Chapter 3: Balancing Needs Through Iterative Development

Overview

In a perfect, egalitarian, happy-dappy world, product development processes would only be about making the user happy. Perfectly user centered, they would focus on creating the ideas users experience at any cost. All software (and hardware and VCRs and cars and pretty much anything with a human interface) would be standardized, optimized, consistent, and transparent. Everything would be focused on helping the users perform their task.

But the world is far from ideal. Finding a single perfect way of doing any task is unlikely. Even ideal user solutions do not always make ideal products. Moreover, products are generally not created solely for the benefit of their users: they are created by companies whose goal is to make money. Making money and satisfying people's needs are two very different goals; they can be made to work together, but they will always remain distinctly different goals.

Furthermore, modern software—especially Web sites—exists in a unique competitive environment. Not only does it have to satisfy the users and the makers, but it often has to address an additional set of stakeholders: advertising partners. Ads don't just add a new element to the user experience, but create a whole new business relationship that permeates the development process. Where before the two primary features driving software design were the quality of the user experience and the profitability of the product, now there's a third element—the effectiveness of the advertising (Figure 3.1). The needs of these three groups of stakeholders are in a constant game of tug-of-war. If any one of them pulls too hard, the other two suffer.

Figure 3.1: Tensions affecting product priorities.

This book focuses on understanding the user experience and will not dwell too much on either advertising effectiveness or corporate profitability; nevertheless, it is critical to keep this tug-of-war in mind when doing development and to consider the environment in which user experience is developed.

In Chapter 4, the focus is on just the user experience, and later in this chapter I present a method of resolving these tensions, but first it's useful to look at what makes a product a success when examined from the perspective of each group.