Why there should be UX unification in general?

Problem statement: When is UX unification needed and why?

Common case for this is a product or service entity which consists of parts that are designed and implemented in isolation to each other and therefore are done more or less differently ending up in unique UX of their own. These unique touch points are not forming up consistent customer journeys or use flows.

The inconsistency can be for example caused by product legacy in companies which have produced products or services long time: some of oldest products are done certain way, and the new ones are build from scratch with new ideas. One general scenario is also an acquisition: when an acquisition brings new products together with company's own products, they very likely are not matching to the company's old UX logic. Moving on the user journey, between the different touch points becomes very difficult.

Also one very typical scenario is the famous "product represents it's organization structure", meaning that there are different product development teams inside the company organization and each of the teams are responsible of the certain product entity. There can be product management, design and development working inside this bubble, having the KPI's of their own, and nobody is responsible of the bigger picture, the overall product experience. This can end up so that even inside the same product UI, depending on which part you are using the experience is different, the functions are handled differently and even the visual appearance is different.

When combining all these, inconsistency in the high level product touch points and broken user journeys to the inside product UI inconsistency, the end result as customer journey or user journey with the product or service is very messy. Difficult or impossible for user to use and equally painful for the product developers to try maintain and understand.

 

What is product UX unification and why it is needed?

UX unification in product creation should mean removing the inconsistencies from the experience and replacing those with the agreed, common solution, so that all the product touch points behave the same way, have similar visual appearance and create fluent user flows within the customer journey. The common UX should be created as most optimal UX in the product context. The context is defined by what can be achieved and doable by the organization within the product development road maps, available tools (like design systems) and maturity and resourcing of front-end development in the company. It means also streamlining processes in design and design delivery to RnD, and streamlining and unifying front-end technologies, and for design and development teams learning new. One key element in unification is that the company and organization agree about the goals of unification and why it is needed. Everyone in product creation should understand why it is important and what are the benefits of it and how it impacts to the company success in long run. 

There should be a long term goal and scope (unification vision) and short term goals and scopes defined for the unification work. The scope and goals of unification work needs to be agreed in minimum by the product organization, but better would be to have company wide vision and plan for the UX and CX unification to ensure also the best possible customer experience (CX) and optimized customer journey.

Why UX unification?

There are several aspects to why UX and UI unification is important. The first thing is to realize that UX is not only limited only in UI, but it is the full End to End product experience: all the touch points which user encounters while using the product (or service). Depending on what is the use case, users journey can go via several touch points. If the experience is broken in one link of the chain, the whole journey is impacted.

I have listed below few main reasons for UX unification:

1. User first - improving the user experience and usability

Un-unified UI behaviour and un-unified UI language requires user to learn and try understand the UI again and again.

It pushes user to do trial and error, loads user’s memory (cognitive load) to remember how to do the operations and find functions and opens possibility to make mistakes, wrong clicks and lost functionality.

This all can cause frustration, extra manual work and opens possibilities for human errors, and can cause risks in operations.

Overall, this can have hindering effect to the customer experience and satisfaction of the product usage. Using it is not pleasant.

2. Optimizing outcome of the product usage

Unification is often also simplification. Removing extra steps from the use flows and enabling several functions with the same action.

Eliminating manual steps optimizes the time usage and gets the work done faster. in B2B, when the UI's are tools for professional users to do their tasks, saving time also saves money.

Unified product usage enables the customer to get the wanted outcomes faster and with less effort.

3. Unified Front-End enables easier scalability, customization and styles

Unified front-end typically requires some kind of design system to be used. Design system which has tools available for both designers and developers. Tools including UI components, UX pattern descriptions and guidelines. 

When there are product UI's developed by separate teams, and there is no clear unification agreement, it can happen that the front-end development is done by using different front-end technologies, like angular and vue. In this case the unifcation gets more complex, because it can require that the used front-end technology is also unified to one, unless the design system supports many technologies. But for simplicity and minimising development efforts in long term, it is best to have it unified too.

When there a good design system in place, changing visual styles (like brand change) and enabling differnet modes for users becomes much more easier and faster.

4. Optimizing the product creation process

When there is a good design system in use, it will make possible to build new features unified way and fix the existing ones faster and with better quality. In addition to design system, re-using the designs and front-end code simplifies the process too.

Design system should include UX patterns and other guidelines for both designers and developers to be used. Also fundamental is that the design system is in sync and up-to-date: there should be same UI components in design tool and in code. When everything is in place, it will reduce significantly the amount of time used ifor design and development. The developers can in best case scenario build the new features just by using the guidelines and code from the design system and the designers can put more effort in the beginning part of the product creation instead of defining UI details.

This will also impact to the product UX and UI quality, when already validated solutions are used in design and in development.

In future the product UX/UI details design and implementation can be more and more automated. But this will require an excellent design system which works end-to-end between design and development.

5. Building the brand

Using the touch points of the service and product should create the feeling of familiarity and quality of the company brand. When user is using the product, it should reflect the wanted quality and impression what the company brand message is telling.

If the product touchpoints behave differently, have a different UI language (visual, functional, textual), the brand impression gets fragmented and influences to the perceived quality of the product and in the end, the quality of the brand. A solid brand will require a solid customer experience. User experience, the product and service usage, is in core of creating the customer experience.

Continue reading the story in the case example: UX unification in F-Secure B2B/WithSecure