Good UX design principles

Well-designed business apps are built for the way professionals work today. Think about Slack’s design – clean fonts, direct copy, and simple imagery caters to its users’ needs for on-the-go, mobile-friendly, creative, and collaborative communication.

Pega believes that everything has a design, whether good or bad. 

So, what does good design mean for software?

Well-designed software is:

• User-centric
• Empathetic
• Engaging
• Process-driven

User-centric design solves technology and business problems from a real person's perspective, doing real work behind the screen with the tools built by Pega. Good design anticipates user behavior and helps users seamlessly accomplish what they set out to do.

The design process must incorporate empathy as a critical element. Empathy is the ability to understand what other people feel from their perspective. It is not the same as sympathy, which is the act of showing concern. Using empathy helps Pega create solutions for the problems the software aims to solve.

Bad design makes for tiring, tedious, and frustrating experiences. Enterprise software users may spend over eight hours a day with Pega products, and good design keeps users engaged for those eight hours to focus on their job instead of struggling with technology. Engaging design elicits positive feelings, and positive feelings at work lead to better performance and results.

There is a formal process for creating a user-centric design. In practice, the process might look like the following example:

Scenario

David, a designer, and Petra, a product owner, are invited to observe customer service representatives (CSRs) use a Pega Customer Service™ application in a call center. David sits next to Cece, the CSR, who answers chats from customers. David notices that Cece handles conversations from a dozen customers at a time, and she struggles to switch back and forth among customers who are waiting. David sees an opportunity to improve the CSRs' experience and help customers with the wait time, increasing customer satisfaction with the interaction.

David and Petra bring these insights back to the team and brainstorm with Elizabeth, the lead engineer. David suggests adding visual cues to show the order in which the CSRs should answer chats. Petra adds that the team should use wait time and customer value to derive the order. Elizabeth has some concerns about the impact on the performance and says that her team will look into it. Together, they agree on an acceptable wait time to prioritize speed and efficiency. The team uses the wait time as a metric and discusses developing solutions to test with real users.

Analysis

In this hypothetical example, the team:

• Observes and defines the user problem
  • Empathize with the end user
  • Understand the context and constraints
• Propose a goal and solution
  • Ideate on a concept
  • Render the designs in collaboration with the team
  • Test and evaluate the design prototype against goals
    • Performance (load time)
    • KPI: speed, wait time
• Implement the design