Joe Lamantia.com

This week­end, some of my ear­lier posts dis­cussing the user expe­ri­ence of Lotus Notes sur­faced in the Notes com­mu­nity. Ed Brill — in a post­ing titled Mary Beth has been tak­ing on the crit­ics — ref­er­enced my men­tion of how the head of the Notes UI team was employ­ing user research as a bridge to cus­tomers. Ed com­pli­mented the design team for reach­ing out to crit­ics in pub­lic. This is a well-deserved pat on the back. Yet it falls short of rec­og­niz­ing the more impor­tant point that direct user research should be a basic com­po­nent of any company’s over­all strat­egy and plan­ning for long term suc­cess (or sur­vival).
Why? User research helps build cus­tomer rela­tion­ships, fur­ther design efforts, and iden­tify new busi­ness oppor­tu­ni­ties when applied across audi­ences (inter­nal and exter­nal con­stituen­cies) and per­spec­tives (mar­ket­ing, sales, prod­uct devel­op­ment), and with an eye for needs beyond imme­di­ate feed­back. This sort of engage­ment with cus­tomers of a soft­ware prod­uct (or any kind of prod­uct) should *not* be spe­cial or note­wor­thy — it should hap­pen all the time. Con­tin­u­ously. I’m think­ing of Jared Spool’s remarks dur­ing his keynote at UI10, to the effect that the user expe­ri­ence per­spec­tive is most suc­cess­ful when it it is a basic com­po­nent of a company’s cul­ture, and thus an assumed aspect of every ini­tia­tive.
In fact, in a socially trans­par­ent, net­worked, and aware envi­ron­ment like the cur­rent FutureP­re­sent, user research serves as a fun­da­men­tal, indis­pens­able form of research and devel­op­ment that com­pa­nies and orga­ni­za­tions must sup­port as part of their port­fo­lio of meth­ods for seek­ing broad based envi­ron­men­tal feed­back (also here). I’ll go so far as to say that user research may move beyond the realm of essen­tial cor­po­rate R&D, and qual­ify as gen­uine basic research.
BTW: maybe it’s just me, but isn’t it a bit omi­nous that the tag line for Notes 7 is “Inno­vate. Col­lab­o­rate. Dom­i­nate.” ? Sounds like some­thing the Borg might say if you asked them how to make breakfast…