going to know immediately. The interactions between designers, developers, artists, the finance team all benefit when everyone has a similarly deep understanding of why we're all here.

Hire your customers and use your own product

[00:01:58] It's not about having the great ideas; it's about getting great ideas out of the team and then ensuring that gets into whatever you're building. Hire the right people, make sure they're your customers, put them together, have them solve cool problems. Your job is to create amazing experiences that help you win in the marketplace, not to make the most convenient place to work ever.

[00:02:18] If you don't want to use your own product, or in our case play your own game, then that's a huge problem. This is a great bellwether to remember where you're at. If you don't actually want to use your own product or service, why do you think that your customers would want it? Know about your users in a way that's more than surface level. And then finally, act like your users. You can't fake it, but live the life that your players, your users, your customers would. Thank you.