The UX Blog

Your source for the best User Experience (UX) content across the web.

[theuxblog]

Consider the hierarchy of needs when designing for human beings!⠀ ⠀ #ux #userexperience #userexperiencedesign #uxdesign #userresearch #uxresearch #uxstrategy #interactiondesign #informationarchitecture #ia #humanfactors #hci #ucd #usability #webdesign #ui #webdev #humancomputerinteraction #contentstrategy #design #uxcareers #digitalmedia #customerexperience #cx #userinterface #uxdesigner #designers #designthinking http://bit.ly/2lJbdni

[theuxblog]

How to Deal With UX Recruiters

Recruiters have a questionable reputation across many industries, and UX is no exception. But that doesn’t mean you should avoid talking to them at all costs. There are good recruiters and bad ones. While a good recruiter can help you secure the perfect position and boost your career, a bad one can waste your time and even set you back. If you want to avoid that, you need to be able to distinguish the good from the bad. This article will give you some important points to consider.

Pre-screening call

If a recruiter has looked at your resume and profile and decided that you're a good candidate, they’ll give you a call to establish that you're not obviously a sociopath. This is especially important in UX, where working with other people is a key part of the job.

And just as they are determining whether they want to work with you, you need to decide whether you want to work with them. While they are learning more about you, you have to learn more about them. It’s a conversation, not a monologue (and if you do find that your phone call turning out to be a monologue, politely excuse yourself and hang up the phone).

The first thing you need to make sure of is that your recruiter understands the industry. If they don't, they won’t be able to help you. If they had no idea what UX is until this morning because they had previously specialized in hiring accountants, and yours is the first UX role they are recruiting for after a quick Google search, they won’t be able to help you. Politely thank them for their time and move on.

The second thing you need to establish is whether they understand the job requirements and can tell you more or less specifically what the role will involve during that first phone call. UX is a broad field, and you can specialize in many areas. Make sure to find out whether this position is right for you during that first call.

Another reason it's important to ask your recruiter about the job in detail is to establish that this is a UX job in the first place. With UX becoming more and more of a buzzword, I see many recruiters trying to pass off everything from digital marketing to front-end development as UX. Only after asking questions over the phone will you find out that a job requires you to, for instance, create banners or social media content.

Warning signs:

Your recruiter asks you what UX is.

You're having a video call with your recruiter on Skype and they are sitting in a boardroom packed with people you don’t know.

Your recruiter is using a lot of industry jargon where plain English would have sufficed.

Your recruiter ask you whether you know Python or Javascript.

Encouraging signs:

Your recruiter has worked with people in the industry for over six months.

Your recruiter has good recommendations from both UX candidates and clients.

Before the employer interview

So, the recruiter is happy with you, you're happy with them, the position still sounds good, and the employee wants to meet you. It may all seem like plain sailing from here, but, unfortunately, there are still things that can go wrong.

If you’ve done your bit during the phone interview, you should now be working with a recruiter who knows the industry, the employer, and the role. However, they may still suffer from a lack of motivation, or exhibit poor attention to detail. They may fail to tell you something important about the employer (such as that they insist candidates present their portfolios on a projector) and consequently sabotage your chances for a position.

To avoid that scenario, ask your recruiter questions about the employer before the interview. Find out how many people will be present, who they are, whether there's a dress code, whether the employer prefers to see a digital or a print version of your portfolio, etc. That way, you can significantly reduce the odds that you'll blow it.

On the other end of spectrum is the recruiter who wants you to fill the position so badly that they give you all the answers. An unscrupulous recruiter can give you a list of all the questions you are likely to be asked, and even go so far as to tell you what responses an employer is looking for. By allowing feeding you answers, such a recruiter is doing a disservice both to you and to the company. They aren't interested in finding a perfect match; they just want to fill the position.

Warning signs:

Your recruiter told you that the interview will be with “Matt” but neglected to mention the other five people present.

You expected the interview to be a general chat about your work and experience, but instead you were asked to solve a problem.

Your recruiter told you (or, worse, revealed in an email) a list of the technical questions the client intends to ask.

Encouraging signs:

Your recruiter told you names of everyone who will be present during the interview, and emailed you links to their LinkedIn profiles.

Your recruiter told you how long the interview will be and whether or not it will involve tasks or problem solving.

Your recruiter told you whether or not there's a dress code, and whether the client prefers candidates to present a print or digital portfolio.

After you secure the position, you’ll naturally stay in touch with your recruiter. However, there’s still something you need to do for all the other recruiters that you have been working with while looking for a new job. You should thank them all by email for their help, and let them know that you have secured a position. After that’s done, make a note of the good ones – you'll want to get in touch with them next time you're looking for a job. Take note of the bad ones too – and be very cautious the next time they approach you with a job.

About the Author

While Vera’s background is primarily in communication and UX design, you will often find her participating in a variety of cross-disciplinary activities, including research, front end web development, and writing. In the past she has written content for a web design course, spoken at a conference “What Do You Know” in Sydney, and contributed to various UX industry websites.

- via http://theuxblog.com

[theuxblog]

How to Become a Successful Entry Level UX Designer

User experience design has probably been around for 3.3 million years since Homo Habilis first started creating stone tools (a design that still exists today in the form of the hand axe... or maybe the chainsaw), but jobs with “User Experience” in the title are very much a 21st century creation. All types of organizations, from giants like Google to recently founded startups, are looking for user experience (UX) experts in research, design, strategy, and engineering. In this article we'll look at what it takes to be a successful entry level UX Designer.

Those experienced enough in UX can easily earn big bucks. PayScale, a database of individual compensation profiles, shows a median wage of about $46k for web designers and $72k for user experience designers, that's a difference of $26k! According to Glassdoor, another salary site, a “User Experience Designer” at Google has a median salary of $117,118.

The UX job market is expanding rapidly, at the time of writing there are 12,103 vacancies on LinkedIn for jobs with “User Experience” or “UX” in their title. Plenty of positions to fill and a lot of money to be made.

A “User Experience Designer” at Google has a median salary of $117,118!

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Money and opportunities aside, what makes a product or service successful? Why does one mobile application have a larger user base than another? Why does one website enjoy more traffic than another even when they provide the same solution to the same problem? In a lot of cases, the answer is that one product meets the needs of the user better than the other competing products on the market.

The ability for a product or service to provide a strong value proposition that satisfies user needs usually results in user growth and continued use. User experience is not just about making beautiful interfaces; it is the process of constant learning and validation of design decisions that deliver value to all stakeholders in a product ecosystem. If user needs are satisfied, they won't look an alternative solution.

Donald Norman is widely viewed as the father of human-centered design. As a prestigious design, usability, and cognitive science researcher, he was the first to explain the impact of user-centered design during the decade of digitization. In the last few years, we have witnessed a tremendous growth in media and interaction rich websites and mobile apps. To survive the cutthroat competition and high standards users expect, organizations need to be design-centric to stay in the game. Good user experience design is a fundamental requirement for any company to stay relevant in the market. For organizations to have a significant advantage over their competitors, they need a stellar UX strategy and UCD at the core of their business.

That said, UX professionals must possess certain qualities and an insatiable urge for learning to be successful in the field. Let's take a look at those qualities.

Good user experience design is a fundamental requirement for any company to stay relevant in the market.

