I’ve been in three board meetings in the last month where it was painfully apparent that there wasn’t a person in the company who owned the UX philosophy of the product. I’m explicitly saying “UX” (user experience) rather than “UI” (user interface) as each company had an excellent designer and the application looked great. But the UX broke down quickly, especially as you went from novice first time user to experienced user.

Now, it’s not that the apps sucks. In each case, the apps ranged from good to great. They had huge amount of functionality, did unique things that other apps didn’t do, and solved a clear set of problems in a compelling way. They were fast, pretty, used nice fonts, and had good screen layouts.

But each had a jumble of different ways of doing things. As you went from one set of activities to another, the approach quickly became inconsistent. I kept noticing that my when I was doing a different set of things in the app, the user flow would change. Or when I switched modalities, I would have different ways to do things that were dependent on where in the app I was.

Sometimes I’d click on a label to take an action; other times I’d click on a text description of the action. In some places I cared a lot about the Tab key; in others it was the Enter key. In some screens data was automatically saved after I exited a field; in others I had to take an explicit action. In some situations all the actions I could take were exposed; in others I had to search a menu tree for them. Orientation of the iPhone mattered in some cases and didn’t in others. Sometimes the key set of data that I was working on was the focus on the screen; in others it was only part of the screen.

When I start feeling uncomfortable with UX, I start counting extra key and mouse actions. When I think I should be able to do something with one action and it takes three or more, there’s a problem. When I realize in one part of the app that I can do something with one action, but in the other it takes four, there’s a problem.

In each of the companies, there is an excellent VP of Engineering. They each have a strong design / UI person. Two of the three had founder/CTOs. And the CEOs in each are excellent. They are each obsessed about the product, but they are approaching it from an engineering perspective. What are the features that the user needs? What is the feedback we are getting about what individuals want to do? Each of these things ends up being a story or a task – a feature – but there is no unifying UX philosophy.

In each case, when asked, no one in the company owned the UX. In one case, no one felt qualified. In one case, no one really knew what I meant and kept conflating UX with UI. And in one case it was a revelation that users were struggling with a chaotic and inconsistent UX.

I’m noticing this more and more in the different apps I use, especially at the early stage. Some are crafted beautifully from a UI perspective, but once I start using them on a daily basis I want to scream. Others have acceptable UIs and a layer of UX consistency that breaks down immediately when I become an advanced user. And others are radically different UX experiences across devices.

I’ve come to appreciate the important of a single person in the company owning the UX with this person being the arbiter of discussion around how to implement the UX. There’s nothing wrong with lots of different perspectives, but a single mind has to own it, synthesize it, and dictate the philosophy. But first, they have to understand the difference between UI and UX, and – more importantly – the product-oriented execs who approach things from an engineering perspective need to understand this.

I’ve decided it times to up our game significantly on this. I’m curious about what resources you rely on, thing are amazing, and would give to an executive team that is struggling with this.

Related articles

• Startup UX and Design Demystified
• User Experience, Incorporated
• What Can SEO Learn From UX?
• My number one prediction for enterprise software in 2013 is … New user experiences (UX) will finally start to emerge
• Harvard Business: Scaling Your UX Strategy
• Connecting: An 18-Minute Film on the Current State of UX Design

I’ve invested in hundreds of companies that have started from scratch and I’ve been though some crazy number of product launches, especially if you include all of the TechStars companies I’ve been involved with. These alphas, or betas, or v1.0 or v0.1 launches are exciting moments as they signify the transition from an idea to a product. And, it’s at that point that the real work begins.

Early in the life of your company you want feedback. From anyone. Of any kind.

It’s often hard to get this feedback. You spend all of your time trying to get some people to use your product. When they have problems, you try to fix them. But you are maxed out – with all the various responsibilities you’ve got and all the things you are trying to do to keep things moving forward.

Occasionally you get feedback. Sometimes it’s precise – a feature request, a suggestion for how to do something differently, or a description of something that’s not working correctly.

Reward this feedback with features. Fix the bug and then tell the person who reported it that you did and thank them for pointing it out. Implement the requested feature and tell the person that suggested it that you did it. Write a blog post about it and name the feature after the person. Be public about thanking the person for the suggestion.

In addition to making your product better, this does two powerful things.

First, it creates a feedback loop with your early users so they know they are specifically appreciated and valued. This will encourage them to give you more feedback, use your product more, and be part of your extended early community of fans.

