Think about how differently design happened, say, ten years ago. Most of us remember days of being asked simply to âmake the logo biggerâ and âboldâ certain content. Itâs not that anyone at that time didnât *want* to make great experience for their products and services, itâs just that they didnât know how to ask for it. Frankly, thereâs still a lot of opportunity to educate others on how to ask for that, but weâve largely made great strides at the organizations we work within.
Another huge shift weâve seen is in more and more, entire businesses built around the concept of delivering a great customer experience alone. Sure, some of them sell products or whatever, but the very fabric of their being starts and ends with the relentless tenacity to make good by their customers. For the most part, these companies tend to have a visionary leader who carries the torch for that uncompromising focus on the customer. What that means, is that not only is the idea of user-centered design integral to the success of the company, itâs inherent in the leadership responsible for that success. Itâs a pretty huge winning combination for us as UX folk.
Consider our design approach way back when we were being asked to make logos bigger and just tweak the navigation. Typically, weâd have made one of many design artifacts to really communicate why it was more than a simple aesthetic change to an interface. We NEEDED to illustrate that making a change in the way someone finds or accesses information requires more thought than could be properly given in a one hour meeting. We needed to bring attention to these things, because by and large, the practice of user-centered design was rather obscure. We aimed to tackle that lack of knowledge with over-documentation (at least thatâs the way we see it now).
Fast forward to the evolution of our practice. We now think of documentation in an almost taboo kind of way. Weâre able to move through design iterations very quickly with little executive oversight and design by committee all but gone. In many teams, designers are crafting an experience from sketch concept to full prototype and testing it with customers in as little as a day. The flexibility and freedom available and often afforded to design teams now is almost astounding.
Why is this able to happen? Are we UXâers just that brilliant to have adapted our approach as such to make us exponentially more valuable and effective? I believe the reality of it is largely in the adoption rate of design by our clients and businesses. People can really feel the importance of design now. Places like Apple, most notably, have shown the masses a different meaning for design and how placing importance there can revolutionize your operation. Design, much like Apple products, has acquired greater market saturation. Design is a product, and people are buying it. Our clients, bosses and counterparts are now beginning with an understanding that good design often precedes success. They expect the design process to drive out a greater understanding of both our customers as well as the solution we provide.
The change in culture and maturity of design within organizations have allowed us to work leaner, faster and smarter. That means, not only has awareness around the need for a focused, customer centered approach increased, but weâve done a pretty good job of delivering on it too. Nice work team. An important factor for the continued success of design, as a âproductâ is for us to be good shepherds of our own contributions. For us to have become more efficient, creative and dynamic is great! Letâs be mindful of how our approach is evolving as such that weâre not losing sight of the true considerations of meeting the needs and expectations of the people we design for. A new approach, technique or tool wonât change the fact that at the heart of what we do is understanding people and organizations to create value that supports both.
The world isnât made into neatly defined paths. Our place in society, business and relationships are never concisely defined by a title or label for the role we play. The journey we take through our career will never be fully defined by a statement on a piece of paper, such as a diploma.
I recently had a chance to speak with nearly thirty students or recent grad creatives about their career, skills, work experience and qualifications. The context was that each student or recent grad had 2 minutes with a number of creative professionals in a speed-dating like format. While the original intention was that the students were meant to deliver an elevator pitch and the professionals critique it, my interactions with each person were very different. Inevitably, we talked about anything each student wanted to talk about, respectively. Many of the questions I got were, âWhat is UX?â, âSo what does your job title mean?â and âHow do you think I can best get a job as ?â.
Having been asked these questions, unrelentingly from 30 people for nearly 2 hours got exhausting, but it really taught me something about myself. More importantly, it taught me a lot on what kind of advice I could give to anyone newly coming into the creative products and services world today. As I tried to describe my role, I realized that it certainly had a lot to do with design, but it had more to do with distinction of responsibility to people and principles. I have responsibility to people who build (developers), create (designers), plan (project and product managers) and make decisions (executives). Frankly, Iâve realized that my job is really to inform all of these other roles to enable their best work as good as I can. Sure, I make stuff too. Sure, I make decisions too. But when it all shakes down, I see myself largely as an advisor to so many other things and people that occur in the often complex ecosystem of an organization.
If I were to choose a single piece of advice for newly venturing creative people, Iâd say you should learn as much as you can about yourself. What do you WANT to do? An education track will never allow you to understand your full value and contributions you can make to another group of people. Once you have a solid grasp of what youâre passionate about, you can then learn how youâll be able to align that to the needs of a company. Education teaches skills. We need these, but you are more than a skillset. You are a person with passions, understanding and unique application of abilities. The good news is that any organization you may choose to join *needs* you to be more than your role. Bluntly, YOU need to be more than your role. Not because I said so, but because not allowing yourself to adapt and extend beyond a job title will be about as comfortable as trying to catch the wind.
The world has a need for people who produce content and the means by which people interact with that content. The world has a need for people who determine how much those things will cost, who would pay for them and whether or not this year is a good time to sell them. The world has a need for people who know how to organize, build and distribute those things in both the real and digital planes. Design is the crux of the majority of those things just described. One or many people can do all of those things and itâs your job to know where you are passionate about being able to help. Design is an organizational adaptogen. Designers have the knowledge and passion capable of bringing clarity to situations and decisions broadly across companies. The nature of the situation or decision at hand dictates the specific element of design needed. Be adaptogenic. Recognize the capacity of your own effect and apply yourself to any place where you can be helpful, not just where a boundary or title says you should.
Thereâs been a tremendous groundswell for doing UX design faster (and arguably smarter) over the past year or so. Iâve experienced many occasions where a client comes to us and asks that we take a âleanâ approach. The true meaning of Lean UX as I can understand it is to remove ourselves from being in the deliverable business (read: wireframes, sitemaps, flows, etc.) and shift the focus to the actual design process where the real value is provided. Most often, my colleagues and I think thatâs just great. We donât want be simple creators of artifacts, but rather really help solve problems through our thinking and approach; deliverables be damned. Whenever a client asks for this kind of approach, however, some interesting things can happen if the situations are not ripe for a lean approach. The inherent danger of pushing hard for a lean UX approach is to improperly suggest that itâs universally cheaper or more efficient.
Have You Lost Weight?
Moving away from âthingsâ we create as being the value we provide is good for everyone. Clients, stakeholders and designers would all do well to understand that the documents we create through our work are not canonical artifacts that will forever dictate how an experience is designed. Theyâll change, weâll need to learn more about the problem and people we serve and do it all over again. Thatâs life in our age as a designer. Weâve all been part of over-documenting our design decisions to the point of nausea. Taking a generally leaner approach is good form and a welcome breath of fresh air. Iâd like to think that the industry at large has taken a great step back from the âthingsâ we produce and really communicated the value of the process and approach such that many organizations are creating meaning through their products and services faster and smarter. This is all great news. The bad news is that while Lean UX can move pretty quickly in creating good designs faster, if youâre doing it properly, itâs not really cheaper. Especially in services companies and agencies that bill by the hour. The most common misconception by clients that Iâve found is in asking for a lean approach theyâre really just thinking that theyâre asking for a cheaper solution. Not true. Bad design is bad design. Lean UX suggests you start with a concept or prototype. Thatâs a fine place to start, but then you have to validate that concept with real people. That takes both time and money, which vary depending on your situation. If weâre going lean, letâs make sure weâre doing it in a healthy way. I urge clients, stakeholders and designers not to accept pure genius design, intuition-only driven solutions without having been tested with the target audience.
Weight Loss Plan
Lean UX can work. Iâve seen it. When it does work, you can have a sense of freedom and autonomy over the approach unlike you may have experienced before. Just like any other formal or informal approach though, you need to make sure you have the right circumstances to apply a lean methodology. One of the big reasons that doing Lean UX can now work well is the maturity of stakeholders and clients. Iâm not talking about the kind of maturity where everyone is polite and grown up. What I mean is that clients, stakeholders and most people receiving the value of UX work has been around it enough now to understand that the value doesnât come from the âdeliverablesâ we create, but rather the thinking put into such documents. Of course, there are still those who arenât as familiar with the work we do to have exposure sufficient enough for their comfort level to be high enough to allow for document-light UX design. In those cases, we have to navigate them appropriately, adjust our approach and educate along the way.
Are You Eating Enough?
