For the User Experience, Good Bones are more important than Good Skin

The Internet economy placed great value on the concept of the network effect. This was often a test of a business model's viability by venture capitalists. To exploit the network effectively meant that as the network of users grew, the value of the network also grew. But the network effect could only be achieved if the business model could achieve scale. Scalability was seen as a measure of how likely the technology - and the business - could accommodate explosive growth and usage required to achieve the returns that investors expected.

Scalability put pressure on technology architecture, and by extension, on the user experience. It meant that as network traffic grew exponentially, the technology architecture had to accommodate the increase gracefully, and that it had to be transparent to the end user. Scaling to hundreds of thousands or even millions of users meant that the user experience could not degrade in any way lest the business be compromised. It meant firms had to commit resources for integration and expansion, lest the user experience suffer.

In the post-Dot com era, user experience architects are now under pressure to design for evolutionary extensibility. This means that user experiences must be architected to "scale", in order to accommodate changing business models. For example, a user experience that was a standalone system is now private-labelled, requiring a new system of navigation. Or a business that evolves from a B2B model to a B2C one means more customers are novices - which means the user experience needs to satisfy a new and different audience.

Yet like designing a house for an earthquake zone, architecting user experiences for evolution can be challenging because it is done in a highly dynamic environment. In some cases, this has meant defining an information architecture that can accommodate changes and updates beyond the first release. Yet, like a well-designed yet small "starter" home, it can gracefully accommodate new additions such as bedrooms or a sun room - as the needs of the owners change. The architecture - like the bones of a body - are the underlying framework upon which the user experience is based. As site experiences become more technically complex because they are serving more varied audiences across channels, it becomes critical that the central organizing principals remain based around the goals and tasks of users. The "look" of the experience - thought of as the "skin" - is only as useful as the framework upon which it rests. Bones matter more than skin for the user experience.

Mistakes in architecture can result in fundamental flaws in the user experience: for example, bad architecture can impact navigation, which will directly affect usability, which in turn impacts establishing and building customer relationships. Yet a site with a decent architecture can often "get by" with less than stellar graphical treatment. Mistakes in the information architecture phase result in the need to re-architected later on, which is a costly and time-consuming process. It's the user experience equivalent of doing structural engineering on your home, as opposed to minor cosmetic enhancements.