#uxpin

[niklas-stiller]

Which software do you use for your interface design at the moment?

[cawerkuu]

Knowledge Wants To Be Free

That's Why We're Giving Away As Much Of It As We Can.

[mattiewilson]

Ngā Tūtohu Aotearoa – Indicators Aotearoa New Zealand website

Wellbeing data for New Zealanders from Stats NZ (a New Zealand Government department).

Created wireframes, mockups and prototypes with UXPin for the responsive website, in English and te reo Māori.

Collaborated with agile developers on a website that met NZ Government Web Standards for accessibility and usability, and Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG).

Conducted workshops and usability testing to ensure design, content and data were appropriate for an audience that ranged from novice to expert users.

Collaborated with experts throughout the organisation to define information architecture and create content, and presented to government and Māori partners.

[carasuxuiblog]

7/18 UXPin The Definitive Beginners Guide

How to Think Like a UX Designer

Simply, question the problem, gain context through user research, and build just enough to validate existing assumptions and uncover new needs.

Any time someone explains a problem that needs a design solution, consider these 5 questions that Chris Thelwell (Head of UX at Envato) asks his team before every project.

1. What do we know we know?

You want to discuss anything that will influence your decisions in the project. For example, lessons learned from previous projects, existing user research insights, even opinions held by certain stakeholders.

Keep a running tally of assumptions vs. facts. If you’ve revealed an assumption, you need to move it now to the second question.

2.  What do we know we don’t know?

Identify the risk behind assumptions.

3. What do we actually know, but think we don’t?

Check if we actually know any assumptions may be facts.

4.  What are the unknown unknowns?

Have we failed to discover anything so far that could completely ruin the project? What haven’t we thought about yet?

5.   What does success look like?

set SMART goals

Specific

Measurable 

Actionable 

Relevant

Trackable

IDENTIFY CONSTRAINTS

Timing- Deadlines

Technology- How well can the development team write the code so your system’s response time feels instant? Do your servers sup- port enough bandwidth to feed data quickly in real-time? Does the location of your data centers affect quality of experience in certain regions?

Medium- What do users already expect from your type of product? What current mental models and UI patterns does your product need to incorporate?

Budget- How much is allocated to the project; can it be stretched incase of unforeseen delays or challenges?

Stakeholder Interview Checklist

GATHER CONTEXT FOR SOLUTION

1. User Research

You can conduct them in the office, over Skype, or even at the user’s location 

Ask plenty of open-ended questions about user behavior (not user opinions

Your goal is to explore the whole scope of the experience – not just the immediate area of focus. For example, if you want to create a competitor to Netflix, don't just talk to people about how they currently use Netflix. Talk to them about other services they use – legal or illegal.

2. Prioritizing Requirements

Once you’ve finished the user interviews, you’ll want to review the answers and start identifying patterns. Check those patterns against any existing quantitative data (e.g. in-app analytics).

Categorize solutions based on a 4 quandrant grid that checks them again design constraints like effort and impact. You may want to go for low effort high impact.

3. Prototyping the MVP

You might start sketching the MVP, then move into a digital plat- form to create a digital prototype. It doesn’t need to be pretty, but it must function well enough to test with users.

You’re on the right track if the MVP prototype faithfully executes the 20% of features that deliver 80% of the value. Only increase the fidelity as you test additional hypotheses (e.g. if your brand colors affect usability).

[antonzaderaka]

https://showcase.uxpin.com/

[jonbosworth]

A Design Sprint in 60 Minutes

Validating a Product before Writing a Line of Code 

This is a talk Ian Latchmansingh and I gave at a software development conference recently teaching developers how (and why) design sprints work. In our own personal experiences, despite how well proven the process is by groups like IDEO and Google, getting developers to agree to spend 5 days in an intensive “design” meeting can be a challenge.  

We wanted to be able to prove the value of a design sprint in a single hour-long session. To do that effectively, we need them to see how rapid prototyping and early testing of a hypothesis shows us if anyone wants it before writing a line of code. So in a pre-conference workshop, 2 days before our talk, we introduced a small group of attendees to the design sprint process by having them participate in a highly accelerated sprint, cramming 5 days of work into a 3-hour tour.