The truth is, Lean UX just isnât right for every situation, so itâs important that we recognize when it may not be the best design approach. As mentioned, if the practice of UX design is largely new to the people on the receiving end of such work, itâs probably not a good idea to move in a lean way as it could make that person(s) feel out of the loop as they are wholly unfamiliar with the process. Theyâll want and need to see stuff. Another situation worth mentioning is remote design and development teams. Lean UX can be done here, but at some risk and far more effort required to make it effective. Most lean approaches start with a concept and test afterwards which flies in the face of typical remote teams requiring heavy documentation of the design specs.
Another thing that may seem obvious but still worth mentioning is that Lean UX is a great approach when weâre designing something like a website or app. In most cases with websites and apps, we have the ability to design, test, refine and iterate, then launch. It must be remembered that UX is often the most impactful to other systems, interfaces and experiences. As such, be mindful of your context for the design. Are you creating an immersive experience that accounts for several touchpoints both digital and non-digital? If so, starting with a concept, testing and iterating (without any up front research) could be very expensive. Additionally, we may be creating an interface that helps airline pilots determine how to adjust the flight plan mid-travel. That, for instance, is not a scenario in which we have the luxury of starting with our best guess concept to then test it later. Itâs got to be right from the start.
A Balanced Diet
As stated, Lean UX typically suggests starting with a concept and testing it later for refinement and/or validation. This should make some designers uncomfortable, frankly, especially newer designers. I say newer designers and those new or less experienced with the subject matter theyâre designing for. Without more seasoned experience, creating a concept to then test can be an exhaustive process, potentially taking many, many iterations to arrive at the final product. The Lean UX approach in this situation may actually be âfatterâ and more expensive than if weâd simply done up front research to really inform design decisions earlier.
The thing is, starting with a concept (best guess) first, then testing and refining it until weâve arrived at an acceptable point for the product is just fine. However, without having really understood the people weâre designing for by doing qualitative research to inform our design decisions, we risk losing all the great stuff that can come from a thorough understanding of what the problem is, why the problem exists and a deeper understanding of how to solve that problem. In essence, we start with a concept for what the design should do. From there, we can become mired in that concept so much that we miss a potential for a new paradigm in the design altogether. Our focus remains on making the original concept better and better, blindly working towards refinement without recognizing that an entirely different shift in the spirit of the product could be more impactful, delightful and valuable.
Part 1 of this article largely discussed how being a design leader requires us to effectively provide autonomy. Dan Pink, author of âDriveâ posits that autonomy over task, time and technique are essential for instilling internal motivation within team members who do creative work. Providing autonomy, however, is only part of the equation. If weâre to become great leaders of design for the people we work for as well as the organizations we serve, there needs to be more. Autonomy alone provides a happy team, but little else. Teams need to be inspired by vision, while having a sense of purpose while they work towards their own definition of mastery.
The Servant Is Not Who You Think It Is
Being an awesome design leader does not happen by thinking of it through the traditional hierarchies of business organization. While the org chart might physically show people âunder youâ, they are anything but. You work for your team. Itâs that simple. Some have called is servant leadership, Iâve heard other names for it, but those arenât as important as understanding that you are there to passionately enable the people you work for, not the other way around. Thereâs not much more that needs to be said about that beyond that said by Kenneth Blanchard, âThe key to successful leadership today is influence, not authorityâ. People are smart; really smart. One of the most damaging things you can do is to assume youâre smarter than everyone on your team such that you actively direct the way they do their work (remember autonomy over task and technique?). Meri Williams gave a sweet talk about that very subject at Dare Conference. So remember, influence not authority.
It really boils down to a few key points in being an effective design leader. First, understand that you work *for* your team. Next, and just as important, actually care about them. I mean personally. If you lack a genuine interest in goals and aims of the people on your team, this probably wonât be a good fit for you. Famed business author John C. Maxwell describes this in his book âHow Successful People Leadâ as people âfollowing you because they want toâ. Relationships are a part of business and people will only want to follow you so far simply because you have a title. Building relationships as a design leader is showing genuine interest in the progression of the people you work for. You need to know what drives their passion to be a designer. A common mistake Iâve seen leaders make (Iâm admittedly guilty of this) is to focus on communicating their aims for the team first, without deeply understanding the goals of the others on that team, or worse yet, communicating no vision at all and leaving everyoneâs sense of identity to interpretation.
Once you have that caring, then start acting. This is where you get to actually establish credibility as a leader. While we mentioned that everyone you work for is likely fantastic at what they do, that doesnât mean your chopped liver. If people sense that you genuinely care, theyâll then look to your acumen and ability as a designer. If people want to follow you, then attention comes to you not just to set an example, but to essentially test your chops. Basically youâre demonstrating that youâre âqualifiedâ. Maxwell describes this as âProductionâ through what youâve done for the organization. Thereâs a trick to it for design leaders, though. Youâre there for guidance and learning, not the flexing of your own design muscles for self-serving efforts. To that end, the work you do should help the people you work for get better and learn, as well as have demonstrable impact to your organization. So donât go on a G.I. Joe heroes journey just to show that you can. Allow for those unspoken standards to be set through your design work without explicitly calling attention to them.
The Student Becomes The Teacher
There are a few really interesting things that happen when you focus on helping people get better themselves. First, it has a ripple effect to the rest of the team, everyone else gets better too; even you. Teaching or mentoring someone forces you to re-learn and really know your stuff. Not to mention, it requires crystal clear communication on your part; something we can all be better at.
When we talk about working toward a sense of mastery, helping people simply get better goes hand in hand. Creating a path towards mastery should come from the people you work for though. Your role to play is helping them identify potential for strengths that they may not otherwise see in themselves. Once youâre doing this, youâre also actively helping others become leaders as well. That, is the fourth level of leadership according to Maxwell. Here again, we see such ripple effect benefits from helping others become leaders it almost needs to explanation. In helping others become leaders, you, by proxy, enable them to better help others in achieving a sense of mastery and cultivating new leaders as well. In time, you will have created a distributed leadership model, which affords accountability to the entire team, rather than on one person. Trust me when I say, that is a beautiful thing.
Do You See What I See?
Earlier we said that if youâre trying to be the smartest one on the team, youâre doing this whole leadership thing all wrong. So then, what are you suppose to do? If youâre only helping others get better, while providing autonomy over their work, that can become a pretty boring gig for your personal growth. It wonât though. Letâs also consider that the people you work for deeply crave a sense of purpose in the work they do. This is so true in designers that you could probably write an entire book on the subject. Providing a sense of purpose for people in their work is, for me, one of the most rewarding parts of being a leader of any kind. Itâs not worth beating around the bush here on how you do that. The single most vital thing to being an effective design leader can be described in one word.
Vision.
Your responsibility as a leader is to create a vision that inspires people. Sounds deceptively simple. While this topic can also take an entire book to discuss in the appropriate detail, there are a few critical takeaways for being a design leader. One secret to vision is that itâs not solely yours. It should come from a distillation of those around you; your team. You will have already understood what will allow people fulfillment in a sense of mastery, defined by them. Use that and apply long range thinking to what that can accomplish as a group and then communicate that vision out as often as possible, with as much detail as possible. Vision is not prescriptive. We talked about autonomy and itâs importance. If youâve set forth a shared vision, providing autonomy as described before allows people to find their own means of accomplishing that vision. That, in turn, creates itâs own sense of purpose and fulfillment in the work being done. I cannot stress enough how important vision is as a beacon of light in the fog of our everyday work lives. A great design leader can set forth clarity in vision and provide the autonomy for smart people to fulfill that vision in the best ways they see fit.
Remember, you donât need a title to be a leader. âWhatever you are, be a good one.â âAbraham Lincoln
Leadership is one of those somewhat tricky subjects to discuss. Most of what you read comes from âbusiness booksâ that have a tendency to send creative types into a manic state and plugging their ears. While I can understand our natural aversion to such things, itâs important to consider that weâre all being tasked with becoming more business-savvy as designers and developers. Letâs face it, weâve all asked for a âseat at the tableâ and now weâre being held accountable for our decisions. I happen to think thatâs great, but one of the results of such acknowledgement is a bigger team and greater visibility in your organization.
With bigger teams and more people paying attention to the work that we do, leadership inevitably happens. We will, and are, leaders whether we choose to be or not. Our customers have an experience with our products and services whether weâve designed for them or not and the chances of them having a great experience increase with designed intent. That same principle holds true with leadership through design. It will happen whether we choose it or not, preparing ourselves to be effective leaders only increases the chances that we can have a quicker impact to the organizations we serve. There is, however, a very, very important distinction I need to make. Leadership is not management.
Dude, Whereâs My Car?
