Today, almost everyone knows what User Experience (UX) is. A concept that has become fashionable in recent years and that major digital multinationals like Amazon, Facebook, etc., not only know of, but have entire teams dedicated to studying and looking for ways to apply it.

As my colleague Jorge Parra said in a previous post, today’s usability isn’t just about making it easier for a user to navigate a website. According to Donald A. Norman (1998), the goal of usability is to bring the user and computer closer together using systems that are easy to use, safe and functional. For Norman, if we could find a plausible way to bridge the gap between technology and people, we could eventually close the gap altogether and reach an ideal situation in which the computer would be invisible to the user.

And that’s the path we’re going down. The usability must be so thoroughly studied and refined that the computer disappears, and the technology dazzles us. Personal assistants, like Alexa and Siri, aim to achieve ever more agile processes and smooth the “human-machine” communication process.

With so much importance being given to usability, members of usability teams in in large companies must not only possess backgrounds in computing, but also skills related to psychology. In this way, they can modify the technology to make it easier to use, as well as focus on researching human behavior to gain a richer understanding of how people interact with technology.

Now that we’ve understood the concepts of usability and user experience and their primary goals, we can go on to say that they have different  when applied to different business sectors. In an ecommerce company, the UX aim is applied to the purchase process. The fewer steps, clicks or screens the user has to complete, the more efficient the purchase process and the more profit the business makes. In social networks, profitability is still the most important issue, but the way to achieve it changes.

Social media platforms have human behavior as a business model. Professionals from these companies concentrate on how to make their platform more attractive. They are not trying to reduce the time a person spends on a page, rather quite the contrary. What they want is to hook the user. The more time the user spends on the platform, the more profit the company can make.

The conclusion to draw from all this is that when talking about technology, we must also speak of psychology. For technology to be successful – economically or otherwise –, we must put the user on a pedestal or, better still, in a test tube.

At Teldat, we keep this very much in mind and make every effort to bring our technology closer to the different end users who consume it. We are committed to saving our clients time and accomplish this by implementing UX principles in all our projects.