Perhaps the most common question after "How are you?" in any context is “So, what do you do for a living?" If you’re a UX designer, answering that will get complicated quickly. Because, even though the field has been around for a while now, many people - even those working in IT - still aren’t sure what exactly UX is.

Anyone working in this field for any significant amount of time would have the “off-the shelf” answer that doesn’t turn into a 5-minute soapbox moment where we explain what UX is and why it matters (so much!!). My answer is “it’s kind of like engaging an architect for a house, I create a blueprint for web apps that tells everyone where everything needs to go. And then I talk to people about it”. That answer is usually plenty complicated to yield some confused looks.

'Don’t judge a book by its cover' is a well-known cliché. And, while I agree completely with the principle, I’m the first to admit I’m guilty of it just the same. Today, more than ever, users are inclined to purchase based on packaging or advertising where contents may be identical or similar.

Today some 89% of Australians are consumers of digital content and we have a seemingly endless selection of it to choose from. Given our vast choice of content, we, as users became increasingly more discerning.

It wasn’t too long ago when we were happy if an app had a mobile version or a responsive site. Now, the options available mean that we will not put up with anything less than delightful. And, once we find that piece of delightful software, we tend to stick to it. We all know this first-hand, being daily consumers of digital content and knowing our own devices intimately. With the importance users place on their experience with today’s online content, entrepreneurs building new software are usually fully aware that they require UX, and they need it to be excellent.

We’ve recently run usability studies on an application for a financial product where, after a user inputs a couple of screens worth of data, a tailored product solution appears. We had a nice prototype, and all was well except for one thing…

During the usability study, we received the following feedback: the recommendation arrived too fast. Wait, what? Yes, the results arrived too quickly after the user hit send, which made people think that it wasn’t real. Some of the user feedback was “there’s no way it could’ve looked at my data in such short amount of time…”, “I don’t think this is real, because it hasn’t spent any time thinking about it…”, “I wouldn’t trust this product, it made me fill in screens of data but then ignored it all when giving me the recommendation…”, or, in some cases, people were expecting to continue filling in more data and didn’t entirely believe that the screen they were looking at was the solution and not just another screen requiring more information.