Words of UX Wisdom: Spend Some Time Upstream

If your organization is like most, as a UX designer you get more of your “design requirements” from other sources, such as business analysts, project manager, user researchers, etc. While this level of input can work OK if the features you’re designing are well contained (small scope, tactical), it will not work as well if you’ll be designing something that has workflow implications. Instead, you’ll eventually discover that your design vision is missing the "root" insights and rationale that will let you envision a more ideal solution. 

 While consulting at Human Factors International (HFI) I had the wonderful opportunity to perform data gathering activities that allowed me to “get inside the heads” of typical users of the site or application. And I was thankfully also the same person creating the UX solution. This gave me both a holistic view of not only the issues to be solved, but also the specific business objectives the design was meant to achieve, which made it easier to create a better end-product (and more satisfied client).

So, what’s a poor guy or gal embedded in a scrum team and fed only an occasional diet of user stories and technical requirements to do? My advice is to spend some time “upstream” in the process by persistently asking a lot of questions. If you did not previously, ask about the users - their profiles, mindsets and intents. If you don’t have these profiles, create them. These will be the “actors” in your user stories, so it’s essential you know where they are coming from psychologically. 

Start with asking the “why” questions about the requirements you’re given, such as:

• “Why is Feature A a priority?” “For which user?”
• “How does it fit into the user’s workflow relative to Features B and C?”
• “Has this need been validated by data, either qualitative or quantitative?”
• “How is success of this feature be measured after its deployment?” 

Yes, these questions were supposed to have been vetted by researchers and project managers earlier in the project, but often they either haven’t been asked at all, or not at a deep enough level. We need to realize that the main motives of the project manager and developers is get a well-defined feature deployed within the allotted time and with an acceptable level of quality. While your project (or product) manager is responsible for the overall technical solution and it’s performance (KPIs, etc), he or she is often does not (with some exceptions - Steve Jobs is one that comes to mind) have the in-the-trenches knowledge of what users need and, most importantly, want and expect in their features when integrated into your site or app. Your main task - in fact, your duty, as a diligent UX pro is deeply learn these user wants and needs so your design solution can fully address them - if not in the current sprint, at least over time.

So, whom do you ask these questions? The short answer is, anyone who will listen. After starting with your immediate colleagues on the creative and tech side, move to your project manager. If they don’t seem to have clear answers to your questions, keep moving outward and upstream to the people what really should know these answers - people with titles like Market Research Analyst, User Researcher, UX Analyst or Sales Manager. (When you want to speak with people with titles of “manager” and above, for political purposes it’s best to first get permission from your manager. If you don’t get permission, don’t despair - persist [in the more assertive, yet nicest, manner possible] ).

Asking these questions and learning the answers (and undoubtedly the new questions that will arise from these discussions) is an invaluable experience because it not only gives you insights - it also gives you personal connections and builds organizational accountability (as in, “Wow, Julie is asking a lot of questions. She really cares about creating a great design.”) If you’re the introverted type, this is a good time to push that shyness into the background. History has pretty strongly borne out that the most inquisitive and persistent (yet cordial) designers and researchers have delivered the user experiences that most make both their users and the company CFO smile.

Of course, the main point of asking these questions, besides gaining valuable user insights, is to inform the analysis you’ll be doing - workflows, interaction architecture, etc - the predecessors to the finished, polished product. I can guarantee that if you ask more questions upfront and do more analysis diligence, you’ll be able to both design more quickly (and with more confidence), and to create designs that produce better bottom-line results. 

I often think of what my first UX mentor said: You first need to define the problem you are solving. Solving the wrong problem, or even solving the right problem with insufficient understanding, is a waste of both your time, and the time of others in your organization. What’s more, designing without deeper insights will result in a UX that feels poorly thought out and more "siloed," which can leave a bad taste in everyone’s mouths.

Here's something else to keep in mind: asking your questions and connecting with colleagues is FREE; it just requires you to allocate some time out of your week. I’ve found that about 2 hours a week (or about 5% of your time) is sufficient initially to get the dialog going. And if you establish the value of caring more deeply about your users’ core functional and emotional needs, you - or someone else in your organization who is better able to do so - will be allowed to devote more time and budget to research activities even further upstream, such as motivational interviews, usability testing, and customer journey mapping. If and when you get to this point, you’ll find that these activities will give you the biggest “aha” insights of them all.

So remember, if you’re feeling hesitant, or “not sure you have permission,” just repeat this UX mantra: “My users need me to ask these questions, and to be persistent in getting them answered!” By not doing so you risk your designs (and you) being judged as mediocre, and not evoking the positive emotional responses you want from the hundreds, if not thousands, of people who experience the result of your work every day.