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Qualities That You Should Possess

1. Passion for Work

Ready to get started in the field of user experience? If you want to excel, then the first requirement you must meet is a passion for making others’ lives easy. You need to be self-motivated. You need to be the one who can analyze the needs of users and observe patterns in their behavior. You should be able to deconstruct complex systems and create models/frameworks to help make sense of them. You need to strive to understand why a user will benefit from a system and what motivates them. In the start of your career, you may not be earning a six figure salary. But, don’t lose heart—you can climb to the top of this profession with hard work and sincere effort.

2. Innovation, Vision, and Creativity

You should have the courage to think outside the box and to take risks to design something new. Designing a step ahead of others (considering problems users might face in the near future) is a brilliant way to stand out from the crowd. This type of innovation is part of UX Strategy, an emerging aspect of UX that bridges the gap between strategy and execution.

3. Know New Things

The third quality is relentless research and learning. Research the latest techniques and design principles. Research new studies and articles published by thought leaders in the field of user experience. Read what prominent user experience designers say about the early career steps that led them to where they are now. Look for the latest trends in the job market. You should do research on budding startups and think about how you can help them grow their businesses.

4. Understand the Need for Change

The fourth quality is dynamism. Although we may think the way we perceive and interact with the world is constant, all things change over time. Keep modifying approach to satisfy the changing needs of users.

“The Only Thing That Is Constant Is Change -”  ― Heraclitus

Design Principles and Techniques

If you think you possess all the qualities of a great designer, then let’s move to the next step: design principles and techniques. An essential step to being a designer is learning the methods and tools related to your profession. The best way to gain the required knowledge for good user experience design is obtaining a degree in Human-Computer Interaction or a related field. Many colleges provide bachelor’s and master’s degrees, certificates, and diplomas. Here are a few examples from some top schools:

Georgia Tech – Human Computer Interaction

University College London – UCL Interaction Centre

Carnegie Mellon University –Human-Computer Interaction Institute

University of Washington - Human Centered Design & Engineering

A quick Google search for “HCI degrees” or “UX degrees” will yield many more results.

However, according to many hiring managers in the field of user experience design, preference is always given to someone with a great portfolio and no degree over someone with a master’s degree from a top institute and no portfolio. But a combination of both degree and experience will almost always be the top choice.

The skill and commitment of a UX designer is easily judged by the quality of their portfolio. If you are a newbie and don’t know how to build a portfolio without experience in the field, there are many ways to do this. Try to work for experience at the initial stage of your career, not for money. Approach some startups for an internship. Offer to do an expert review and provide design recommendations for a small company website. Avoid presenting your college project and show work with real-world outcomes instead. If you can convince your professor to let you do real-world projects for academic credit, then you can have two birds with one stone.

Tools and Software

Hard work is necessary for success, but working smart will help you climb the career ladder faster. You don’t need to analyze and design from the ground up every time. The following are a few tools and software programs on the market that can make your work easier.

If you’re doing UX research, then you should know how to use MS Excel, Google Docs, and similar tools. I’ve found having good mind mapping software, such as XMind, to be helpful for research analysis, as well. You might want to become handy with SPSS Statistics, Nvivo, Morae, Silverback, etc. (this will be overkill for most small projects, and they cost a lot of money for licenses). There are many cheap/free research tools on the market such as User Testing, Usability Hub, Google Hangouts, Skype, etc. that will be sufficient for smaller projects.

If you're more interested in UX design, it's worth noting that some companies prefer candidates with expertise in specific software packages. This shouldn't discourage you, mastering numerous software packages gives you a chance to compare functionality, and then choose the best software for the project at hand. Some of the most common software include:

Balsamiq

Mockflow

Mockingbird

Hotgloo

Pencil

Pidoco

Sketch

Adobe Photoshop

Adobe Illustrator

Adobe Experience Design

Axure

Invision

Flinto

Keynote (mac only)

PowerPoint

Large Corporation or Small Startup?

I am not a mind reader, but I know that by now you might be thinking, “Okay, I have the relevant traits, knowledge, and techniques. Now who’s going to hire me?”

A lot of organizations who aren’t aware of the unfair advantage they can gain from having a stellar UX team

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While there a lot of organizations who aren’t aware of the unfair advantage they can gain from having a stellar UX team, there are some businesses out there who focus on driving product development and strategy with user experience rock stars. Here are a few examples of the types of places that hire a large chunk of UX professionals:

1. Tech Giants with Complex Product Ecosystems

Websites are becoming more sophisticated every day, and, as businesses expand, their products need to functionalities to satisfy new user groups. Introducing new features to a complex system comes with the risk of affecting existing parts of a system. That is why we need to gain a holistic understanding of a user’s tasks, the context of use, user needs, etc.

One misplaced button can cost millions of dollars in revenue, at least in the case of major online platforms like Amazon or Alibaba. Moreover, one bad experience can lead to loss of customers and bad publicity. To avoid all these types of situations, tech giants are in a perpetual search for UX experts to build delightful and seamless experiences.

Working at a big company will provide you with a low-risk environment and a chance to work with a variety of people. You will likely have mentorship and supervision from senior UX professionals. However, you may face a lot of bureaucracy, company politics, and projects will sometimes move a lot slower than you want them to.

2. Budding Startups

If large corporations are oil tankers of the tech world, then startups are speedboats. They are always searching for product/market fit in hopes of becoming the next billion-dollar unicorn. For the UX professional joining a startup, this means that the risks are high, work is dynamic, and the ability to adapt to changing conditions is critical. If you have a business mindset and are passionate about building innovative experiences, then go for a startup. You can learn a lot more, a lot quicker than at a big company, but you might not have the same amount of training and mentorship as you’ll mostly be learning by doing.

Startup salaries are usually on par with the tech giants but tend to get lower once you go outside startup hubs such as San Francisco, New York, London, etc. Startups will give you greater responsibility and more opportunity for growth in a shorter amount of time, but this can be risky as 9/10 startups fail in their first year.

The type of company that you choose to work in will depend on your personality and what you’d like to gain as a professional. There’s also the agency route, which will give you the chance to work on a range of projects, but is typically more of a consulting role where you might not be able to get as in-depth compared to designing a product at an in-house position.

Best Online Resources for UX Job Tips

Whether you are a novice or expert, these resources are your best friends for keeping up with the latest in the field of user experience:

1. Usability Counts

The main Usability Counts website is a great resource, but this particular article is written by an experienced hiring manager who describes what he looks for in a candidate. Some extremely useful tips here.

2. Nick Finck

If you are just starting your career in UX experience, then my personal recommendation is not to pass up on this article. This article can give you all the information you need to know before getting started.

3. User Testing

Want to get a job as soon as possible, but a lack of experience is getting in your way? This article was written for you.

4. Nielsen Norman Group

Now onto the more general resources. My personal favorite, this website provides you with articles and the latest research findings in UX. These guys have been in the game for decades and should be read by any serious UX professional.

5. Smashing Magazine

Smashing Magazine is maintained by market experts who themselves are in the profession of user experience design and are guardian angels for those striving to achieve expertise in this area.

6. Usability Post

If you want to discuss various issues regarding website design and usability, then quickly bookmark this link. It is probably one of the best sites dealing with real life problems of designers at work.

7. 52 Weeks of UX

Joshua Porter and Joshua Brewer are prominent UX designers and brilliant bloggers. Their brainchild is 52 Weeks of UX. The blog is maintained personally by them and, according to their readers, is one of the most brilliantly explained blogs they had ever followed.