So, management is not the same as leadership. This is not just a semantical point. A great deal of what weâve traditionally done through âmanagement tacticsâ is highly ineffective. In his book, Drive, Daniel H. Pink says, âthereâs a massive gap between what science knows and what business doesâ. I highly recommend the book as the studies it presents have given me a language to describe what Iâve long felt is sound leadership for creative people. The key points I took away from Drive is that motivation (and by extension, leadership) of people who do creative or knowledge work needs to be internally driven, which is to say that providing people things like money incentives to do a good job simply donât work. As a matter of fact, theyâve been shown to literally have the reverse effect! Internally established motivation is the holy grail for designers to be their best. It seems that external rewards and motivators have their place, but thatâs better left to the book to explain.
Itâs Whatâs On The Inside That Counts
If management and leadership arenât the same and we canât rely on the old system of task management (*shudder*) or good oleâ incentives, how do we foster internal motivation? Providing autonomy seems to be the key. Dan describes autonomy to be broken into task, technique and time suggesting that if people have a sense of freedom to choose their work, how they do it and when can lead to dramatic increases of internal motivation. What this translates to is allowing people choose âwhatâ they design. This can be tricky depending on your organization and business model, but thereâs always a means by which we can have choice. At The Nerdery, for example, projects come in as theyâre sold for the most part. Nevertheless, I do my best to allow my team a choice over available projects, and further, make sure Iâm aware of the kind of work they want to be doing so that I can help actively cultivate it. Autonomy of task goes even further by allowing the assigned design teams self delegate work for the most part. Doing so allows them to select which parts of the project they work on, which also borders on autonomy of technique. With regard to technique, thatâs pretty simple. There are many ways to execute a successful design. In order to help support the internal motivation of the team, I donât mandate a certain way to do interviews, or wireframes, but rather act as a guide for individuals to determine the what will be most effective for the problem weâre solving. Whatâs more, is that project leads often have full license to rework a scope of work for themselves (again, assuming theyâve collaborated with the client). All those things really allows a designer as part of our team to gain a sense of autonomy over task and technique.
Finally, time. I feel like time is the one thing from legacy âmanagementâ that is still ferociously tracked and policed. For designers, this can be more than just frustrating, it can be detrimentally limiting to the quality of our work. Again, context of your organization dictates your flexibility here, but as The Nerdery is a services company, we bill by the hour. Those constraints donât allow for true autonomy with regard to time since we canât always say how long weâll spend working on something. What I can do is allow team members to set their own deadlines for their work on projects (consulting the client of course). While we know we have a certain number of hours to work on a project, how those hours get allocated are up to the designers themselves. In our case, the only thing strictly enforced in that regard is that we donât go over budget (read: over hours). Beyond the constraints of project work, we have âcore hoursâ which is a time slot when everyone is expected to be fully available for meetings and such, but beyond that, you can do your work when you want. As the leader of that team, I canât think of a single time when Iâve even thought of mandating how someone should plan their time working on a project(s). Yet, the work always gets done to high quality.
Mile Marker 1
So thatâs all it takes to be a good design leader? No. In my experience this is just the tip of the iceberg. In the past, I had often boiled all this down to the differences between micro-managing and simply trusting smart people to do their jobs. Thereâs more to it than that. What Iâve learned in doing some right, and some not so right is that creative people in business want to be inspired by a vision that they can subscribe to and continue to improve themselves while working toward that vision.
Part 2 will discuss further the importance of a shared vision for design teams, working towards a sense of mastery and John C. Maxwellâs 5 stages of leadership.
Your World Is Bigger Than You Think- Customer Experience and User Experience (part 2)
In part 1 of this post, we examined how customer experience is defined and how UX could move further upstream to facilitate and execute on those customer experience efforts. Essentially, customer experience is meant to consider all relevant touchpoints between a âcustomerâ and the business itself. As we considered further, there are current methods and approaches of user experience design that account for the recognition of and design for such touchpoints. It seems that between UX and Customer Experience (CX) lies a hotbed of potential for partnership and shared effort.
Our World is Bigger, But Who Lives in it
One of the first things Iâve seen people get hung up on in any discussion between UX/CX is the definition between a user and a customer. On the surface, this may seem like thereâs an important distinction between the two. I happen to disagree, but allow me to explain. As we consider who a âuserâ is, in itâs basic sense is someone who decidedly engages with a product or service weâve designed. At the other side, most of what Iâve read suggests the definition of a customer is basically someone who is paying for a product or service. Of course, the extension of that description goes as far as people buying or procuring products/services for other people who use them and so on. Iâm personally less interested in the labels and more interested in understanding the similarities between the two.
If we subscribe to the surface level definitions mentioned, the differences between customer and user begin to wane. When we get right down to it, we design for people. The relevance between the two (customers/users) then comes in at understanding how we design to engage people in such a we that they become a customer. Other considerations, however, are that users can become customers and sometimes customers are never users. Labels aside, I propose that we think simply about the distinct needs of the groups of people within an entire customer experience. That may be, a âcustomerâ who purchases products or services for their organization. The remainder of that company may be the people âusingâ those products and services. Thatâs all fine because we can address the needs and expectations of both of those people to understand how we better serve them without focusing unnecessarily on the labels of those groups of people.
World Shaping
As mentioned, customer experience is focused on understanding all of the places, digital, non-digital, online and offline, that a person has an experience with the organization. Service design and experience strategy as a practice and set of principles in the UX world also work toward that very same goal. We can start with understanding the broader reaching business goals as defined through the customer experience vision. The business should have an idea of the people they want to serve. Where UX and service design comes in is conducting the necessary research to understand the goals, needs, behavior and expectations of those people. Later, we can match the business goals and the behavior of our target audience together and work with customer experience team members to begin mapping out how we want to deliver value. From here, we can start to examine where the distinctions may lie between customer and user in that ecosystem.
How we begin this exercise largely depends on whether this is a new or existing business. If itâs a new venture, we would begin to form a strategy of relevant touchpoints and how to fulfill on them. If itâs an existing company, we could audit all of the places, online and offline that a customer/user has an interaction with said organization. Either way, we move to a space where we start to have conversations about the most meaningful ways in which we want to create and support those interactions.
The Bridge Between Worlds
Customer experience most often accounts for reactive processes in the overall experience someone has with a company. User experience designers (including service designers) can allow for a more proactive approach to customer centricity. As customer experience defines the overall strategy and even touchpoints for customer interaction, service designers can account for the connection and flow between them. Further, UX designers can then take those touchpoints and create elegant interfaces to allow for a meaningful experience to take place within the flow of the service that also meets the overall strategic goals for the experience.
Time is a critical factor shared between CX and UX. In both fields, weâre concerned with how time unfolds and how the experience should change to be most relevant at each point in time for the people we serve. As an example, customer experience strategy may have outlined that the organization have a customer call center, a mobile app and the primary corporate website. The strategy is set. Service design can account for the journey of how someone may interact with those touchpoints to happen in a more meaningful way and complement each other over time. Finally, applied UX design can create the actual interfaces of the mobile app, website and even parts of customer call center to define how those interactions should take place. UX design can account for the nitty-gritty details that make up a single touchpoint in a service or overall customer experience. Thinking about customer experience as translating and measuring a companyâs experience goals for their customers and users then allows service design and user experience design principles to define and construct that strategy to deliver solutions that serve customer needs over time.
Your World Is Bigger Than You Think- Customer Experience and User Experience (part 1)
Customer service. I can feel confident saying that all of us at some point in time have had a run-in with customer service. Letâs wager a guess that the interactions youâve had with customer service probably involved your dissatisfaction about a product or service and a phone call with a person from that company assuring you that everything would be ok. No? Then it must have been a time when you had a really tough error or confusion with a product or service and you contacted âcustomer serviceâ for help, hoping they would walk you through the event.
Thereâs more to customer service than that. As it turns out, many organizations are beginning to understand that our current delivery of customer service, in and of itself, is actually incomplete. Usher in the term customer experience. No, this is not just a new label for the same old tricks. Customer experience, for those whoâve adopted such a term, means a great deal more than simply reacting to problems. For this, seemingly select, group of people, customer experience is:
âthe sum of all experiences a customer has with a supplier of goods and/or services, over the duration of their relationship with that supplierâ - source Wikipedia
Well, that sounds a heck of a lot like how I tried to define experience strategy. Specifically, my thoughts were:
âFundamentally, experience strategy is the orchestrated direction for the design of a product or service (or set of products and services) that incorporates any existing relevant products, services, apps, or websites for the design being created. Additionally, it accounts for both the online and offline touch points with the organization serving that design, even those not immediately within the realm of direct influence by said organization. Further, experience strategy offers an intentional, structured, engagement model to which the audience is meant to interact with the design.â
So, Where Are We?
