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"You may work for a company that just hasn't figured it out. It may still be pondering, \u201CWhy should we care about user experience?\u201D Maybe it doesn't care at all. Maybe it has lucked into a strange vortex where customers are accepting of unpleasant interactions and misguided designs.\nIf you\u2019re that lucky, stop reading this article and go buy a lottery ticket. If, on the other hand, you work at any company with a product, website or application within which a customer might fail or succeed, you should pause to understand how the strategic failings of some companies (e.g. Research In Motion, Yahoo or Sony) caused them to be leapfrogged by the vision of others (e.g. Apple, Google).\nBut delineating the underpinnings of user experience clearly for everyone is not an easy task. There are algorithms, axioms and antonyms abound. Our frequent reference-point is pop culture \u2014 something to which folks can relate. We've already touched on UX lessons from Tom Cruise and Johnny Depp. But a thirsty person crawling through the desert of knowledge needs more than two swigs. So today\u2019s user experience lessons are five taken from the cannon of Tom Hanks.\n1. Re-Skinning Can Allow Financially-Advantageous Reuse\n\nIn the 1980s sitcom Bosom Buddies, Hanks played Kip Wilson. The premise of this whimsical show was that Kip and his roommate, Henry Desmond (played by Peter Scolari), were only able to afford housing in an all-women\u2019s apartment complex, so they changed their exteriors\u2014cross-dressing while at home\u2014to save on cost.\nIn UX, this type of saving is called re-skinning\u2014a feature available in the more advanced modeling tools. Imagine you spend months perfecting a user experience by creating an advanced model, porting that to reference hardware, testing it with persona-like users, and iterating your masterpiece. And then management says, \u201CI want that same thing, but for Brand XYZ.\u201D \nThe cheapest and quickest thing to do is re-skinning: You swap colors or pictures within the model without removing all of the logic previously created and tested. At CES 2012, Paul Leroux (QNX) characterized re-skinning as \u201C\u2026 essential to projecting a unique brand identity \u2026 cost-effectively for multiple model lines.\u201D\nAnd, just like Bosom Buddies, your male design can instantly look like a female design without a change to the core of product.\n2. Fictional Personas Can Bring Sanity to the Project\n\nIn the movie Cast Away, Hanks plays a FedEx executive whose plane crashes in the middle of nowhere. He ends up stranded on an island with only a few household items salvaged from the wreck. Among them is a Wilson volleyball that\u2014while battling depression and isolation\u2014he transforms into an imaginary companion named Mr. Wilson (no known relation to Kip Wilson). This quasi-companionship helps Hanks solidify his resolve to escape the island.\nIn user experience realms, fictional characters whose goals help to formulate strategies are called \u201Cpersonas.\u201D As Alan Cooper says in The Inmates Are Running the Asylum, \u201CWe make up pretend users and design for them \u2026 and they are the necessary foundation of good interaction design.\u201D\nAnd as Dr. Charles B. Kreitzberg perfectly summarizes, personas:\n\nEnable designers to make inferences about the needs and desires of audience segments.\nServe to communicate user characteristics in a compact and easily understood way.\nHelp keep stakeholders from changing the definition of audience segments to advance narrow interests.\nPut a face on the person for whom you are designing the UI.\n\nHanks put a face on the volleyball and, subsequently, put sanity back into his quest to leave the island\u2014demonstrating that a fictional character can add value.\n3. Task Completion Doesn\u2019t Automatically Equate to Success\n\nPaul Edgecomb is the head guard on Death Row in 1935 when several unusual and mostly miraculous events occur in the movie The Green Mile, based on a novel by Stephen King. \nWithout giving away too much of the movie\u2019s plot, a critical scene in the middle is the execution of an inmate that goes awry due to some deception by an evil guard. The victim\u2019s electricution causes him to die in a prolonged, fiery blaze producing a stench that will supposedly take five years to disappear. When confronted by the warden, Hanks' character tries to downplay the debacle by calling it an objective success despite the tragic ending.\nThis is not uncommon in UX. A product will be stamped as a \u201Cuser-friendly\u201D success, based upon one of many objective measures employed by human factors engineers. Most commonly these include effectiveness or task completion, which measure the ability of participants to figure out the interface sufficiently enough to finish a particular assignment. \nAs Fr\u00F8kj\u00E6r et al (CHI 2000) points out, \u201CWhen these studies make claims concerning overall usability, they rely on risky assumptions about correlations between usability aspects. Unless domain specific studies suggest otherwise, effectiveness, efficiency, and satisfaction should be considered independent aspects of usability and all be included in usability testing.