8. UXPIN Blog

This site contains lots of UI resources and tools, such as responsive web design tips, UX cheat sheets, resources for design patterns, wireframes guides, and other useful articles.

9. Awwwards

This article has a massive list of quality resources. It categorizes thought leader websites into strategy, UI, UX, process, deliverables, tools, psychology, trends, design patterns, and book reviews. In short, if user experience design is your religion, then this link is your Bible.

Conclusion

This article should have provided some ideas about how to start a career in user experience. Add a comment if you have any resources to suggest for this article, or if you have any opinions on anything I wrote. Good luck to all of you just starting out in UX!

About the Author

Nicholas Tenhue is currently User Experience Manager at Orion Health. He has served as VP, Creative at Capy Inc., Co-founder of RunTroll, Design & Data Viz at Intel, and User Researcher at SCEE. He is also an alumnus of Microsoft Ventures, Founder and former President of EIT Digital Alumni. He also holds a dual MS in ICT Innovation from UCL and KTH. 

Learn More about Nicholas.

- via http://theuxblog.com

[theuxblog]

Responsive design has many form factors.⠀ ⠀ #ux #userexperience #userexperiencedesign #uxdesign #userresearch #uxresearch #uxstrategy #interactiondesign #informationarchitecture #ia #humanfactors #hci #ucd #usability #webdesign #ui #webdev #humancomputerinteraction #contentstrategy #design #uxcareers #digitalmedia #customerexperience #cx #userinterface #uxdesigner #designers http://bit.ly/2myxVR2

[theuxblog]

Designing A.I. first Products

There’s a guideline in UX that says a machine should never ask a question to which it can work out the answer on its own. Alan Cooper and his partners, authors of About Face, widely considered the Bible of interaction design, claimed that such a machine would be like a considerate person -- one that takes an interest in us, is forthcoming, conscientious, perceptive, anticipates needs, and displays many other attributes besides.

Today, as artificial intelligence develops at an accelerating clip, these attributes of a considerate person are increasingly attainable through machine learning technologies, and it is no longer crucial for elements of UX to carefully create the illusion of such a person. Instead, a new set of questions arise:

What should the relationship be between human and machine?

How do we make A.I. accessible to, and inclusive of, everybody?

Given that current A.I. technologies rely on large amounts of data to learn, how should A.I.-first products treat data and privacy?

At Clarifai, we believe A.I. is the next platform for our digital interactions. We see an opportunity to revisit many user needs with an A.I.-first approach, just as web needs - such as communications, media (photos, videos), and even business directories - were revisited with a mobile-first mindset. Beyond this, we are also confident that a new set of possibilities will emerge, just as geolocation-driven products emerged with the mobile platform.

As with the transition to mobile, there will be attempts to “cross the chasm in two small steps,” so to speak. That is, some will attempt to sprinkle A.I. into their products in the same way that many sprinkled mobile into their products, creating A.I.-enabled systems just as people created mobile versions of their websites. There are probably many instances in which this sprinkling approach is sufficient, as was the case with mobile (mobile sites are good enough for restaurants), but here at Clarifai we’re interested in the set of experiences that will be transformed with an A.I.-first approach.

To begin, one of the fundamental questions when thinking about A.I.-first design concerns the relationship between the machine and the person. There have already been a few stances taken:

The Oracle

The Oracle will know what a person needs before they know it themselves. In this relationship, the machine is superior to the person as it is infinitely more intelligent. This is what Google wants to build.

The Henchman

The Henchman exists to serve the person’s whims. If the person wants to leave 15 minutes late for a meeting, it isn’t going to object because it assumes the person knows best. In this relationship, the machine is subservient to the person, much like the Genie to Aladdin; its intelligence and power is solely used to fulfill its master’s wishes. This is what Apple wants to build.

The Partner

We see a third path here, where machine and person work side by side. The machine’s goal is never to replace the person, but rather to augment them, allowing the two to work in concert.

But what does this mean? For the foreseeable future, there are many things that people can do better than machines, such as empathy, metacognition, and efficiently sensing and encoding new information. Machines, on the other hand, are very good at other tasks, such as organizing information, interpreting data, and deriving insights from situations too complex for people to fully comprehend. We believe this relationship will continue to evolve, but there will always be something both parties bring to the table.

With this belief in mind, the design team at Clarifai works hand in glove with the engineering team. There isn’t a bias towards a user-centered approach or a tech-centered approach. Instead, we aim to meet in the middle. One side of the room considers the capabilities of our tech, and asks, “what is possible now that this exists in the world?” The other side of the room looks at what people want, and asks, “how can A.I. best help serve these needs?”

We leave you, then, with three of the top challenges on our minds as we think about designing for an A.I.-first world.

Building human-friendly A.I.

New technology is always scary; especially new technology at the magnitude of intelligent machines. Making our products relatable and approachable is always a central priority for our design team. This is particularly relevant for our iOS photo app, Forevery.

Making teaching A.I. accessible to, and inclusive, of everyone

Right now, people code in order to tell machines what to do. We believe that as A.I. advances people will instead teach machines what to do directly, and it is important for the teaching to come from a diverse array of viewpoints. It is our design team’s goal to make this teaching experience enjoyable, inclusive, and human.

Protecting data and privacy

In the current paradigm of A.I., machines need a lot of data to learn. We think carefully about how best to design our products to obtain the data needed to make machines smarter. That said, we are also deeply aware that the acquisition of data needs to be done respectfully, and so we constantly challenge each other to think creatively about what privacy looks like in an A.I.-first world.

We’re excited to tackle these questions and more as they arise, and we look forward to sharing our learning with you! In the meantime, we’d love to hear your thoughts on A.I.-first design!

About the Author

Jason Culler, Senior Designer and Chief Coffee Enthusiast, has experience spanning multiple design disciplines, Jason focuses on creating products that are usable, meaningful, and filled with delight. And delicious. When he's not tinkering with an Aeropress or seeking the city’s best chocolate babka, you can find him obsessively working to improve his penmanship and trying hard not to break two kids. Check out Clarifai’s A.I.-first products! 

- via http://theuxblog.com

[theuxblog]

Build product, measure data, learn and generate ideas. Rinse and repeat!⠀ ⠀ #ux #userexperience #userexperiencedesign #uxdesign #userresearch #uxresearch #uxstrategy #interactiondesign #informationarchitecture #ia #humanfactors #hci #ucd #usability #webdesign #ui #webdev #humancomputerinteraction #contentstrategy #design #uxcareers #digitalmedia #customerexperience #cx #userinterface #uxdesigner #designers #designthinking http://bit.ly/2mco8yY

[theuxblog]

Contextual Interviews: Context is Everything

“I am the wisest man alive, for I know one thing, and that is that I know nothing.” ~ Socrates

Contextual interviews are a technique widely used in user experience research and user-centered design. Sometimes referred to as contextual inquiry, these structured sessions revolve around a one-to-one interaction between the researcher and the user and are conducted in the environment where the user typically works or accesses the system in question. The researcher observes users completing everyday tasks and takes note where there are points of 😬 distress or 😄 delight!

These types of interviews are a blend of observation and dialogue. They allow the UX researcher to examine the physical setting and assess specific product usage as it relates to location, environment, and surroundings. Ultimately, they provide the team with added direction in defining project requirements or refining existing processes. For more information, read this excellent article.