More importantly, it builds a feedback loop culture into your business. You and your team will realize the feedback matters. You’ll show this through action. Your users will realize this. And they’ll value it, and you, more.

What do you do to get feedback from your early users?

If you are a developer, I encourage you to carve out an hour and watch TechStars CEO David Cohen’s presentation at RailsConf 2012 (30 minute presentation and outstanding 30 minutes of Q&A). He starts out with the assertion that “developers are the new investors”  - how could you not be interested in hearing more about that?

David and I wrote a book last year called Do More Faster: TechStars Lessons to Accelerate Your Startup and this is his riff to a room full of developers about some of his top tips. Special bonus – see a photo of me in my pajamas at minute 7.

I was reminded of the importance of starting with the customer experience while I was watching this brilliant video from WWDC 1997 of Steve Jobs. In the video, Jobs appears to be responding to attack by a troll, but is actually doing something much more interesting. Rather than take the bait and react, he thinks carefully in real time and makes a critical philosophical point about his – and Apple’s – approach to creating new products.

The punch line happens early when he says “you’ve got to start with the customer experience and work backwards for the technology.” It’s five minutes long and worth watching, if only to see how incredibly durable Jobs’ philosophy has been over the past 15 years.

When I think about the companies we’ve invested in, some of them embody this philosophy deeply in their culture. Oblong, MakerBot, Orbotix, Fitbit, and Cloud Engines immediately come to mind. The entrepreneurs running these companies are completely and totally obsessed with the consumer experience of their products, even though their products embody an incredible amount of technology (in each case, both hardware and software innovations.)

As an investor, I often lose sight of this, especially when I’m working on non-consumer facing companies (e.g. enterprise software companies). But I believe very strongly in the consumerization of IT – namely the notion that innovation in software is now being driven by consumer applications, and correspondingly by consumers, not by enterprise IT organizations and enterprise software vendors. If you accept this, it means that if you are working on enterprise applications, you also need to be obsessed with the customer experience.

When I think about this abstractly, especially in the context of “software eating the world” or my view that the machines have already taken over and resistance is futile, I completely buy the premise that the consumer experience trumps all technical decisions in any context. Apple has proven this throughout the entire customer experience, including being exposed to the product, buying the product, implementing the product, upgrading the product, and getting help with the product. And I think it’s going to get a lot more important going forward.

I was at an board meeting yesterday morning for a new seed deal that we’ve done that will be announced next week. I love the product vision – it’s in an area that I’ve been working in for a while across a variety of companies and will take a new approach to a very old and persistent problem.

The entrepreneurs have been living the specific problem for a long time and believe they have a unique and very informed way to solve it. Given that the company has had no funding to date, the founders have been scrappy and have cobbled together a really impressive prototype that they’ve been using to get early customer feedback. It’s an ambitious product vision that will take a while to fully roll out.

In lean startup language, they’ve got a minimal viable product. However, they are faced with two choices. The first is to polish and release the current prototype. The second is to use the prototype to continue to explore and understand the specific customer fit while building a production version from scratch that incorporates much of what they learned during the prototype development.

In their case, the customer is a business customer rather than a mass market consumer web product. Consequently, having 100,000 free users is not important in the near term – I’d much rather see them have 100 paying customers which might translate in several thousand users across all of these customers, as our premise is that organizations will have between 1 and 100 early users of the product.

We spent a lot of time in the meeting talking about this choice as well as overall product cadence. We left it up to the founders to figure out what they wanted to do and what they wanted the cadence to be, but we encouraged a one year top down view, rather than a quarterly bottoms up view. We encouraged them look at where they want to be in a year (remember – this is a seed deal, so we have plenty of ability and desire to continue to fund as they make progress, with or without new investors) and work backwards to a product cadence that works for them.

I don’t know if they’ll have a once a week, twice a month, once a month, or once a quarter release cycle. But I’m fine with any of them as long as they pick the cadence and stick with it. Given my deep belief in an agile development approach, I don’t really care what’s in the actual incremental releases at this point as I fully expect the furthest out they’ll be able to see is one quarter.

It reminded me of something I often tell TechStars teams – “slow down to speed up.” I see so many startups rushing to just get stuff out, without thinking hard about “what that stuff is and why anyone would care.” Part of this is lack of understanding of what you are trying to accomplish, but some of this is a lack of product cadence. When you have a clearly defined cadence (e.g., a monthly release) you can focus on “what’s next” while in parallel explore “what’s after next.” But in the absence of a cadence, you are always working on “what’s next” and never looking out any further.