The Fukunaga approach to UX Design

“Sin Nombre” is the title of the independent movie, written and directed to Cary Fukunaga. His approach to writing and directing was that caught my attention some months ago and thought it will be usefull to apply in  User eXperience (UX) design. First lets see what the movie is about, here is the synopsis:

After murdering his gang’s leader, a teenager joins a family of Honduran immigrants making the dangerous journey across Mexico to the United States, avoiding a fellow gang member who has been sent to kill him along the way. [Source Yahoo Movies]

Fukunaga’s approach was to do research before starting to film anything. He travel with illegal immigrants in trains, talked to gang members or “mareros” (the local term for this type of gangs) and even had two ex-mareros help him with the slang and way of expressing.

The movie has been acclaimed internationally and is very well done. One of the strongest attributes is attention to detail (which leads to some strong scenes), high pace and scenery. Things Fukunaga couldn’t have figured out without the research.

In the case of software, research is needed if we want to provide a pleasant UX experience to our customers.

Most of the time we create software to solve a problem. If we follow Fukunaga as example, we should not just interview the people the suffer the problem, but “ride the train” with them. In other words, let them take you through that moment in life where they suffer the problem. If we continue with the movie theme then we can conclude that:

story boards are to sketches as filming is to programming.

UX design is about continuous improvement.

We have done the research, now we need to determine if our conclusions are correct. So, we need make a rough sketch of the software and show it around the future customers or users. Then after some feedback, lets redraw the sketches with more detail. We continue doing so, until we have something that we can take to the next level.

The next level is to build the core of the software. This means that we only include those features and functionality that is the least needed to solve the problem. Once we have a good core, then the rest of the features will be easier to add. In addition it will keep things simple, which will save some resources. But more important it will give you a application that some of your customers can try and give you feedback on.

It is always about continuous improvement through research and attention to details, unlike movies there is no final version.