Contextual interviews are a popular method in the field of User Experience and are widely used. They’re also extremely helpful! But, will this method always work? (spoiler: 🙁)

Big Plans

“A good traveler has no fixed plans, and is not intent on arriving.” ~ Lao Tzu

We recently hit the road with a national 🚛 truck rental company to help determine how (if?) their mechanics and technicians were utilizing the company’s on-demand instructional video content. Our goal was to find out why the videos weren’t getting more views and attempt to understand any contributing factors. We also wanted to find out when, how, and why they were accessing the videos and what we could do to encourage usage. Each of these questions seemingly required 👓 observing the technicians in their 👩‍🔧 work environment. Logical conclusion = Contextual interviews. 

[ed note: I’ll stop with the emojis. #promise]

The plan was for two of us to sit with a technician while he/she worked and have them walk us through their normal process of accessing the content. One researcher would conduct the interview while the other took notes. We were also accompanied by a corporate representative to help pick up on any verbiage or jargon that might arise during our conversation.

We scheduled thirty minutes with each participant and had a general outline of what we wanted to accomplish. We were set to hit the road and visit three states, 12 locations, and interview approximately fifty users. 

Reality Bites

“My commitment is to truth, not consistency” ~ Mahatma Gandhi

Above is one of my favorite quotes and a represents a longstanding principle in my approach to User Experience Design + Research. The point is to keep an open mind and follow where the experience takes you. If you have any expectation of the outcome, you’re increasing your bias in finding the truth. 

It’s essentially letting you know that ‘it’s OK to change your mind’! It’s OK to realize that your plan must change due to circumstances. And in fact, you are being paid for your critical thinking! Follow the truth and forget what you think you know. 

Within a few minutes of the first interview, it became clear that the environment was not well suited for the interviews. Why?

It’s loud

And dirty

And hot (This was August)

And dirty

These are large garages with multiple bays and pits covered in grease. At any time, 6–10 enormous vehicles are in the building — many running for diagnosis. Music is blaring. The intercom intermittently squawks. Technicians are constantly on the move; helping each other, fetching tools, and logging their progress at one of the two (or three) computer carts in the shop. Shift leaders, fuel pump operators, and drivers can be found coming in and out.

It’s busy

And chaotic

And did I mention hot?

The environment is extremely distracting. It’s difficult to hold a conversation with this level of noise and almost impossible to ignore the constant interactions and interruptions. 

During the second interview, we began to feel we weren’t getting honest, unfiltered responses with co-workers and management in such proximity. Any criticism or negative feedback was given very cautiously. We didn’t want the technicians to feel they couldn’t speak freely. 

The interviews also took away from real work. These men and women need to hit very tight repair time estimates and they take great pride in their work and their team. They watch the clock and are extremely aware of their surroundings. To idly stand by while the remaining team members worked made the technicians feel noticeably uncomfortable. 

This presented a problem. 

After three attempts, we decided it was time to abandon the idea and find a better solution for the remaining interviews. Would we get useful data if we went with a more traditional interview style? 

Switching Gears

“If you don’t contradict yourself on a regular basis, then you’re not thinking.” ~ Malcolm Gladwell

The short answer is yes. There we several advantages to taking these interviews in a private room rather than in the shop. And changing our approach early gave us ample time to refine our process. This course correction allowed for some noticeable benefits: 

Respite from the heat

Privacy from peers and management

Quiet environment

Sanctioned break with no time on the clock being used

We were still able to have technicians walk us through their process and we would occasionally step out to the shop floor if they needed to show us a specific action. We received a greater level of detail concerning the platform by creating a quiet, welcoming environment. And we learned a lot.

I had no idea that a 7th injector cleaning on a Volvo D13 was so intricate!

Here’s the thing. I don’t know a damn thing about truck repair. I don’t even change my own oil. But, I like people. And I like to hear what they have to say. We may have lost out on some of the behavioral data by removing ourselves from the work environment, but what we gained in user insight more than makes up. 

The lesson is: Don’t let the tool define your process or hinder your progress. Contextual interviews are a great tool to have in your arsenal, but don’t insist on using them when the circumstances dictate otherwise.

About the Author

Andrew Jacobs is Sr. User Experience Architect at Williams Forrest. You can find him on Twitter or Medium.

- via http://theuxblog.com

[theuxblog]

The UX of Wedding Planning: A Case Study

Empathize – Who is your stakeholder? Who is your user?

This is easy right? The stakeholders were my future husband and I, but since we are both very close to our parents, and since they were financing the majority of this undertaking, they would also have to be considered stakeholders. My future husband and I were the CEO’s of course. There must be a hierarchy.

Our end users were the people on the guest list, being required to RSVP, they were part of the process. Naturally the guest list was revised many times prior to invitations being sent, as I grappled with the competing priorities of my own requirements and budget.

Define – Research vendors, establish a budget (and break it)

Devising the budget was more challenging than expected. My mother had agreed to pay for the wedding (minus what the groom’s family traditionally pays for), but she didn’t provide an exact figure. We had established a number years ago, when it whole enterprise was hypothetical, but she never actually said, “You have X amount of money and when it’s gone it’s gone.” She was consulted on all of the major expenditures, but never once told me that the cost was too high, even when asked. This was problematic when it came to defining other requirements because I really didn’t know how to evaluate their priority in regards to an implicitly variable budget. I just tried to keep everything reasonable since spending massive amounts of money pains me and my family is by no means wealthy. Obviously, this isn’t an issue for everyone. Many couples pay for their weddings themselves and have strict budgets. I knew we were working with a financial limitation, but not being able to quantify that limit was definitely a pain point when planning (say that three times fast).

The research element of the process was time-consuming, but straightforward in terms of identifying overall value for a few key items and vendors. We listed these things in order of importance.

Venue

Photographer

Catering/Drinks

Flowers

DJ/Entertainment

Clothing (dress, accessories, tux rental, etc)

Cake

Stationery (invites, save the dates, thank yous)

Favors

You get the point

Some of these items simply reflect the natural order when it comes to expense, but not everyone prioritizes these elements the same way. Just as an example, because I come from a photography background I have high standards when it comes to wedding photographers. I know how much work they do and I know how much time they invest. I value their talent and organizational strategy, etc. I knew who my photographer would be before I knew I was going to marry my husband (don’t judge me – I’ve known my photographer since high school, which is far longer than I’ve known my husband).

Ideate - Make a Pinterest board (of all the things you cannot possibly do)

The easiest tools at my disposal were Pinterest and bridal magazines. I honestly used Pinterest the most since it was free, easy and all in the palm of my hand. The pitfall with this approach lies in the amount crazy ideas out there and the fact that you will, in reality, carry out perhaps 25 percent of your “pins”. Don’t get pissed when your total vision doesn’t happen because unless you have NO budget it really won’t happen that way.

Keep it all together (literally and figuratively).

I also got myself a handy little wedding-planning binder that saved me more than a few times. It kept paperwork in one place, held all my vendors contact information and contained timelines and guides for reference.

From here we move on to coordinating a color scheme, which was easy because we took my husbands favorite color and my favorite color and matched the right shades of each. Themes emerged from our color choices that helped us identify proper attire for both the wedding party and guests. Obviously, the groom and groomsmen were much easier to dress because tuxes just don’t have the amount of options that women’s fashions do.

Piecing it all together…sort of

Since it’s so difficult to have four women of varying body types agree on the same dress, I took that out of the equation to a degree. I made sure they all tried the dress on and that everyone was comfortable, and that was that. Dress choice made. I picked charcoal gray for the color because it went with our color scheme and looked great on everyone since it’s a neutral color and close to being black (and who doesn’t look good in black)?