\u201D\nFor example, in a 2010 study of airline websites, participants were asked to complete various tasks such as finding the items not permitted through security. American Airlines was ranked second-best for task completion but near the bottom for the subjective rating of \u201Cease of use.\u201D In fact, one can see visually from that study that individual measures cannot deem success.\n\n\n4. Complicated Interfaces Have Their Purposes, Too\n\nWe\u2019ve all heard the acronym that doubles as a UX mantra: KISS\u2014Keep It Simple, Stupid. However, we as an expert community must realize there are cultures and sub-cultures that prefer or seek complex user interfaces as a quasi-right of passage.\nIn Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code, the protagonist, Robert Langdon must unravel an intentionally complex set of interfaces that only a highly skilled cryptologist or informed member of a secret society can unlock. The culmination leads to a cryptex, a complex combination lock. The user interface is intentionally intricate and arduous.\nBut this is fiction, right? Are there truly groups that desire multifarious interfaces? It's no secret that commonalities in preferences can be found deeply-rooted in culture and that information is processed differently in Asia than it is in Europe. \nBut having tested navigational systems around the globe, we've seen firsthand that some cultures feel rewarded by overcoming a complex user interface. In the Far East and even in Western subcultures (such as engineers), having conquered a challenge demonstrates a level of sophistication that may be worn as a badge of honor.\nSo should we UX engineers always design for the zealots? Certainly not. But just like all design projects, we should not presume the desires of the user without understanding his or her motivations. In some instances\u2014like the Road Rally app or a Murder Mystery game\u2014simplistic is undesirable. Yes, sometimes the user only desires the riddle to be complex and still wants a simple user interface, but not always.\n5. Exceeding User Goals Makes You Memorable\n\nIf you've seen Forrest Gump, you most definitely remember the scene in which Hanks, playing the titular character, not only runs through Alabama\u2019s end zone, but continues to run right out of the stadium. A touchdown is a touchdown\u2014it is worth six points regardless of where the running back stops outside the end zone. But this over-delivery made Gump\u2019s touchdown memorable.\nSure, this simple lesson might be applicable to all business strategies\u2014exceeding the expectations and goals of the user will make your product memorable\u2014but it is absolutely applicable to the design of a UI. In Designing For Emotion, Aaron Walter, the lead user-experience designer for Mail Chimp, talks about making your product memorable. \n\u201CHold on to that memory \u2026 that feeling is what we\u2019re trying to craft through emotional design. We\u2019ll create that feeling of excitement and we\u2019ll bond with our audience ...\u201D\nSimilarly, in his book, Descartes\u2019 Error, Antonio Damasio explains that feelings and associated projections play a role in choices according to the past experiences with which they are associated. A \u201Csomatic marker\u201D (where \u2018soma\u2019 means \u2018body\u2019 in Greek) improves the predictive efficiency of the decision-making process by reducing the number of options and, therein, protecting the evaluator from future harm. \n\u201CYou can think of them as a system of automatic qualifications of predictions, which acts, like it or not, to evaluate extremely diverse scenarios of the future[s] that lie ahead of you,\u201D Damasio explains. Those which have gone favorably beyond your goals shall be remembered as predictors of future pleasant experiences and subsequently bolster the likelihood of returning.\nSo, just like Gump, your product could stop right at the goal line, but maybe by going the extra yards it\u2019ll be that much more memorable.\nMaking sure your product\u2019s user experience is satisfying, user-centered and performing beyond the customer goals is the path towards ultimate success. Designing for your customer persona and testing for customer satisfaction as well as task completion is the way to confirm you\u2019ve headed down the appropriate design path. \nAny other actions can be summarized by another quote from Forrest Gump: \u201CStupid is as stupid does.\u201D\nPhoto via Ian Gavan/Getty Images Entertainment/Getty Images"^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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