Okay. Those two definitions are not the same verbatim. There is, however, enough overlap that makes me scratch my head. Admittedly, my first reaction felt kinda like this. This is not a situation where someone got their customer experience in my user experience. Weâre actually trying to do the same things. Customer experience is trying to account for the all experiences a customer has with their respective organization. Thatâs a tall order. Letâs also remember, that the biggest function of a user experience designer is to define and design touchpoints and interactions between people and organizations. Wow, sounds like a match made in heaven. The main wrinkle comes in when we start to talk about UX beyond a single touchpoint. What happens when we start to look at things like service design? Uh-oh. Looks like weâre stepping on the proverbial toes of customer experience professionals. We must have taken a wrong turn.
I donât think we have though. I believe what has happened is a revelation on both sides (UX and CX) in different ways. First, I believe that UX is much, much more than simply designing a single touchpoint to artfully crafted perfection. So do other UX designers. There is a groundswell in the UX community that seeks a greater purpose and provide value beyond what interfaces we create.
On the other end, we see what traditional customer service is starting to do. The welcoming of a more holistic view of customer service is on the rise. Of course, with the term customer experience, these professionals are also seeking to provide value beyond a simple reaction to a problem (see: call centers). What this means to me is two groups of people inching from opposite ends of the spectrum toward the same, unified purpose; creating better experiences for the people they serve.
Traveling to the Same Place
While customer service has long been a substantial part of overall business strategy, UX design has not. Customer experience is beginning to recognize that a proactive approach to defining the touchpoints someone will have with them is important. Meanwhile, we UX designers are seeing that we have the ability to provide value further upstream, in defining all of the touchpoints and how they weave together to create a comprehensive, beautiful, consistent experience with a single organization. Both of our professions have realized that our worlds are, and should be, bigger than we originally thought.
Customer experience seeks to define the execution of the touchpoints they've identified, which are largely reactionary in nature. User experience design aims to use research and design strategy principles to help define entire company customer experience strategies. There is a clear partnership to be had. UX design can, and inevitably does, fulfill the execution of initiatives and touchpoints defined by customer experience visions. While each group aims to dip their toes further into the others responsibilities, we should determine what the most meaningful partnership looks like. Customer experience likely hopes for aid in defining how they will actually create some of the defined touchpoints of a customer experience strategy. User experience design certainly has the capability to define larger strategic initiatives, informed by customer research. Further, UX design has the ability to execute, with targeted intent, on each of those touchpoints.
The Map of Our Worlds
As we take a look at the obvious overlap in disciplines between customer experience and user experience design, we can see partnership on the horizon. UX design can inform what customers are doing now, and what they expect to do, feel and experience. Customer experience professionals are able to translate business strategy into a set of initiatives to deliver a customer experience that aligns with business goals and vision. UX design can start much earlier than itâs currently allowed to. Customer experience is a major area of opportunity for UX design to take on a more strategic role and have a much needed earlier impact to an organizationâs overall strategic goals for the experience it provides to its customers. Experience designers can do this by helping customer experience efforts define and later design touchpoints to a total customer experience.
In part 2, Iâll write in more detail about the things customer experience professionals aim to accomplish, how UX designers can support those efforts and how to forge a more meaningful partnership between the two that can lead to more valuable interactions between people and organizations.
A typical scenario here at The Nerdery is a client that approaches us with an idea. That idea can be for a new product or service, or one that already exists. The most common request is one where the client asks, âCan you help me design my idea?â Most often, that request really means, âCan you do my project?â The answer is obviously, yes. We often find ourselves asking, however, âWhere did this idea come from?â For optimal design solutions, itâs necessary to understand, especially for existing products/services, the history of the idea, how itâs evolved and the aim for the future. Answers to those questions, among others, empower our UX team to provide rather innovative solutions to a design problem. As user experience designers, we analyze problems differently than most people, and through methodologies we build in design work weâre regularly able to synthesize data about the problem to make an informed decision on the solution.
But, what if thereâs more? Such a narrow scope of designing a solution to a singular problem, at its core, ignores the very fact that solving that design problem creates a ripple effect in the lives of the audience itâs meant to serve, as well as the business or organization serving the experience. Accounting and planning for this change, dare I say, designing with intent for it, fosters an environment for the product or service to reach optimal success. Enter the experience strategy.
Experience Strategy: An Offered Definition
Experience strategy for The Nerdery UX team means a number of things. Fundamentally, experience strategy is the orchestrated direction for the design of a product or service (or set of products and services) that incorporates any existing relevant products, services, apps, or websites for the design being created. Additionally, it accounts for both the online and offline touch points with the organization serving that design, even those not immediately within the realm of direct influence by said organization. Further, experience strategy offers an intentional, structured, engagement model to which the audience is meant to interact with the design. This engagement model acts as a customer journey that supports not only the introduction to the design in question, but the means by which that audience might find motivation to its continued use. Moreover, the experience strategy speaks to the recommended approach for establishing a continuous feedback loop with your audience to employ informed decision making to the necessary evolution of the design itself, without which, no amount of strategy can fix.
Where to begin? âšAs with most effective designs, a thorough experience strategy begins with an understanding of the business organizationâs intent and goals, balanced with a healthy baseline knowledge in the audience behavior and needs. From there, we examine areas of opportunity to support a singular design with contextually relevant influencers, such as those supporting websites, apps or services. This comes from a deep understanding of organization design. Is there a customer service department? Do you have physical locations or trade-show/conference events that can feed into the digital or non-digital experience we intend to design? Here, we can identify where opportunities to integrate and augment the design in question and further support your audienceâs mental model.
Mapping Success & Accountability
This all sounds great, but how do we know it will work? In beginning with the high-level initiatives of the business, we will presumably have defined metrics that map back to those goals. From here, it becomes a matter of priority exercises to identify the highest impact feature(s) and functionality within the larger strategy of the design and, most importantly, the currently existing products/services â and where they can integrate. Once identified, we map those back to a set of success metrics for the business. Those metrics and initial priority in design execution directly inform the approach for the oncoming feedback loop with the audience necessary. In order to truly track the success of a design, a regular and consistent plan of attack for learning from your audience and internal business leaders is critical. Our experience strategies inform that feedback loop â how often it should occur, how to use that information and, finally, how it should map back to the original business goals of the design (or, how it supports new found or changing business goals). A common business goal of our clients is increased engagement with the design. The first step with our team is defining what engagement means for their product or service. Then, we set up quantitative tracking mechanisms, such as a web analytics package to measure the frequency part of the engagement equation. Next, by finding patterns in frequency, relevant to certain design or business KPIâs, we determine where we need a deeper, in-person, qualitative understanding. User interviews, ethnography and on site observation are all ways in which we gather such qualitative feedback. The real key is, that the hard metrics (the quantitative stuff) actually informed our needs for the additional research. Even further, all of those research and feedback-loop goals were constructed based on a set of business goals, identified with that organizationâs leaders. Finally, we start building models of what this data means, in essence, synthesis. From that set of exercises comes design recommendations, or, solutions to the problem weâre solving.
The Formation of a Product Roadmap
From this comprehensive understanding of business goals, user needs, the surrounding ecosystem in which the design lives and how it all maps back to defined success metrics, naturally, a product roadmap will emerge. A roadmap of this kind can be a daunting and uncertain endeavor, but through the prioritization exercises coupled with informed decisions steeped in user research, the patterns begin to almost show themselves. This usually takes the form of development schedule or cadence (depending on your chosen development philosophy of waterfall, Agile, etc.) and the task points to integrating supporting products or services into the new design as well as creation of new feature(s) and functionality. Those tasks can be seen as the traditional âprojectâ that incorporates a set of actions to improving or modifying the product or service. This step can often include a recommendation for phased rollout in alpha or beta releases with a limited set of the targeted audience, as part of the aforementioned âfeedback loopâ.
Does Your Product or Service Have an Experience Strategy?
âProjectsâ are a natural part of creating any experience. But creating them within a silo â without careful consideration of the entire ecosystem in which a design will live â decreases the chance for success. Projects executed on a whim, without defined business goals and supported audience behavior can sometimes feel like a foolâs errand. An experience strategy provides companies and organizations with a toolset for informed decision making in product and service design by acting as a lighthouse in the fog of redesigns and endless design improvements. Inject confidence into your product and service development by knowing your productâs next three projects, rather than reacting to the last release.