How to Reach Mark

email: mark.hall99@gmail.com
skype: markhall_skype
twitter: @HallmarkUX
linkedin: www.linkedin.com/in/hallmarkexperience

Words of UX Wisdom: Get Psyched!

The best UX researchers and designers I know have a passion for psychology - understanding how the human mind works, so that their design solutions can best be tailored to its capabilities and desires. And they take it to the next level - seeking to understand, as specifically as possible, the mindsets and motivations of their site or app’s target users. You can see it in their inquisitive eyes and attitudes, by the psychology-related study findings they cite, and by their eagerness to do usability testing. They truly care about humans (at least on an intellectual level) and know that through this caring they can create more successful solutions - both for the user and for the business. The “before/after” ROI results of their designs usually bear this out.

So if you want to integrate more “human-ness” into your designs you don’t need to read an academic journal article a week and have an advanced degree in cognitive psychology (although that doesn’t hurt). You simply need to be curious about humans think and feel, attend some local UX meetings, find a senior-level UX mentor, and read up on psychology as it relates to design, at the same time as you are honing your design skills. It’s all about adopting a mindset of continuous learning. 

In terms of reading, I especially recommend books on architecture (information, persuasion, content), emotional design, and neuromarketing. The latest wave of design books from publishers like ABookApart provide a great starting point if you’re short on time and attention span (disclaimers: I am in no way affiliated with ABookApart. I formerly worked as a consultant at HFI). If your work and interests are more on the “art” side there is much to be learned there at well. Read some books on visual design theory; Art & Visual Perception (Arnheim) and Designing Visual Interfaces (Mullet, Sano) are stand-out books in this realm for me.

If you’re saying, “I’m not a big reader,” that’s OK. I lieu of reading books you can learn from talented graphic design greats by watching their videos on the Web (YouTube or elsewhere), or even by watching any of the wide variety of interior design or home improvement shows currently on TV.  Within a concise 60-minute time slot these shows demonstrate how a home can be transformed from a confusing, undesigned mess into a beautiful space where all of elements work together functionally and aesthetically.

So don’t wait - if you are committed to becoming the best you can be in the UX field, get “psyched up” to become a student of how humans perceive, think and decide. You'll become a more successful designer as a result.

How to Reach Mark

email: mark.hall99@gmail.com
skype: markhall_skype
twitter: @HallmarkUX
linkedin: www.linkedin.com/in/hallmarkexperience

UX at 50

Turning 50 recently has made me reflect on how UX has transformed over the last 15 years. Sitting in a Corvallis, Oregon apartment in 1995, I was absolutely awed by being able to virtually jump to the beaches of Rio deJaneiro, Brazil in a matter of about 10 seconds - a Web page “painting” before my very eyes, courtesy of Netscape Navigator, and some genius graduate work by Mark Andreesen’s at the University of Illinois that developed the initial Mosaic browser. In an instant the Internet was no longer a place where only geeks could control the landscape and push messages over gopher and ftp; instead it was a place with the only moderately tech-savvy masses could participate in a visually rich content and media sharing community. The “first Web” - version 1.0 - was born.

By the late 1990s, however, all was not well on the UX front. Jakob Nielsen, in his Alertbox articles, lamented the poor state of usability on a weekly basis (we let him do so, since he had considerable design consulting experience and had done a lot of usability tests; besides, we enjoyed hearing his “how many users to test?” debates with Jared Spool). As I did usability tests and heuristic reviews on a lot of websitessite, it was obvious that, while some websites had decent graphic design and usability, the vast majority had poor - even terrible - usability. And this was happening despite the fact that there was some good foundational books out there (for example, Cooper’s About Face, Nielsen’s Usability Engineering, and Rosenfeld & Morville’s Information Architecture for the Web).

By the early 2000s, when I worked at a healthcare eCommerce startup, “information architecture”, “visual design” (and many other variations on these monikers) became specialized disciplines under the umbrella titles of “web designer” or “web developer”. Best practice, research-based guidelines surfaced from organizations like IBM, Yale and usability.gov. At long last the disciplines of “usability engineering” had matured to the point where smart, talented folks could (if they were made aware, and cared) use prescriptive processes and tools to create more usable and “enlightened” sites and apps.

By the mid 2000s, when I was consulting for Fortune 500 companies while at Human Factors International (HFI), best-practice design standards had evolved to the point where design was primarily user-centered, focused as much on the target user’s goals and intents and as on having “good usability” and a nice graphical “look and feel”. Many of my clients were shrewd and demanding, and they should have been - they were plunking down 10s - some times 100s of thousands - of capital dollars for the promise of creating more efficient, attractive experiences that would both build their brand and augment their bottom line.