Other parts of ideation included the creation the seating charts, which was made problematic by the existence of weird family dynamics and people who don’t like each other, but act like they do. I remember asking my husband if he had any family members that shouldn’t sit together for any reason and his reply was a very casual, “No”. “Must be nice!” I said (insert eyeroll here). 

Test - Evaluating your event before the big day and beyond

There are only a few aspects of the event that can be tested here. The first concerns the planning of the menu. Many caterers offer a tasting so you can be assured 1) that they can cook, and 2) that the menu items are to your liking.  This applies equally to your baker, although the cake may not look exactly how you envisioned it. Your final test before launch comes in the “dress rehearsal”, since this is literally a run-through of the ceremony. I have to stress the importance of choosing the right participants for the “study” that was my rehearsal.

You really only have one shot. There’s no way anyone in their right mind would go through the costly trauma of a wedding more than once. You can go to fittings, you can sample cake and do menu tastings, but you never what the event will be like until it happens. Bear in mind that, as with any usability testing, there will be results that you didn’t anticipate and things that will go wrong.

There are always exceptions to the rule of course. There are those who’ve been married more than once and decide to proceed with the pomp and circumstance all over again. I’m not going to dwell on these cases though, because the thought alone makes me anxious.

Feedback is supplied by your guests, not only in the form of comments and responses, but in the overall energy of the event. Whether you were going for a lively evening or a sophisticated soiree, what matters is that your guests enjoyed themselves and, most importantly, that you and your new spouse are happy.

These factors can be quantified in a few ways:

Food - Did people eat everything that was offered and what feedback was given? This pertains to both the meal and the cake of course!

Favors - What was the response to the gifts that were given to guests? Did people leave them behind?

Overall atmosphere - What was the energy like? Did people stay until the last song or did the place empty out right after dinner? Were people engaged in what was happening throughout the evening?

Your overall satisfaction - This can be difficult to judge because, if you’re anything like me, all you're capable of feeling once the stress and craziness are over with is pure joy!

When all is said and done, the most important thing is the new chapter you’re starting with your new spouse. I gained a loving and supportive husband as well as an equally supportive family. I finally got that older brother I wanted when I was 6 (my parents made sure to explain why that couldn’t happen). In fact, I actually I got two of them, and two awesome sisters as well. My overall satisfaction rating for this part of the experience would be a comfortable “highly satisfied 5” on a Likert scale.

Photos by Erin Hession Photography 2016

About the Author

Lindsay is an inquisitive UX Designer with a background in photography and visual art. She is focused on creating compelling experiences and inspired by building better ones. Lindsay is currently a UX design consultant in the Indianapolis, Indiana area. Her work can be viewed at http://bit.ly/2ll3yiS

  - via http://theuxblog.com

[theuxblog]

Design > Measure > Learn for shorter feedback cycles!⠀ ⠀ #ux #userexperience #userexperiencedesign #uxdesign #userresearch #uxresearch #uxstrategy #interactiondesign #informationarchitecture #ia #humanfactors #hci #ucd #usability #webdesign #ui #webdev #humancomputerinteraction #contentstrategy #design #uxcareers #digitalmedia #customerexperience #cx #userinterface #uxdesigner #designers #designthinking http://bit.ly/2kU5vSF

[theuxblog]

My Big Fat UX Wedding

Or how to keep Groomzilla away

As a UX designer with a background in Law and Visual Communication, I have been solving problems for a while.

Yet, little can prepare oneself for solving a challenge of a different kind: your very own wedding.

Well, that is what I thought.

My partner is from South Africa. I am Spanish. We met in Dublin, then moved to Melbourne and eventually decided to get married in my hometown in the Canary Islands.

The ‘problemo’: Organise an enjoyable multicultural wedding 10,000km away without breaking the bank or losing my cool.

A UX wedding?

I could have just asked a wedding planner to do the job for me. It’s pricey but convenient and hassle free. But design is a useful tool that can bring happiness to the world. So why let other people do it if you can personally bring that extra bit of happiness to family and friends?

Also, when one of the members of the family to be is a designer, there should be no place for cookie-cutter solutions or for design debt. This was going to be a design challenge, so why not applying design thinking?

To take this approach and ‘design’ the right experience and to do it ‘right’, designers need to put on the UX hat and become the gatekeeper of all decisions.

UXers have a number of techniques to explore users’ needs, discover opportunities and come up with effective ideas to solve problems. This can be very useful when planning a wedding.

On my journey I used UX tools and produced some UX artefacts: questionnaires to interview ‘users’, personas, journey maps, MoSCoW analysis and paper prototypes to name a few.

Here’s a selection of tips and thoughtful interaction points that you can try, should you ever wish to create your own Big Fat UX Wedding

3 UX Wedding Tips

#1 Research to Create Guest Personas

Generative research helps define users’ problems while collecting knowledge about them. Exploring guests’ needs, behaviours and context when having fun is critical.

UX designers aim to be as empathetic as possible to provide relevant solutions to users. Yet some research suggests that empathetic UXers tend to be ‘egocentric’. Meaning they predict and assume what users would like based on their own preferences.

This can be problematic in the context of wedding planning, as traditionally the couple’s ego play a big part. After all, they most likely know the guests quite well. Most assumptions should be validated and (if necessary) discarded after research and testing. Weed out opinions. Look for facts.

Through anecdotal research and interviews, designers will identify patterns to create personas. As Joe Toscano puts it, they are “the personification of the research”. These personas define whom the story is about and the designer should work to address their needs and fix pain points.

I found guests’ social media accounts a good starting point to unearth their insights when diverging on the research phase:

Facebook showed me the places they fancy going or weddings they have been to;

Spotify showed me what they currently listen to;

Pinterest showed what they would love to experience.

Gabriel was our primary ‘user’ and one of 3 high level personas created. ©Mario Quintana

Pro tip: Jakob Nielsen keeps reminding us that designers are not the users. But what can you do if this is going to be your wedding? Aim to be as objective-ish as possible. To circumvent this, I suggest embedding your partner with other guests when researching and creating your personas.

#2 Define a Minimum Viable Wedding

Personas help shape a Minimum Viable Wedding. The most basic wedding family and friends would enjoy. A simple MoSCoW analysis can be useful to prioritise and categorise the options or ideas obtained during the research phase. Write ideas on post-it notes and get some guests to help you out organising them. We must always think about the personas we are designing the experience for. Some of the ideas we wanted to put forward:

Must include Eurovision and Metallica Hits;

Should be outdoors;

Could be on the beach or in the country;

Won’t be corny, so hearts, pastel colours, and lacy details were out.

Pro tip: If you can, try to organise an event, or better still a mini wedding before the ‘big day’. In our case, some guests could not travel to Spain. So we organised a smaller celebration in Melbourne before the ‘big one’. This helped test ideas and assumptions as I listened and watched guests closely. It was our ‘test’ before we ‘launched’ the final ‘product’.

MVW Hit: choosing an informal venue. MVW Miss: Mobile phones interrupted the magic of the day. ©Mario Quintana

#3 Map the Guest Experience

Good wedding planners consider what happens before, during and after the big day. It is a holistic approach — with more interaction channels — that adds value to the overall experience. A Minimum Viable Wedding turns into a Minimum Viable Experience. User experience design, turns into customer experience design.