âWe need help creating this new <insert mobile app/website/etc>.â âOur existing <digital thing> needs redesigning.â This is how a great deal of User Experience design work gets started. Somewhere, someone gets an idea for a new experience, or feels that an existing experience has gotten long in the tooth. Both of those things inevitably happen; ideas and time. As is most common, the idea and/or problems with an experience get communicated to UX practitioners and then translated into a âprojectâ.
As UX people, weâre good at doing projects. We have many methods, approaches, tools and methods to do great design. The stickier situation for me frequently occurs when I get started on a project and suddenly ask why weâre doing this project. See, by the time the project is under way, asking why weâve decided to commit precious time and resources to doing this is not only an uncomfortable conversation, itâs often an unwelcome one. There is a choice to be made, by many parties, as to whether or not that conversation is important enough to have, yes, but more importantly, when.
Where to Begin?
A conversation in someoneâs office, the morning shower, the annual planning meeting. Those are all places where the inception of an idea for a new experience probably take place. Events that, in all likelihood, are lacking the participation of an experience designer. Commonly, those ideas get later communicated to the design team to take on the âexecutionâ role of that idea. Make it real. As mentioned, weâre good at doing that, so it makes sense. The problem is that those new ideas and changes can be informed by the very work we do. The same tools and methods we apply to create the thing(s) are the same that can define them. I will go so far as to say that UX designers have the opportunity to even create spaces for those ideas to occur.
In the scenario mentioned before, if weâre trying to figure out why weâre doing a project, how it will be useful or relevant to an audience while weâre designing, it can end up feeling like weâre forcing a business idea into the lives of people who donât want or care about it. To be clear, that usually sucks. Creating meaning during design can be done, it just doesnât typically work that well and at best, we can hope for the hippocratic oath of âfirst do no harmâ.
Thereâs a better way. Experience design principles and methods can inform decision making in business. As designers, weâre constantly seeking to learn about people. We synthesize that understanding into some insight that informs design decisions. That practice can be applied much earlier to inform decision making about business, operations and strategy. Business, audience, design. If we create continuous feedback loops of understanding for all of these, theoretically they can inform each other to establish and maintain a bedrock of understanding with which to make sound product and service decisions.
Creating Spaces for Decisions
When I mentioned creating spaces that allow for those ideas to occur, Iâm directly referring to the ability to design situations in an organization, ones that possess insights to business direction and goals, current products and services and the people theyâre meant to serve. Iâve often referred to these as feedback loops. In a former article I wrote about experience strategy, I talked about explicitly separate efforts of continuously and objectively learning from ourselves (the business) and the people we serve (our audience). In establishing such feedback loops, inherently therein creates a convergence and divergence of understanding. Some cases will prove that the audience, culture and expectations have changed the goals of the business. Other times, we may find that business decisions have subsequently changed what people need.
The practice of UX design can create these feedback loops through strategic execution of methods like analytics review, ethnographic research and business discovery sessions that happen on a regular basis with clear intent on the purpose and frequency of each activity. Itâs no secret that organizations have a difficulty in alignment between separately operating areas of any company. Further, Iâve found it to be more common than we should care to admit that we often donât know enough about the people weâre hoping to provide value to. All that said, if we created feedback loops with each (business and people), and committed to a regularly occurring time when the aggregate understanding of each were meant to inform each other, weâve essentially created a space for informed decision making to take place. Decisions that are defining what âprojectsâ should take place. Those spaces allow for business leaders to determine even what decisions should be made. Essentially, Iâm suggesting that experience design can begin before we even know when the actual beginning is. How meta.
The End (not yet, keep reading)
Value provided by a designed experience never really dies. The needs and expectations of people rarely change dramatically enough to render a product or service obsolete. Products or services most often fail due to unmet expectations of the people they were created for. They donât adapt to the changes in people. Lucky for us, weâll have created an ongoing feedback loop with our audience, and our business intentions, to keep in step with behavior and expectations of a product or service. If weâve done that, weâll know when and how to make changes in existing products and services, but just as well weâll be confident when a new or complementary product/service is warranted. With such a bedrock of understanding, we shouldnât have to face a daunting, large-scale redesign as often as we now do. Additionally, we would have a deeply rooted confidence for moving in a new direction if and when we do. You can see where this is going. Experience design doesnât end (Iâm very sorry for the trickery in the title). If we use existing design methods of research and discovery to inform decision making in an ongoing basis, we can create feedback loops between people and organizations that allow for products and services to evolve when necessary, in the right ways. In that way, weâre also well positioned to create new products and services that have clear and uniquely separate meaning in the lives of the people weâre designing for. Doing so increases the chance for success in meeting business goals and serving people the way we hope to..
Measure Twice, Cut Once - An Approach to Sketching
A colleague of mine recently attended SketchCamp Chicago. She was talking to me about all the things they discussed and ways of using sketching that she hadnât readily thought of before. We ended up talking about how she was going to take pieces of what sheâd learned and apply them to a current project on our team to design a mobile app.
Forgotten But Not Lost
This conversation reopened my eyes to something Iâve been doing for nearly my entire career thus far of calling myself a UX designer. Sketching is so often overlooked in the shuffle to produce visually compelling, highly polished documentation. I personally was able to take for granted that the ârealâ effort behind any design is the thought work that goes into creating the document, not the document itself. That is to say, the document deliverable is only a communication of that idea or concept. We all too often lose sight of where the priority should lie in our effort; the thought work.
Measure Twice
Sketching allows us space and freedom for the thought work effort of a design. More importantly, it provides the much needed oil for our creative engines. Weâve all read articles or seen presentations about the importance of sketching and the perils of starting too early in a higher fidelity medium. The former is well tread in the UX community and in general tells us that sketching helps generate better ideas, while the latter often cautions us that a higher fidelity medium can be limiting in our creation of a concept. My intention isnât to revisit those statements but rather take a different outlook on it and share my own approach. Measure twice, cut once, is an English proverb that suggests exactly what it means. Traditionally, it was an axiom for craftsmen and carpenters that served as a reminder (and caution) to carefully plan their approach before engaging creation. Itâs relevance in what we do is incredibly powerful. In experience design, sketching is measuring.
The Measuring Tape
Iâve always been a relative fan of constraints. Not the kind that stifle creativity or limit an idea, but ones that actually do the opposite. The way Iâve always designed has started with sketching, but as I progressed through my career, I added little bits along the way that I felt made sketching even better. The idea of âmeasuring twiceâ is great, but examining the ruler every once in a while is useful to ensure the right measurements.
In starting most design efforts, I begin using the 6-up sketching template I found by Leah Buley. The 6-up template forces me to think through, at minimum, six different ways a screen interaction might work. In this case, Iâm âmeasuringâ up to six times, or sometimes more! The way Iâve always used the template is to generate a number of ideas in a short time frame. This 6-up template has several benefits:
it forces me to think through at least 6 different ways a set of interactions could work
it requires priority as the windows of the template are small and simply cannot contain everything the screen may have
it shows me the graduation of my design ideas in progression, all in one place
Boxing Yourself In
When sketching, sometimes I go free-form and just explore ideas, but more often than not, the exercise of sketching is more structured for me. Iâll start by using the blank 6-up template. Hereâs the catch though, I actually âtime-boxâ myself to 15 minutes. I force myself to come up with 6 different designs for the particular problem Iâm trying to solve within 15 minutes. Has to be six different designs, has be to done in 15 minutes. Why 15 minutes? Well, in truth it was an arbitrary number I placed on myself a long time ago that felt right when trying to solve a design problem quickly. I hardly ever expect to have the answer after 15 minutes, but I DO expect to have a bunch of ideas. Iâve found that it actually goes one of two ways. Either I end up scrambling to fit everything in within those 15 minutes, or I actually find myself struggling to fill all six of the the boxes with newer ideas. There are huge advantages to each situation. If Iâm struggling to fit all my ideas into 15 minutes, the time constraint forces priority in my thinking and focused restraint to meeting the goal of that interface. If I find myself âdoneâ with only 2-3 boxes sketched out after 5 minutes, it then forces me to explore my design ideas more deeply. In essence, the exercise does not allow me to take my first ideas at face value, nor does it permit me to meander in concepts for eternity. Hereâs an example of the approach I take, showing the progression of a comparison screen interface I did a while back:
I start with Leahâs 6-up template.
Then, giving myself 15 minutes, I force myself to come up with 6 different sketch concepts of the interface Iâm trying to design. Youâll notice how the idea visually progresses, building on itself from left/right, top/bottom. Iâve often found that I continuously âstealâ things from the prior sketch, however small. There are times when Iâll actually run through more than one 6-up template if I donât feel like my concepts are sound enough for a particular interface. In that case, I simply repeat the cycle; another 15 minutes, another 6 concepts.
