Since when is having a poor user experience good for business.
I would also say that having a poor User Interface and poor User Experience is doubly bad for business.
I'm reminded of the recent article posted here to HN about Expedia removing a single field from their checkout form that resulted in $12MM to the bottom line.
Since when is having a poor user experience good for business.
Would you like fries with that?
Article continues on page C8.
The DX is a fine automobile, sir, but the LX offers a lot of extra safety features, which I'm sure mean a lot to you with such a charming wife. (Are you newlyweds, ma'am?) Traction control, ankle air bags, anti-impact rustproofing, everything a lucky man like you needs to safeguard his precious cargo. And the premium for these features is really not much compared to what you have to lose.
Leave this box checked to receive product information and spam.
The product is configured using a bespoke business process description language that describes your configuration in intuitive problem-domain terms. It's so simple and intuitive, a non-technical person can understand this fake example! The support contract specifies that our consultants will be available at reasonable rates to attempt to train your business analysts to be programmers, and then to attempt to train your IT staff to write code in what turns out to be an arcane '80s-era language with dozens of undocumented bugs and sharp edges, and then to do all the work themselves at great cost since nobody can actually be trained to configure the product in any reasonable amount of time.
Wouldn't Google's UX be better if there were no ads? In the short term, maybe. In the long term, it would kill the company, so there wouldn't be any UX at all.
no, you're confusing UI and UX... without ads, the user interface might be better (less ads, less clutter, etc) however, it could be argued that without the ads the user EXPERIENCE would not be as good... as very often ads are highly relevant to what the user is searching for on google and are therefore of value to the user.
No, adverts are almost always irrelevant for almost everybody. They are a necessary (and sometimes unnecessary) evil. Most of us don't look for something to buy all the time. When I read my mail or a blog or whatever, that huge burger and coke ad right in the middle of the screen is an irrelevant distraction.
When I have to watch that very same 30 second Hoodie Footie Pajamagram - the perfect way to snuggle up - segment before each and every 3m news video on CNBC it's a torture for my brain.
I wish more sites gave me a reasonable way to buy myself freedom from that "highly relevant" bloat.
[Edit] As a service provider, I appreciate the convenient excuse you provide for torturing my users ;-)
I think Google's billions in revenue and profits would beg to differ with you. (ads on google search results are generally highly relevant and get clicked a lot)
you are right, however, if the people you are generalizing for are HN folks, and websites other than Google.
Revenue and relevance is not quite the same. A 1% clickthrough rate would lead to great revenue for all concerned, but it still means I'm annoying 99% of my users (or one user 99% of the time).
Of course, not all non-clickers would be terribly annoyed, but many of the clickers might still be annoyed by the distraction even though the ad was relevant enough to click on.
"Since when is having a poor user experience good for business."
You'd do better to ask which situations it is good for business,and which situations focusing on a strong UX can distract from more pressing concerns, or worse.
The article mentions one potential situation of the later type and I strongly suspect that large e-commerce firms do know what they are doing for the most part. The Expedia example you cite clearly shows that they do, in fact, experiment with their UX. (It doesn't clearly show that there is a correlation with removing fields and clutter and increasing profits, we'd need a lot more datapoints than that.)
CWuestefeld, mentions another, where they have to cater to two very different kinds of customers with different needs and usage patterns. There is no single UX that would satisfy both and I suspect that it would be prohibitively expensive to target them separately, hence business, in this situations trumps UX.
Clearly this isn't always the case and everything being equal, good UX will probably trump bad UX, but everything rarely is equal, and that's the problem.
I would also say that having a poor User Interface and poor User Experience is doubly bad for business.
I'm reminded of the recent article posted here to HN about Expedia removing a single field from their checkout form that resulted in $12MM to the bottom line.
Better UI + Better UX = Better Business