The map represents the big picture. A story about how the personas would reach their goal: have a great wedding experience. The map helps identify pain points and opportunities to improve the journey (e.g. when or what channel to use to send relevant information).

Journey maps helps to focus on users goals and to engage with collaborators.  ©Mario Quintana

The map represents the big picture. A story about how the personas would reach their goal: have a great wedding experience. The map helps identify pain points and opportunities to improve the journey (e.g. when or what channel to use to send relevant information).

To get a better understanding of the context, designers should also take journeys with real personas. It’s a perfect opportunity for guerrilla testing. Embark with guests to check venues, restaurants and entertainment options. I must admit that my empathy building and active listening skills were not very sharp at some of these sessions. Blame it on the bubbly!

Pro tip: Plot some ideas and start the customer guest journey map with an unexpected surprise, a peak with emotional weight. In our case this was a skydiving video of us telling the news of our engagement. Boom.

My partner jumped first & showed the words “WE ARE…”. Then on my jump, I ended the sentence: …ENGAGED”

5 Thoughtful Interactions

Robert Hoekman notes that, ‘user experience’ is “the net sum of all the interactions, impressions and feelings a person has with a website, digital product or service”. Including what people say about the product or what it looks like. With this in mind, designers should pay special attention to all interaction channels and the branding of the experience.

After much iteration I created a relevant and consistent wedding identity. This informed the prototypes and touch points. It also helped set the tone and was key to communicate with guests.

Consistency on touch points prevents design debt. ©Design Mario Quintana

#1 Website

Design a simple website to give information about the event and the location if you organise a destination wedding. Hick’s Law says that “Every extra choice increases the time required to take a decision”. So based on guest research and to reduce decision fatigue, curate a few ideas (things to do, visit, eat…) and become decider in chief. 

Wedding websites can be a bit predictable. So why not inject some personality with an engaging natural language form to RSVP and to entice users to subscribe to a newsletter. When making decisions people prefer to avoid losses than acquiring gains. So to sell the benefits of joining a content king newsletter, use an opt-out strategy. In our case 100% of the guests joined the list.

Engaging short natural forms brings a smile in the mind. © Design Mario Quintana

#2 Social Media

Helps keep costs down and engage continuously with guests. As soon as I posted the skydiving engagement video on Facebook, interaction started.

You can also organise Facebook and Whatsapp groups, where attendants can engage and bond while discussing options, e.g. Airbnb accommodation or renting a car together. Guests also found Pinterest walls useful for dress code ideas.

#3 Events

Don’t keep all interactions digital. Organise events and activities before and after the ‘big day’ where family and friends can interact. This will help break the ice and form stronger bonds.

A printable -and shorter- pocket booklet for those who prefer an unplugged experience. ©Design Mario Quintana

#4 Surprise Surprise

Plan to surprise and delight your guests. With Skype and Whatsapp I coordinated a flash mob with 5 people from different countries. This surprise added extra fun and was one of the highlights of the day. We repeated it — a few drinks later — and guests joined in, which made the dancing even better. Certainly we could have done it a third time but as John Saito says, repetition could kill the “delight” of the experience.

#5 Keepsake

For Don Norman the most important part of the experience is the ending. Follow his advice and turn the Design Offence-Seeking Antenna to high. Ensure the keepsake evokes positive memories. I settled with a final newsletter that included:

Highlights short video where everyone was featured;

Professional photos of guests taken on the day (via dropbox link);

Wedding playlists. Guests might smile next time they listen to Black Eyed Peas and remember our flash mob!

By using a UX approach and paying attention to the interaction channels, we generated buzz, encouraged interaction and most importantly removed pain points of personas. In Gabriel’s case, we limited the use of mobiles on the big day and only allowed children of close family. Drastic, I know. However, both ideas were well received.

UX Wedding Takeaways

#1 UX designers can be good wedding planners

UXers share many skills with wedding planners: empathy, creativity, communication and negotiation. You don’t need to create complex omnichannel user experiences. Simple user journeys or high level personas would be enough to add UX thinking into the mix. This will prevent designing for a generic everybody and keep Groomzilla or Bridezilla at bay.

#2 Share your vision to improve the experience

It is hard to avoid the urge of designing your own wedding the way you want to. But being sensitive to family and friends’ expectations pays off.

Designers should surround themselves with people willing to help. It is worth the joy of sharing the excitement. This forges stronger bonds and save heaps of money!

#3 Face it, something will not go according to plan

Create a resilient experience and consider all eventualities. Don’t leave any stone unturned. Be agile enough to iterate quickly and prepare for edge cases. Unexpected cold-ish weather despite organising a wedding in the city with the best climate in the world? External heaters at hand? Checked! Pay special attention to the ‘peak’ moments of the journey. They will make the experience memorable and the ‘dark cold valleys’ forgettable.

Then withdraw. Relax. Let go. You have created a great experience for your guests. Don’t forget that this is also a party.

You must have fun. Enjoy it.

Happy Planning!

PS: if your peaks ‘collapse’ on the day, just open the bar earlier and close it later. This could erase any unfortunate experiences.

About the Author

Trained as a lawyer and turned UX and Visual designer, Mario Quintana keeps solving problems to make the life of users and clients easier. The designer is currently based in Melbourne where he works as a UX consultant for Shinesolutions. Part of his design work can be found at www.madebymario.com.

- via http://theuxblog.com

[theuxblog]

How Mature Is Your UX Practise: An Interview with Margaret Hanley

Recently I attended the Melbourne UX Leadership Meetup, that was presented by Margaret Hanley, she was sharing her ideas and insights around UX maturity models. In these models Jennifer Fraser and Scott Plewes identify milestones in which you can gauge how mature your practise is. Like any function or practice, not all businesses have embraced UX design to the same degree or level of maturity.

Knowing how important the growth of a UX capability is for the wider business I wanted to ask her some more questions over a cup of strongly brewed English Breakfast.

(For all of you on the run and not lucky enough to have time to sit down for tea I have released a Podcast of our chat, listen here)

Margaret Hanley has experience delivering and growing UX capabilities for clients like the BBC, Razorfish and WTG, she has taught user experience management at global conferences, has spoken at various summits including IA in Atlanta, on retail IA for Debenhams and UX Australia and has been the Director of Information Architecture for Argus Associates working alongside the likes of Louis Rosenfeld and Peter Morville.

So Mags why is it important that UX plays a part in leading business direction and decisions?

“UX keeps the bastards honest: it focuses on the customer and their needs; rather than on profit and the whiz-bang of technology. UX has the customer or user in mind every time an organisation has an interaction with them. It’s different from using designers who care about just the brand and visuals, and product who cares about the product selling? And an organisation that cares about the user will make more money; if it is combined with the right product.”

How do we know when UX is guiding a business?

“Measurement...A lot of what we do as UXers, is based around qualitative research, so we must learn to quantify our impact. Be it being a customer satisfaction score like NPS, reduced numbers of emails to customer service, increased use of the site or selling more product.”

We know that to get UX practice as part of the business we need to have our executive and leadership teams selling and believing in the value of UX, how can we build their trust and get UX into the boardroom?

“Trust can only be built by understanding how people work. Use UX techniques to understand how the Exec Team work -  interviews with key stakeholders, talking to the people they work with, how the company is measured, what is deemed success or failure.

You can go in guns blazing, but you need to prove value. The days of ‘it's just good to do this’ are gone.”

You mentioned Leah Buley during your talk; why is some of her research so beneficial?