Fast-forward to the late 2000s. Don Norman and others introduced the era of emotional design, which emphasized that design should not just address our rational and behavioral goals, but should also tap into our visceral needs (how we wanted to feel at a gut level as we moved through these online experiences). This guided us (at least this practitioner) to think of emotional design and persuasion architecture in the same context as information architecture. While some users are bound to use applications (e.g. healthcare portal or CRM), if the app is inefficient and frustrating to use they now felt empowered enough to whine about their experience and advocate for something better. While using common websites (eCommerce sites, news sites, etc), we were harshly reminded that an uninspired, emotionally disaffected user can bail out at any time, taking their discretionary dollars with them.

Now that we’ve entered the 2010s, it’s apparent that old fashioned “can do” usability must be be closely coupled with “will do” user experience design and “excited to do” neuro design - the latter part being the site/app personality that keeps them coming back. Not only do we want to complete our tasks quickly, but we want to do them with a sense of pleasure (yes, that’s right, it’s OK to say “this should be fun, or at least pretty painless!”)  It’s a great melding of the architecture of design with the aesthetic side. To use a physical world analogy, UX designers have become a hybrid between an architect and an interior designer in that we need to deliver both form and functional seamlessly to make “the client” happy.

The status UX has had in organizations has also transformed. Personally, my work evolved from doing “guerilla” usability work (quick, or too often free, usability tests) within IT and Development groups to partnering closely with marketers, product managers, stakeholders and executives. And over the last 4-5 years I’ve been delighted to see companies give high exposure and importance to their UX work by bestowing senior UX staff titles like Chief Experience Officer and Chief of Customer Satisfaction. Even Chief Information Officers who were previously focused almost entirely on technology and development, have “seen the light” (and ROI) that better UX practices can give to the features they are delivering. UX design has truly become both a highly strategic and tactical discipline.

All in all, I am VERY pleased with “the current state of UX” today. It’s come a long way, baby, and designers, users and companies alike have reaped the benefits. It will be interesting to see where our profession will be another 15 years. Based on the foundation that’s been set, I’m that UX specialists will push their organizations to even higher, user-warming heights.

How to Reach Mark

email: mark.hall99@gmail.com
skype: markhall_skype
twitter: @HallmarkUX
linkedin: www.linkedin.com/in/hallmarkexperience

Words of UX Wisdom: Don't Get Tripped Up By Pixels

Here’s my UX confession (which I end up stating often): I am a user experience designer, but not the graphic designer kind. Sure, I know my color theory fundamentals, know how to cut/edit existing graphics with the best of ‘em, and - having worked with a dozen or so very talented graphic/brand designers over the years - I definitely know the difference between “good” and “amateurish” visual design. It’s just that in my case I chose to focus more on user research, user testing, interaction architecture, and the strategic side - in other words, the rational and behavioral, rather than the more aesthetic and visceral, aspects of design. I have found during my career that, unless you’re some kind of modern-day Michelangelo, it’s a very rare thing indeed for one individual to be strong in the full spectrum of “user experience research and design” skills.

Over the past 7 years, while working at entrepreneurial and budget-conscious medium-sized companies, I have felt an explicit wish from colleagues for a “do it all” designer - someone who can whip up a compelling Photoshop comp, while also do great user research and render well-thought-out wireframes and workflows. While i’m the first to admit that grayscale wireframes aren’t particularly sexy, I strongly believe that the process that goes into creating them is as - if not more - important to the success of the ultimate website or web app than are its graphic design elements. Interestingly, I’ve found that it takes my colleagues and management about 6-9 months to come to this realization, usually after asking something like, “What’s the difference between your UX process and the Creative process again?”.

For me, it ultimately comes down to asking users to vote: If you had to choose one over the other (obviously having both would be ideal), which would you choose: a site with a smooth, intuitive workflow and mediocre color scheme, or a site with a great color scheme but awkward workflow? I’ve found that in the “app” world (and many new websites are much more “app” than “site”) the predominant answer is “workflow”. Ultimately it’s hard to fix a broken structural foundation, while it’s easier to embellish a less-than-pretty face.

The strategic companies get this and keep someone like me on board; the less strategic continue down the road of beautifying their sites/app, while making few user friends and brand advocates in the process.

How to Reach Mark

email: mark.hall99@gmail.com
skype: markhall_skype
twitter: @HallmarkUX
linkedin: www.linkedin.com/in/hallmarkexperience