Finally, once I feel as though Iâve explored the majority of possibilities for the screen Iâm working on, Iâll move to the 1-up template.
If you notice from the 6-up template, there are several items that ultimately made it into this larger version. From the 6-up template, I was also able to explore specific parts of the interface in subsequent sketches with a bit more detail. That later allowed me to add such detail to this larger version and bring together several ideas in a single interface.
Cut Once
Ultimately, I was able to make a ton of revisions during my sketch cycles, rather than wireframes or, worse yet, development effort. With all the âmeasuringâ I did, I could feel confident in moving to a higher fidelity medium knowing I had accounted for all of the possibilities available for the interface. In this case, it was an information-heavy page, which also gave me a head start on prominence, priority and hierarchy of that information. Thatâs something a little harder to do if youâre jumping right into a wireframe.
The final wireframe ended up looking like this:
A recap of the sketching process I usually take is:
Start with the 6-up template
With a time limit of 15 minutes, generate 6 concepts for the interface
Review and repeat the 6-up if necessary; otherwiseâŠ
Move to the larger, 1-up template
Again, with a time limit of 15 minutes create 1 comprehensive sketch for the design based on your ideas from the 6-up template(s)
Repeat 1-up as necessary
Move to a higher fidelity such as wireframes, prototype, etc. (if the situation calls for it)
This approach has helped me rapidly explore ideas for complex interactions. Just as it would be difficult to measure while you cut, the challenge persists for designers to create concepts and explore ideas as theyâre attempting to communicate those ideas. Sketching allows us to understand our own ideas, refine them and plan for the best way to communicate them thoroughly.
I had a conversation with a friend and colleague recently that got me thinking about what actually makes a âgoodâ client. Itâs important to note that we both work for a services organization. That is to say, we provide experience design skills and people hire us for them. Typically, that comes in the form of a project and thatâs exactly how the conversation started. We were musing over our history and why he and I had the good fortune of working together on some of what we considered the best projects, with the best clients. These kinds of things can happen when two esoteric designers get together over cocktails. But with jokes aside, it got me thinking about what actually makes a good client, or for that matter, even a good project.
âThis Client Sucksâ
Working in a services organization will inevitably bring these thoughts to mind, or even spoken aloud. In some agencies, Iâve heard it said almost daily. Being on the providing end of a service or skill many times means weâre working with (read: for) people who donât know what we do and that can cause wrinkles in a relationship. Itâs kinda like a mechanic. Most us of arenât equipped to go in and ask specifically for the parts and labor we want for our cars. Often enough, even if we do, the mechanic typically tells us that we were wrong (at least thatâs happened to me). Yet, this is a service we know enough about to say âI need that kind of helpâ. Sometimes, we get angry with the mechanic for telling us that we need a bunch of work done that we didnât have in mind when we started. All of this back and forth has harmed the relationship and trust of the mechanic and I canât imagine they think very highly of us when we tell them how to do their job. In actuality, the mechanic probably isnât being unethical but rather making decisions based on knowledge that we donât share.
Arguably, the biggest reason that ever leads us to say a client sucks is lack of knowledge. There are, of course many other factors. Ignorance, however, breeds a host of negative emotions like distrust. That, in turn, erodes any relationship. Again, while the mechanic doesnât expect us to come with the level of expertise in their trade, it sure would go a long way wouldnât it? Iâd imagine some of the most enjoyable jobs for a mechanic are ones where the clients trust them to do their job well and have educated themselves enough to know what they donât know. Itâs the same for us. Maybe we should only hire the clients that are as smart as we are about design. That should solve our problem, right?
Sucky, Defined
After the conversation with my friend, I couldnât help but try to understand what made up a lousy client relationship. Itâs one thing (and a pretty easy one) to say, âhey, that project rocked and the client was greatâ, but to actually articulate why is trickier. In UX, Iâm often found exploring what wrong looks like to determine good. With regard to clients, a crappy one probably doesnât trust you to do your job. They wonât consider your ideas and recommendations outside of theirs. Likely, theyâll micro-manage your work and make unreasonable demands for the project. Those clients just suck, donât they? We start to call them bad names and think that their companies are full of morons. They just donât get it. Obviously they wonât listen to us, so weâre left with putting quotes from these cretins on http://clientsfromhell.net/. At least our other designer super-friends can get a laugh out of our misfortune until we get a good client. Yea, thatâll teachâem.
Mirror, MirrorâŠ
My friend and I agreed we had a chance to work on some incredible projects with amazing clients. Weâd poured over what made the projects that awesome but what we came up with were the clients. So here we are, full circle. If a good client is the most decisive factor in a kick ass project, how do we find more of them?
Hereâs some real talk, good clients donât just show up, theyâre made. What makes a client good? You do. I do. We all do. If your client sucks, you probably suck. This is a little Roosevelt tough love, man. That website should change its name to âdesigners from hellâ. Sure, some of the things clients say is ridiculous. Some requests we get are probably outlandish, but nobody would ask for that stuff if they knew what we knew. We need to teach them! Great client relationships are all about setting clear expectations and being transparent and informative in your communication. That, in turn, sets the stage for a pretty sweet project.
When that mechanic simply tells you that you need $3000 worth of work done to your car without explaining why, it sucks. I know it gets me angry if someone tells me something has to be a certain way with no explanation. We are very guilty of this and when we think critically on it, it is absurd to expect anyone to engage with us and blindly follow our recommendations without explanation. These folks are likely paying good money for our services and they deserve to know the rationale behind our decisions, but even further, to feel part of making those decisions.
As Iâd reflected on some of my best client relationships and projects, they are ones where not only did the stakeholder(s) have a part in making decisions for the designs, but I wanted them to! They were partnerships, ones where I truly valued their input and knew it would lead to greater success for the project. Jon Kolkoâs article over at UX Mag has a lot of great suggestions for how to get to that level of trust in a client relationship.
If we were teachers, would we just tell students they were stupid because they werenât learning the material we taught? No way. The chef at your favorite restaurant doesnât stay in business for long if they tell you that you donât like the dish because your palette is unrefined. The best professionals in any industry donât compromise their approach or quality, but rather find a way to educate the people they serve on why their service is the highest value. They don't just expect trust, they earn it.
A Rose By Any Other Name
So hereâs the thing, even those clients and projects that werenât on my âcoolestâ list were still pretty damn good. One thing I know for sure, is that if we didnât work to make them even âjust okâ relationships and projects, they probably would have been a drag. People are who they are. We can do a lot to bring the best client out of them. One of the most interesting things my friend and I realized is that even though there were many great projects and clients, none of them were the same. No two clients were great clients for the same reasons. Every single time, we worked to carefully educate and partner with those people in order to make the relationship and project a success given the situation at hand. Arguably, there is a common thread in every partnership and awesome project outcome. Trust. Itâs true, that clients who trust us are typically regarded as the best clients, but thereâs more than one way to earn trust. Trust also comes in many forms. Some clients trust us, but push back enough to make our work even better. Others have faith in our work and allow us full freedom to work within the agreed upon constraints and everything in between.
If you find yourself in a lousy client relationship, donât jump to the conclusion that the client sucks. Think first on how you could be communicating better. Ask yourself if youâre being as clear as possible about the project, where itâs going and why. Check yourself and evaluate whether or not youâve set or are setting clear expectations. Letâs work harder. Letâs be better. We make better clients that way.
Thereâs been a lot of talk over the last few years on âdefining UXâ and what our process is. We've asked ourselves questions about what the difference between UX and UI is, where Content Strategy fits into UX and how "lean" we can get. I canât say that Iâve read all of this without shaking my head. With as much discussion as we've had around these topics, we've still left many people in the dark about what it actually is that we do. As we move to position what we do at a higher level in business and organizations we work for, it serves us well to align the message and value of UX in a broader sense in order to evolve our offering. Further, it's incredibly important that we bring clarity to what we already do.
First Letâs Be Clear, Weâre Talking About Screens
One of the biggest clarifications I feel needs to be made in this kind of discussion is that most of the time, weâre talking about an experience that has a screen. Typically, we refer to that as an interface, which can have a much more transcendent meaning. The majority of the time we have this discussion, however, we're doing so in the context of designing something with a screen. Thatâs perfectly fine. The distinction is important, for me anyway, due to the very broad definition I apply to experience design in general which is: designing any set of parameters or influencers to allow for a group of people to have a certain experience as it was intended by another set of people.Â
Thatâs super broad, but in essence, thatâs what we do, we just happen to do it mostly for screens (for now). We take information and understanding from one group of folks (most often a company or organization with the intent to generate profit) and design (services, interfaces, products, environments) to allow for that experience to take place for the identified customers/users/members of previously said organization. To that end, itâs important to call out that there are many forms an experience can take, and a screen is but one of them.