“Leah has game. - she has worked with organisations at the cutting edge of UX at Adaptive Path; written a book about being a lone UXer in an organisation and has worked as an analyst at Forrester.

So her research at Forrester and now independently is important because it allows us to understand the conditions where a UX/CX practice will flourish and make an impact.

This is important - because UX can be commoditised. It can be that a set of methods arejust applied - ticking boxes (we’ve done usability), rather than actually impacting the users and the organisation.

It makes a case for where a UX function should live and how many people should be in the team.”

There are 5 stages in the Jennifer Fraser and Scott Plews 2015 indicators of user experience maturity model. Do you think it is possible for Melbourne to start working at a Stage 5 level and what do we have to do to achieve this?

“As I said in my talk, I’m not sure there are any Stage 5 organisations in Australia or maybe the world. I could be wrong. I do know that the team at Seek led by Cam Rogers and Kirsten Mann at Aconex are pretty close.

Most Melbourne UX teams are lucky to be Stage 3 - applying the processes and getting some wins.

To start working at Stage 4 (the one I consider most attainable), you need strong, experienced leadership. This is where we fall down. There aren’t many people who have the experience of doing this for more than 10 years; and then working across agencies, in-house and consultancy.

We need to consciously develop this talent, which is where the UX Leadership Group is invaluable; a place to learn, meet others at the same level, share stories and gather experience. We all need a safe place to say, ‘I don’t know.’”

Mags you gave me a UX Maturity Scorecard at the end of your presentation, I immediately wanted to take it to some of my clients. How can businesses start making changes to help them to build more mature practices?

“Benchmark themselves first; you can only move forward if you know where you are now. Then work out where in the model you realistically want to be in 12 months. This gives you an idea of how you need to develop the practice and impact the business. You may just want to shore up the UX practice because people have left - so you are a strong 3.

It could be hiring a UX leader to take the practice from 2 to 3; or building up the core team with team leaders to allow the most senior UX Leader to focus on culture and working in the organisation to take it to Stage 4.

You may not be able to do this on your own - consider finding a trusted, confidential coach or mentor who can be your sounding board.”

For all those solo UXers out there struggling to see how they will ever get their business to adopt design thinking, what three pieces of advice would you give them?

“Short term impact - how can you prove worth with a small project? Understand how the business makes decisions (analytics, product sales, reducing costs, revenue) and learn from the people who are doing this well in the organisation. Be ready to compromise - sometimes we get so evangelical that we annoy people; be able to see others’ perspective; and work in a team”

If you are in need of a mentor, need some advice about how to build your practice or create some actionable milestones for 2017 please reach out to Margaret Hanley

A big thank you to Margaret Hanley, Morgan Consulting and Sabine Brix

Header illustration by Mark Conlan, http://bit.ly/2lIwZvZ

About the Author

Naomi Easson is Senior Digital and UX Recruitment (recruiter) Consultant at Morgan Consulting.

- via http://theuxblog.com

[theuxblog]

Critique too early or too late in the design process can be counter-productive.⠀ ⠀ #ux #userexperience #userexperiencedesign #uxdesign #userresearch #uxresearch #uxstrategy #interactiondesign #informationarchitecture #ia #humanfactors #hci #ucd #usability #webdesign #ui #webdev #humancomputerinteraction #contentstrategy #design #uxcareers #digitalmedia #customerexperience #cx #userinterface #uxdesigner #designers #designthinking http://bit.ly/2jI3bza

[theuxblog]

How to Discover a Niche User Base in a Month with User Research

Have you ever built a product?  And have you found yourself unable to get your idea on track? This is a case study demonstrating how we discovered a niche audience in a crowded market in under a month, simply by talking to people.

The idea

We wanted to build a unique product for stock market traders. In case you're not familiar, these are the people who work in front of dozens of computer monitors, watching numbers and pushing up oil prices.

So our question was: what might be a good product for these people? What would they pay for? To answer these questions we needed to identify their main challenges. What are those pain points in their lives that we can solve in order to earn their gratitude?

We sat at our tables in the UX studio office and reflected on these questions. In the end we realized that the answers were surprisingly obvious.

The process

Instead of thinking about traders' pain points for hours, I logged into my Facebook account and searched for groups like "stock market traders". I started to publish some ads in those groups - for example:

“Hey, We are developing a new product for Traders but we don’t know if we are crazy. I am very curious about your opinion. Can I reach out to you?”

And I also created some eye-catching pictures to help the ads get noticed.

Over the next few days I received numerous messages from traders around the world, and organized interviews over Skype. All of these were recorded, and at the end of each day I spent a few hours reporting the interviews. This phase took about two weeks.

Our questions were designed to identify the traders' pain points, and they included the following examples:

What is your main challenge in trading? 

What gives you the biggest headache? 

Why is this a problem for you?

How do you try to solve it?

How much time or money do you spend for the solutions?

Can you give me an example when this problem occurred recently?

After approximately 20 interviews I came to see the bigger picture. Almost all of the traders gave the same answers. I collected these answers in a table and used color coding to signify different categories of problem, such as technical or psychological.

Here are the results:

The table shows that many of my interviewees experienced psychological difficulties arising from their trading process. For example: “Emotions, especially while you are in the trade. Fear, greed, hope, anxiety...”

Results

Drawing on these interviews, we formed some initial ideas about the most important types of problems experienced by stock market traders, and we wanted to test these ideas with a wider audience to see whether they were valid. We used the same process as before - Facebook, eye-catching picture, copy - and we led respondents to a page containing a survey comprising the questions that were asked during the telephone interviews. This time we targeted more people. Almost 50% of the visitors filled out the survey and provided an email address so that we could contact them later. This phase of the experiment took another two weeks.

Would you be surprised if I were to tell you that we received completely different responses to the surveys than to the Skype interviews? 

Well, we didn’t. After almost 50 surveys we got back exactly the same results.

We were ecstatic. We had found something. We had discovered a unique problem that hadn’t yet been solved in a crowded market. I had butterflies in my stomach.

Conclusion

You can make many assumptions about the needs of your audience, but the best way to build a niche product is to begin by askinga few simple questions about your customers' habits, challenges, problems, and solutions. The more questions you ask, the better you'll be able to build your product. Of course, this was just a first step, and our product can fail at any time because of a tiny, tiny thing. But if we don’t listen to our customers from the very beginning we'll never build a great product at all. 

About the Author

David Bartos is the marketing manager at UX studio, a Budapest-based UX design company. He has a wide range of experience in online marketing and helps people to find their perfect product scope before launching it.

