Episode 153 of The Informed Life podcast features a conversation with distinguished UX design consultant, educator, and author Joe Natoli. Recently, Joe co-authored the second edition of Leah Buley’s classic book The User Experience Team of One. That was the subject of our conversation.

Joe shifted from another discipline (graphic design) into web design early on, as I did. Back then, there was no “UX design” – the field emerged over time with contributions with folks like Jesse James Garrett, whose Elements of User Experience influenced Joe.

The User Experience Team of One was another milestone in the discipline’s development – it’s served for years as a “UX 101” text. As Joe pointed out, the ideas in the book are timeless:

The first month, literally, of working on this project was really all about picking through, especially on the practice side, on the methods side, picking through each one of these things and, essentially trying to, not in a bad way, but poke holes in them to say, “Okay, would this work? Does this still hold water? Does this still hold true? Could I still see myself walking into an organization, a client tomorrow, and suggesting that they do this?” And to my great joy, to your point, the answer to almost all of that was, “Yes, yes!” And the more you do it, and the more we are talking about it, like the more excited you get, because it is really remarkable that so much of this still works and it’s simple, it’s clean, it’s clear. It doesn’t require some massive special skill or knowledge or infinite years of training, like, “Now you’re a master after forty years, you can practice now.”

Among these ideas is one Joe introduced to the text, the “UX value loop”:

there’s two sides of the equation when we talk about UX… you have a product in the middle—product or service, whatever. On one side of that equation, you have users; on the other side, you have a business. Both parties need to see value in that product, and both parties contribute a role to improving it.

So on the user side, a user has to look at this and feel like, “Yeah, okay, this is worth my time. I’m gonna at least check it out. I’m gonna try it, I’m gonna see what happens.” If from that first interaction, they get value back in some way. “Yeah, that was worth my time. Yeah, that was worth my money. Yes, this makes my life better in some way.” They keep using it, which generally means that value comes back to the business as well. Money made. Sometimes money saved if it’s an internal app or it’s more downloads or it’s market share or whatever.

But here’s the kicker to the entire equation. Unless that value does come back to the business, people on the business side of the equation are never going to spend the time and the effort and the money required to continuously improve that product. So my thing has always been — much to the chagrin of many people that I’ve talked to — but after a while, they understand that this is actually empowering. My thing is business first, user second.

This “business first, user second” idea isn’t popular with lots of designers. But it neatly exemplifies Joe’s reality-based approach to designing. It’s a refreshing perspective, and one that needs more advocates.

I’m glad to see a new version of The User Experience Team of One, and was thrilled to get to talk with Joe about it. I hope you get as much value from our conversation as I did.

The Informed Life episode 153: Joe Natoli on The UX Team of One