Whatâs In, Whatâs Out
My view of experience design is colored by the approach we follow at The Nerdery. For the UX team there, we subscribe to the idea that all of the following disciplines or practice areas fall under the umbrella of âUX at The Nerderyâ:
Discovery and definition
User research
Content strategy
Information architecture
Interaction design
Visual design
Front end development (to a more limited degree)
That may seem like a long list of âstuffâ to claim in the UX camp and there are a few key points to make. First, is that we donât expect, nor do we have, anyone to practice all of those areas to proficiency. Second, not every part of that approach is employed in full effect for every project. Weâre structured this way with desire to be efficient with breadth of in house talent we have while producing the highest quality of work possible. I've heard variation in how many UX practitioners define each practice mentioned, so my own definition for each is useful for clarity.
Discovery and Definition
Here, we're trying to learn about the business, it's goals and the problem they're trying to solve. Defining the problem and the people we're hoping to solve it for are the primary goals in this practice. Often, this takes the form of stakeholder interviews, client workshops and related activities.
User Research
Once we've more thoroughly defined the problem we're trying to solve and a target audience, we'll aim to learn about that audience more. Specifically, the behavior (current and past), expectations and even cultural values are main areas we hope to learn more about. Later, we'll reconcile those with the identified goals and needs of the business to make informed design decisions.
Content Strategy
Establishing the primary goals for the content and messaging is critical. Content strategy as a practice allows us time devoted to determine the proper tone, delivery and channels to deliver the message of the intended design. Additionally, it often helps clients think about who owns, updates, manages and governs content curation and creation.
Information Architecture
A critical element of providing a sound experience on a screen (or anywhere) is the ability for people to easily recognize labels, access and use of the information your design provides. Information architecture (IA) is a practice that aims to organize, prioritize, label and structure the information and content of a given design. Commonly used tools here are sitemaps, content inventories, taxonomies and the like.
Interaction Design
Once interaction design (IxD) is underway, the focus turns to defining all of the ways a person can access, manipulate and consume information. Also, IxD creates the means by which people using a design can accomplish tasks and goals with a design in the easiest way possible. We often see prototypes, wireframes, process flow documents and pattern libraries (buttons, layout schemes, process steps, navigation, etc.) come out of the IxD effort.
Visual Design
Almost always, an experience we create for a screen or interface has a brand behind it. The visual design effort is where we work to incorporate those brand standards, visual language and aesthetic into the experience. More importantly, visual design is tasked with bringing rich fidelity to defined interactions and content in such a way that really engages the people using the design, through use of carefully applied color theory, typography and other fine art principles.Â
Front End DevelopmentÂ
HTML, CSS and Javascript are common programming languages used in the great majority of work for a UX designer creating interfaces and screens. This development effort brings to life an orchestrated definition of an experience to be delivered in modern web browsers. This seems commonplace, but the importance of considering it as part of an experience design process cannot be understated. Team members with front end development skills have the ability to beautifully bridge the gap between psychology, humanities and the technology being used. In essence, they bring our designed experiences to life.
A critical point to mention, is that our approach is largely unique for each project (read: problem) weâre tasked with solving. Again, each of these disciplines are not applied to the fullest for every project, nor should they be.
Making the Cut
Determining how much or how little we apply all of the previously mentioned practices to a given project is somewhat of an art. We often make that decision on the fly. Sometimes, we simply don't know enough before the project starts to accurately make that call. In short, we change our plan once we learn more.
Our approach considers each discipline mentioned for every project. The catch is being able to ascertain where the majority of effort is needed. Discovery and user research are the best ways for us to do so. Those disciplines are ever paramount for defining the problem, which leads us to a stronger grasp for how we can solve that problem. We cannot hope to effectively solve a problem we have not fully defined. It would also be somewhat arrogant to think that we know enough about the people we're trying to design for without actually talking to them. It should be repeated, that we too should not assume we know enough about the business or organization we are working for. Therefore, we begin with a strong focus on learning their goals and how solving a particular design problem aids in their efforts.Â
Applying the appropriate amount of effort of other disciplines within UX on any given project is often determined through a combination of what we've learned in research and discovery, as well as project constraints like budget and timeline. Once we've painted a clearer picture of the design problem we're solving, we can choose our tools (read: disciplines) more strategically to meet the expectations of people and the goals of the organization. Most often, we discover a priority in either content/information, usability, utility or efficiency is needed. In which case, we choose our tools to deploy against them accordingly.
Apply the Right Pressure
Designing an experience for a screen frequently calls for a focused interaction design and information architecture endeavor. Those activities, however, are the output of effort put forth in user research and content strategy phases. A "deliverable focused" UX practice is something I strongly discourage, but it is important to note that IxD and IA disciplines typically require such documentation to communicate ideas. In short, you're probably always going to do sketches or wireframes. Timeline, budget and comfort level of the client can help navigate a leaner approach to those activities, but when choosing where to spend other effort, there are simple questions to ask yourself. For instance, if the project is an entirely new product, it may require more comprehensive user research activities to define the audience and their expectations with the product in question. If the product or design primarily provides value to its audience through content consumption, we'll need a concentrated content strategy and IA approach. You get the idea. The possibilities in constructing your approach to experience design are nearly endless. Each element should be a consideration, but not a step in the process. We're capable of doing research and design at the same time, for example. Research or content strategy activities can also happen later in the process for a project. Be flexible. The end goal is such that we take steps, in succession, that inform each other in a tumbler effect to arrive at the optimal experience. There are myriad ways that can happen.
Solve A Problem
Forget about formal project methodologies and whether or not you should be Agile or Waterfall. Ultimately, there is no âone size fits allâ project framework that will provide you the right approach for every project. Design is a means to solve problems. That philosophy that can help us navigate any problem space. Define the problem youâre solving (discovery and definition), understand why itâs a problem (user research) and create a solution to that problem (content strategy, IA, IxD, Visual Design). In the end, thinking in this way has helped me determine the best project process for hundreds of unique design challenges spanning all sizes, complexity and industries.
7 qualities of an effective experience (and designers who create them) â Quality #1
â7 Habits of Highly Effective Peopleâ is a highly acclaimed book written for business leaders by Stephen Covey. In the book, Covey discusses what he calls a principle-centered approach to becoming an effective business leader or person in general. Covey's principle-centered approach is comprised of seven habits which identify personal principles displayed by successful and effective individuals throughout the world. Today, his book still stands as one of the top go-to guides for business leadership.
I first read this book about three years ago. At the time I had no intentions on becoming a business leader, but rather seeking another resource to read about how I could get better in everything that I do at work and at home. It wasn't til late last year that I was home one evening and had glanced at the book while checking up on work email or the like. Then, it hit me that the concept of creating a successful experience for a âuserâ requires a nearly direct translation of those seven habits, among other things. Further, being an effective designer in my opinion, is also to demonstrate the very habits Covey talks about in his book.
Be Proactive
The first habit in the 7 Habits, is Be Proactive. What does it mean to be proactive? The definition of proactive itself is:
Creating or controlling a situation by causing something to happen rather than responding to it after it has happened.
By that definition we are, as designers, charged with taking the initiative to learn, meet and exceed the needs and expectations of those we design for. The nature of user-centered design aims to create a proactive experience. A good experience will meet the needs and expectations of the person having that experience. A GREAT experience will meet and exceed those expectations by not only allowing that person to have the experience they anticipated, but introducing something easier or more delightful than they would have imagined. For an experience to be effective, it's no longer enough to deliver âme tooâ design, which is to copy other established conventions and/or competitors.
Being a proactive designer and person follows the definition above. In his book, Covey talks about proactivity as not simply taking initiative and avoiding reactive thinking, but responsibility. Covey, however, breaks responsibility down.
Response-ability
Covey's definition of response-ability is making choices based on self and shared values rather than the person's conditions and surroundings. We have the ability to respond. In the world of knowledge work and design, we have ability to influence our surroundings and conditions, rather than them controlling our work. Our roles as designers are often accompanied by a set of expectations and unspoken boundaries by others in the companies we work for. Proactive designers know don't allow those unspoken boundaries to affect their circle of influence (as Covey would put it) as they aren't making decisions affected by the outside stimuli and rather self and shared values. Ultimately, designers have the ability to respond to other forces and make decisions based on what's best for the company's values, the experience and most importantly the users' needs. Realizing that we have the ability to respond to outside requests, as well as taking the responsibility to do so is what makes one an effective designer.