- via http://theuxblog.com

[theuxblog]

If you don't explore many design possibilities, you'll never come up with the best possible solution to a problem.⠀ ⠀ #ux #userexperience #userexperiencedesign #uxdesign #userresearch #uxresearch #uxstrategy #interactiondesign #informationarchitecture #ia #humanfactors #hci #ucd #usability #webdesign #ui #webdev #humancomputerinteraction #contentstrategy #design #uxcareers #digitalmedia #customerexperience #cx #userinterface #uxdesigner #designers #designthinking http://bit.ly/2jqe1pr

[theuxblog]

Great lessons from lean startup! Build > Measure > Learn⠀ ⠀ #ux #userexperience #userexperiencedesign #uxdesign #userresearch #uxresearch #uxstrategy #interactiondesign #informationarchitecture #ia #humanfactors #hci #ucd #usability #webdesign #ui #webdev #humancomputerinteraction #contentstrategy #design #uxcareers #digitalmedia #customerexperience #cx #userinterface #uxdesigner #designers #designthinking #leanstartup #lean http://bit.ly/2ju3fiN

[theuxblog]

Be a great UX #leader!⠀ ⠀ #ux #userexperience #userexperiencedesign #uxdesign #userresearch #uxresearch #uxstrategy #interactiondesign #informationarchitecture #ia #humanfactors #hci #ucd #usability #webdesign #ui #webdev #humancomputerinteraction #contentstrategy #design #uxcareers #digitalmedia #customerexperience #cx #userinterface #uxdesigner #designers #designthinking http://bit.ly/2jiZA79

[theuxblog]

The UX of Gifting and Returns

Tech and Improving the Gifting Experience

Valentine’s Day is the holiday when significant others go through the gifting ritual. But gifting can be a draining process because it is hard to predict someone’s wants. When faced with what to get loved ones, users may turn to technology or gifting services for a hand in picking gifts. In this article we explore the user experience of giving a gift.

Gifters want to use technology tools to feel like they “found” a better gift that the receiver will like. Increasing the certainty of receiver satisfaction removes the doubt in the gift giver’s mind. Does the removal of doubt change degree of expectation? With less doubt, the gifter has less at risk and a guaranteed reward. However, if the gifter has a greater risk, she has a greater feeling of satisfaction when the receiver loves a gift the gift giver took a chance on.

But using a gifting service removes part of the personal nature of gifting. No longer does the gifter feel that they personally selected a gift for the giftee. Instead, gifting is now delegated to algorithms and automation. This is similar to using a personal assistant to complete a task, like picking up laundry. This turns gifting into a service and reduces the user’s form of expression. Another issue is that gifting can be considered a life skill and delegating it to a a service infantilizes the user because she now lacks agency in being able to make her own gifting decisions. In this impersonal sphere, a person who doesn't know the user can use automated services to get a gift. For a gift to remain personal, does it still require the act of shopping and selecting gifts to themselves?

A compromise of using a gifting service involves the user’s avatar. The avatar or agent can be considered an extension the user. Having an avatar go shopping for a user is acceptable because it is a form of the user. Because the avatar represents the user, it may not be considered an automated gifting process. The user may likely feel engaged and not feel like they are delegating tasks to an external source because the avatar may feel like a construct of the user.

Sociopolitical reasons for gifts

In the digital age, gifts might go away because of sociopolitical reasons. No longer do people need to bring material things to others to manipulate them. Also, there is a recognition that there is no need to wait for occasion (such as Valentine’s Day) for gifts.

Artificial intelligence(AI) is reflected on society through generosity versus greed. With the decreased focus on material goods and increase in interest of experience, the idea is that experience is what matters most. There is certain monetary value based on tangible things. Physical gifts are rooted in a set price and status. Often physical gifts are not things the user needs, but rather status symbols. At the root, gifting is both cultural and mathematical.

The Gifting User Experience Journey

In gift shopping, the user goes through an emotional journey. The user initially faces the “What should I get?” questions and doubt in finding a present that the receiver will like. Then, the user shops at multiple places for research of what to get, facing anticipation. Sometimes, the user will get frustrated when she is unable to find a suitable gift. If a great gift is found, the user will have an “AHA!” moment and satisfaction. If the user has to settle on an acceptable gift, the user feels an “I guess this is ok” mellow feeling.

Types of gifts also provide different user experiences. The user may ask “Do I want to give a safer or riskier gift?” This question often falls into play when the receiver may want something very specific. With a safer gift, the user gifts the receiver exactly what the receiver wants. Both parties are satisfied, but there is no emotional spike related to risk or expectation. With a riskier gift, the user has increased anticipation and potential that the receiver will love or hate the gift. On the other hand, the receiver also has increased expectation rooted in anticipation, questioning “What will I get?” but receives a greater reward when the receiver gets something interesting and surprising that she loves.

Taking gifting out of the physical domain reduces the risk associating with gifting. The receiver has projected a lowest common denominator of what is known –what she wants. The gifter has to gain insight into things that the receiver wants –information the gifter often knows but forgot. There is also “the hunt” factor and the intent that “someone put in the thought”. No longer does the user have to hunt through Tiffany’s or Harry Winston’s for the perfect diamond necklace. Nor does the user have to put thought into the gifting process if it is automated. Because there is no investment, the user has less emotional attachment to the outcome of the gift. How can we increase emotional engagement by simulating gifting?

A technologically functional, frictionless gifting experience may be the solution. However, this new gifting system may change the way humans interact with not only technology, but also with each other.

Gift Alternative Solutions

Gift cards

Instead of buying presents, people often give gift cards. Gift cards are a completely different user experience from physical gifts because it reduces the risk of giving something the recipient won't like. The receiver’s odds of surprise and delight are reduced. But the receiver knows what they are getting and is able to utilize the $20 to Victoria’s Secret. Gift cards are practical, but do not provide the emotional experience. They are almost taboo to give on Valentine’s Day.

Gift subscriptions

Gift subscriptions are a great middle ground. The receiver has declared interest and openness to be surprised. Upon receiving the gift, the receiver will immediately be surprised. However, gift subscriptions spread smaller bursts of surprise out over time instead of giving the receiver a big bullet of emotion.

Customized gifts

There is also the option of creating something as a gift instead of purchasing. Some websites and services like Etsy, even connect makers with people who want something made as a gift. Ultimately, people are less creative than they think they are but want to customize. The idea of a customized gift is great but doesn't scale well. The gifter also faces a high risk that the receiver may not like the gift, but accept it out of politeness.

Gifting experiences

Instead of giving a physical present, gifters can provide experiences. Experience gifts are special for people who don't want stuff and an alternative vehicle for gifts. Gifting experiences seems to be easier because this level of gifting is not based on tangible things. Although experiences also contain a price tag, experiences provide a value that may be greater than an item to buy/sell. An experience may also provide a personal value to the receiver that may not be equated to a numerical price tag.

Returns

If the receiver does not like the gift, the problem arises in sending back gifts. Before the digital age, returning gifts was much more difficult and considered rude. Now, the receiver can slap a label on their Amazon box and send it back on its way. Because returns are more automated, the act of returning a gift is considered more socially acceptable, even during events like Valentine’s Day.

But how can we aid or push returns? There is the option of creating an automatic return service that gives the receiver a picture of the gift and allows the receiver to accept or decline it. If the receiver declines the gift, the gift will not leave the warehouse.

In practice, automating returns is difficult. Brick-and-mortar retail clients do not like processing returns because customers buy more by physically going into store. Disappointing gift can create more revenue when the receiver goes into the store with a dress return and leaves with 4 new pairs of shoes.

If experiences are valued more, the return rate between experience and tangible gifts should be analyzed. Because experiences are personal to the user, returning experiences may be awkward. Experiences may also be unreturnable. Gifters may have great intentions, but if the receiver of Soulcycle classes has never biked before and hates exercising, the experience may not translate to any meaning. In turn, these experience gifts would mean nothing to the receiver and end up being unused or re-gifted if returns are questionable.

Trained as an intellectual property attorney focusing in medicine, Amelia Wong brings technology to reality with design. Creativity drives her and she offers detail-focused solutions to solve problems efficiently. As a designer, her process begins with empathy. Listening to and identifying with the user are essential to creating the best user experience. Her work can be found at www.amelia-wong.com

- via http://theuxblog.com