5 days > 3 hours > 1 hour

For the sake of synthesizing a design sprint, we had to work on a problem. We picked the conference’s advance communications (website, emails, social, etc.) as the problem space to be addressed in the sprint. Because the people in our workshop were attendees (exposed to the advance communications) it was like they were all sorta subject matter experts (SMEs). Our challenge was to go through the 5 days of the sprint in 3 hours to produce a storyboard from which we could design and test a prototype of their hypothesized solution. Then, in our hour-long session on Saturday, we could present the work we did in the workshop, the prototype, and hopefully even some testing to convey how the sprint works to the larger group.

(image from Google’s Design Kit)

Monday: Understanding the problem space

After gaining an understanding of the conference’s mission and goals, the group looked through personas we’d created and data we’d collected in advance (via surveys of attendees, some pre-baked expert interviews with developers who’d attended in the past, as well as some data from the conference website). 

One data point seemed to really stick out to both teams in the workshop:

Although tech managers represented less than 10% of the attendees, they registered their teams, which made up more than 80% of the attendees.

Once they’d consumed all of the information available about the problem space and explored a number of risks and assumptions, the founders of the conference joined us for a live expert interview. 

(Paul and Katy Irwin, founders of Code on the Beach, being interviewed.)

After asking the founders about some of the risks and assumptions they identified from the data, both teams, completely independent of each other, settled on the same problem to solve. It was summarized best in this "How Might We” (HMW) question:

Tuesday: Turning abstract ideas into tangible design elements

There were some parts of the sprint that just couldn’t be crammed in, so we prepared some lightning demos in advance to get them quickly to the Crazy 8′s exercise so they could start imagining the product they want to design. Although this exercise stressed them out a little (developers seem to resist drawing) the solution sketches came out pretty nice.

Wednesday: Voting on solutions and storyboarding

After heatmap voting on the solution sketches and doing rapid speed critiques, we moved quickly into straw poll voting and were storyboarding before we even knew our time was almost up.

Even with all of us staying late for questions, we never really had the time to discuss testing the prototype with actual users. We did have a pretty well-drawn solution, though. 

Thursday: Designing the prototype and writing the tests

From the two teams’ storyboards, Ian was able to quickly build a prototype while I wrote up the user tests. 

Friday: Testing and synthesis

In the 2 days between the pre-conference workshop and our Saturday session, I took advantage of being at a conference with plenty of our target personas around (tech managers) to test the functional prototype Ian had designed. 

NOTE: Check out the presentation linked at the end of this for links to software, the actual prototype, the tests, and other resources.

Outcomes

I was able to test the product with 4 tech managers. This solution is a huge relief to each of them, however, we also learned about what issues the solution may present in execution if not considered in advance. These insights will inform the development of the registration system the conference will employ in the coming years.

It was rewarding to be able to teach this process while solving a real problem. It also made Ian and I realize how much we enjoy facilitating design sprints. In fact, we learned something sublime:

Some design sprints could be more successful if none of the stakeholders were involved in solving the problem. Outsiders just see your problems so much more clearly!

Of course, 9 people with little insight into the complexities of a problem can never be as valuable as a smart and innovative team of experts investing the full week to make sure each part of the process brings you closer to a validated solution. It’s just interesting to see how effective the process can be, even accelerated as it was, with a dedicated group of smart people that are virtual strangers to the problem being solved.

See our presentation deck from the conference for the full scoop, to see our prototype, and to find links to design and prototyping software.

[kyuxhwang]

Design System

What is a Design System?

A Design System is a collection of stylistic elements, patterns, and rules that is used as a scalable framework across a portfolio of products. A team can merge their design and development efforts around these principles in its design, code, and documentation. 

Companies that offer a suite of interdependent tools as their product strategy may benefit from Design Systems (e.g. Google, Apple, and Airbnb). In fact, this was one of the selling points for adopting UXPin when I introduced Design Systems to CSF. This was very much inline with our goal of moving away from bespoke applications and finding consistency in all of our products. 

Designbetter.co, Invision’s blog,  published a comprehensive handbook about Design Systems and how to build your own. Read it here.

[tutorialsdepot-blog]

15 Email Newsletter UX Tips for Creating an Awesome Campaign

You know the importance of a great User Experience on your website and within your product, but a lot of people overlook the importance of UX when it comes to the marketing emails you send. A newsletter with positive UX will grip your subscribers, leading to more opens, clicks and sales for your business. Unlike your website or product, where UX is often a question of design and information…

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