I recently read Storytelling for User Experience by Whitney Quesenbery & Kevin Brooks. While I enjoyed the book, it's focus was primarily on how one uses the art of storytelling to communicate research findings, promote empathy and even sell design ideas to stakeholders. There was however, a great deal of focus within the book on how to listen. Seems simple enough right? You listen to things and people all day, every day. In actuality, active listening is hard work, it takes thought...and genuine consideration for the person you're listening to. I was quickly convinced that listening is the most valuable tool you have in your arsenal for research.
As I continued through that book, I began to think of practical applications of storytelling while conducting research. This seems fairly obvious when thinking of interviews and the like, but being in a start-up environment, I very often "piggy-back" methods to optimize my already tight time-line and budget. I felt like storytelling can be applied in one on one research activities and also, promoting participants to tell stories themselves.
For context sake, I'll briefly cover my most common research activity, usability testing "piggy-backed" with non-directed interviews. The way in which we run these research sessions starts very much as you'd expect with defining the goals of the research. What do we want to find? I'll cover that with our CEO and begin writing a short questionnaire to allow for appropriate screening of participants who respond to our ad(s). Once we choose the folks that we think are a good fit for the research, we ask them to come in, generally for about an hour. During that hour, we ask people to take a look at our website and have a casual discussion either before or after.
How I used storytelling to improve our research
Historically, we would run the usability test first. That process was predictable for the most part, to anyone who's participated in or conducted such research. Afterward, we would have a discussion about what they saw, liked and didn't like. I'd ask questions about how they made certain decisions on and offline and allow for my observer to take the opportunity to ask any questions regarding what they saw during the usability session.
In the last case in particular, I encouraged (subtly influenced?) people to tell me stories. Being that it was shortly after the holidays, many of these stories were fresh in their mind. The main change to my research format was that I held the interview before the actual usability session, where they would take a look at the website. Having people tell stories about their past (and hopefully relatively recent) experiences with doing similar tasks, allowed me the opportunity to make note of "flags" for parts of their story that I could use to place them in context of completing a task on our website.
How holding an interview before the usability test made a difference
During the interview this time, I really encouraged people to tell me about their experiences for making decisions online (in this case, decisions regarding their holiday season). I had to work hard to just listen, but when I did, as they told stories I was able to gather mental notes about particular things and dig for further detail. Now, so far that isn't anything new for a non-directed interview, but this case, I was able to rely on the context(s) in which people recalled making decisions. This was the biggest advantage over how I was conducting research sessions of this kind previously. For instance, before, we'd have a list of tasks we would want to see people complete. Often, we would have to ask someone to complete a task that wasn't in the natural flow of how they'd visit the website.
Before example:
Task: see if people can successfully compare items
Me: "...ok, now I'd like you to try and compare 'item x' and 'item y'..."
This time, however, even if we weren't close to a task we'd want to see next, I would be able to place them in a real, past context of their story instead of "make believe" for a task. In almost every situation, the person would pick up the story they were telling and without prompt begin to dive in even deeper as to how they completed it before while also showing us how they would do so for our website.
After storytelling:
Task: see if people can successfully compare items
Me: "So, you were telling me about how you were looking for a new TV a few months ago, and you did some comparison shopping - could you show me how you would do that here?"
In the end, we gathered much richer qualitative feedback than previous sessions since we had people tell us stories about their real past experiences, while at the same time demonstrating how they would attempt to reach their goal with the website being tested. Ultimately, this exponentially enhanced the depth of the "data points" we would get from the think-aloud activity during usability tests.
Jon Kolko recently wrote a series of three posts for Fast Company Design all discussing how to embrace design synthesis in your organization. They're all a great read and I highly recommend taking the time to read them in succession.
The first article, How Do You Transform Good Research Into Great Innovations?, Jon presents three strategies move from your research into a more useful and actionable form.
In a nutshell, his strategies are:
"Get out of the laptop" - take all of your data points and move them into the physical space, get all of the information around you physically.
"Identify and celebrate patterns and anomalies" - begin grouping that information to identify patterns and "low hanging fruit" while being aware of outliers for innovation.
"Build a model of something, anything" - Jon suggests creating visual models of your data points/information to solidify understanding and increase communication around your findings.
The second article, Cultural Values That Will Make Your Office an Idea Factory, discusses ways that your organization can build a more playful culture.
Jon recommends:
Embrace Dynamic Constraints - acknowledging and allowing the designer to create new constraints and, at times, ignore restraints entirely.
Provide a Runway to Explore Deviant Ideas - providing designers with time, resources and permission to explore "outlandish" ideas leads to innovation.
Support and Encourage Flow and Autonomous Decision Making - providing space and ability to enter a "flow" state where the designer(s) are without distraction, making decisions freely and are empowered to do so.
The final article in this series, When Trying to Invent, Being Objective Can Cripple Your Process, promotes an interesting point of view on whether or not teams should approach design solutions in an objective or subjective way. Ultimately, the article declares that all people and moreover, designers, have unique perspectives that they apply to the data, thus creating something new from that understanding.
This past Saturday I had the opportunity to drive down to DC and participate in this years UX Camp DC 2011. This was my first time attending a barcamp and also a first for attending this particular conference. Overall, I was very happy to have been a part of this event and was impressed with the content and energy of everyone in attendance.
The day started off with the creation of the topics and schedule. Now, this isn't the typical conference in that you have a predetermined schedule and time slots of topics. Instead, everyone arrives at the venue that morning and writes on a whiteboard a topic and time they'd like to present. It is important to note that there were a few participants that were invited to attend (as opposed to simply registering and arriving that day). You can see the full schedule here.
I showed up that morning with no intention of speaking, but alas, there was an empty space once the dust settled. As I mentioned at the beginning of my talk, I like whitespace as much as anyone else, but I just couldn't resist the urge. I ended up proposing a discussion about UX and Startups, but more on that later.
My particular experience started by attending Steven Fisher's talk - Architecting Social Experiences. You can view the video of his session here (part 1) and here (part 2).
After that, there was a different discussion suggested by a local entrepreneur and startup owner discussing - Facebook, twitter, 4sq and Groupon: Why call them tech companies and not IXD companies? He suggested that these new and successful "tech companies" were not necessarily technology innovations but rather innovations and successes based on quality experience and interaction design. His topic raised some debate with the participants but I personally saw his point and agreed with much of his stance on these companies mentioned.
Next, I decided to sit in on Thom Haller presenting - Framework for making complex clear, in which you can see the video of here. He spoke about concepts not unfamiliar to us as UX designers but I appreciated his somewhat unique approach to the content. Thom went further into detail how he uses his "triangle" of audience, context and purpose. We heard about ways in which Thom has created quick and dirty personas from his method of holding the "triangle" up to gain perspective that not everyone is our audience and that we should focus the lens, so to speak. Thom's website has more information.
After a break for lunch, it was time for me to lead a discussion about UX and Startups. Since I wasn't anticipating leading a topic that day, there were no slides for this particular talk. Instead, I allowed it to be an informal discussion about some of the challenges presented to UX designers within a startup atmosphere.
I was lucky enough to have folks attend my session with different perspectives, both as consultants and large enterprise designers who faced similar challenges in their respective environment. During the session, I told stories of challenges I had faced during my time working for startups as well as offering advice for overcoming some of the obstacles that others had encountered as outside consultants.
You can view the video of my session here. You can also watch below.
After my session, the same room had Dana Chisnell leading a discussion about Rethinking User Research for Social. You can view the video of this talk here (the video is quite dark). Dana pointed out some common pitfalls of usability testing in general, but also how "traditional" means of usability testing don't accurately account for the context of the social web. It was an interesting topic that was a tough nut to crack. Dana also shared a few case studies of social web gone wrong, even when thoroughly tested and researched (see: Google Buzz). Ultimately, the group felt that setting up scenarios with real people and content was paramount to properly researching the social web.
I ended my day by attending the talk given by Dan Willis - This is your brain, this is your brain on UX. You can view the video of this lively session here. I appreciated much of Dan's content as he often cited the book (that I very much enjoyed) "Brain Rules". He used the biological processes of the brain to point out new and interesting considerations to make when designing experiences. Most notably was the reference that we are exposed to roughly 11 million data points every second, yet our prefrontal cortex only absorbs about 40! Dan also used participants to act out parts of the brain to demonstrate the way humans understand and process new information.
All in all it was a great time. I really appreciate those who attended my session and would highly recommend anyone considering attending to do so in the future.
