Out of Box Experience

On the 21st of April, Frank Long, UX Designer at frontend gave a talk in UL about the User Centered Design from the perspective of product design.

I really enjoyed the talk as it made me recall my experience as a product designer and also because Frank was enlightening and fun.

The talk was mainly focused on Out of Box experience, which is the journey after you buy the product, from retail store to operation. Ideally we should strive for a “Plug and Play” operation, where the customer is guided seamlessly thought the experience. He described that this experience, which is overlooked by many companies during the development stage of a product, is imperative to the products success and to growing brand loyalty. He reveled that only 5% of products returned were actually faulty. By lack of design and consideration on the importance of out of box experience incurs high costs for the company though customer service, returns, poor reputation of brand, environment and loss of sales. By having poor out of box experience means that companies are getting one or all of the following wrong

• their packaging

• poor visibility of system status

• error prevention

• recognising, diagnose and recover from errors wrong

One of the main ways of creating successful out of box experience employing progressive disclosure, where it starts off simple for the customer and gets more technical as you go deeper into the product.

Front of Packaging to Back of Packaging

Simple to Advanced

Some of the main points that Frank concluded with

• Don’t overwhelm customers with information that is unnecessary to them.

• It must work in all environments and in every case.

• Don’t assume everyone has a third level education. Ensure that the language used is clear and concise

• Make items intuitive, people don’t read the manual

• Consider time to task, don’t make it too long

It was a very insightful talk which reaffirmed the importance of user centered design and the role that it plays in all phases of design