Tem is a UX Lead of Bouvet, who provides consultancy and development services in information technology and integrated communication to public and private sector enterprises.
Tem's presentation offers 5 tips for managing UX & design.
2. USER EXPERIENCEUSER EXPERIENCE
- What does this girl need?
- A chair? A ladder?
- Or, if we’re thinking in the form of needs, rather than solutions
- She needs to reach. Or maybe she needs boundaries, she’s been on that tablet for almost 4 hours and her parents put it there for a reason
- But all we know is that we’ve seen a dramatic increase in the need for more books this quarter
- And all management cares about is to maintain those numbers
- So the design team is tasked with coming up with ways to sell more books
- This company is not interested in design
3. USER EXPERIENCE
Design is the intentional
solution to a specific problem.
“Design is the intentional solution to a specific problem.”
- Selling more books is not a problem, it’s a desire
- Increasing KPI’s is not a specific problem, it’s a specific desire
- If you’re a product owner, or in a leadership position and part of your job is to manage design, or a design team there are 2 things you need to know
5. USER EXPERIENCE
“I move things around
until they look right.”
USER EXPERIENCE
“I move things around until they look right”
- Milton Glaser, legendary graphic designer, the man behind I ❤ NY -logo said this when asked what he does all day
- He said it jokingly, but traditionally, that’s how we’ve viewed design
- As something esoteric, this mysterious process that involves inspiration, thinking and lots and lots post-its
6. USER EXPERIENCE
- And in some ways it’s true
- Some of you might have seen this before
7. USER EXPERIENCE
Research Concept Design
Uncertainty Clarity/Focus
- It’s called the design squiggle and it’s not uncommon to show this when trying to explain what design, or design thinking is
- But it’s not a very fair depiction of how design works
- Design is not random
8. USER EXPERIENCE
- There’s actually a method to the madness
- It’s about methodically testing different solutions until you have enough data to move forward
- Otherwise you’re just designing for the sake of design.
- Making stuff look good is not a goal, it’s a desire
- It’s about designing with purpose, with intent
10. USER EXPERIENCEUSER EXPERIENCE
- Most companies today, value repeatable and predictable quarterly profit reporting.
- But design doesn’t conform easily to estimates
- It’s really difficult, if not impossible to predict how much value will be delivered through a better experience
- Or to calculate the Return On Investment in creativity
- And once you understand this, design will be way easier to work with
12. USER EXPERIENCE
1. MAKE DESIGN LESS AGILE
“Make design less agile”
- And by that, I mean take design out of your Scrums.
- Traditional UX focuses on requirements and deliverables
- But we are looking to produce changes that improve the product here and now
- Lift design out of the development-pipeline and ditch the estimates
- Design high be hard to estimate, but it’s really good at working with deadlines
13. USER EXPERIENCE
1. MAKE DESIGN LESS AGILE
USER EXPERIENCE
- Create a separate design pipeline and work in weekly, or bi-weekly sprints
- Get together, designers, PM, and developers.
- And collectively define the problem you want to tackle each week, maybe start coming up with some assumptions.
- We aim to leave the first session with 1–2 high-level design approaches that you can test with users.
- Each approach should have an underlying hypothesis that testing will either validate or invalidate.
- Which brings me to number 2
14. USER EXPERIENCE
2. WHAT’S OUR HYPOTHESIS?
“What’s our hypothesis”
- This sentence is great
- When solutions and ideas are being discussed, asking this question helps us stop and remember what we’re trying to solve
- We can’t solve a problem until we understand it. That means we need to study it.
- We need to test our assumptions, these statements about what we think is true
- And a quick way of doing this is by creating an experiment
15. USER EXPERIENCEUSER EXPERIENCE
- A hypothesis driven experiment looks a bit like this
- You start with formulating your hypothesis
- Then you write down how you plan to test this
- Thirdly, you specify what needs to have changed in order for all this to be considered valid or invalid
16. USER EXPERIENCEUSER EXPERIENCE
- So, starting with the hypothesis statement
- Looks a bit like this
- LÄS
- We believe that [ adding a vendor rating system ]
- For [ the byers ]
- Will [ make byers feel safer and more comfortable ]
- Or
- We believe that [ A popup, Prompting non-logged in users to sign up, will increase account creation ]
- Once we have that, it’s easy to create the experiment
17. USER EXPERIENCEUSER EXPERIENCE
- We will make [ an invision prototype and test it on 6 users ]
- Or
- We will [ run these A/B tests ]
- And we will know this is true when we see [ these numbers change ]
- Like [ 4 out of 6 testers signing up via the popup ]
- Continuously testing assumptions like this is a low cost way of minimizing the risk of developing the wrong thing
- Especially if designers and developers work together in creating hypotheses and experiments.
- It also serves as a great reminder that we should always design with purpose
- I have it on the inside of my notebook as a constant reminder, when I moderate design discussions
- Which brings me to number 3
18. USER EXPERIENCE
3. BE WHERE DESIGN IS
- Leaders need to put themselves where design happens
- Weekly design reviews is a great way, I suggest Tuesdays between 10 and 11.30
- A company I helped lead design, had design reviews once a week
- because the main decision-makers were in the room
- We had about 12 designers, the CEO, and the head of Product together for an hour and a half
- Each meeting starts with going around table, setting the agenda.
- If anyone needs to discuss any experiments, get some critique, or a decision in order to move forward, they put it on the agenda.
19. USER EXPERIENCEUSER EXPERIENCE
- And it was Fantastic
- Not only because the main decision makers were in the room
- But because they understood that
- The design review, for someone in a leadership position, is not about governing
- It’s about being informed and being there to answer questions and make decisions to help move the product forward
- And it’s also about being respectful, always remember that you are a guest in that context
- Your goal is to help the designer make intentional decisions.
20. USER EXPERIENCE
4. TOLERATE FAILURE
- Design is about minimizing risk, and that’s why it’s important to tolerate failure
- A design culture is nurturing.
- It doesn’t encourage failure, but the iterative nature of the design process recognizes that it’s rare to get things right the first time.
- Apple is celebrated for its successes, but a little digging uncovers products that didn’t fare so well, like the Newton tablet, and the Pippin gaming system
- We should leverage failure as learning, viewing it as part of the cost of innovation.
21. USER EXPERIENCE
5. CREATIVE CONFIDENCE
- Adapting a UX model, like UXDX is a great step
- But it’s not going to be a silver bullet to solve your product pipeline
- A model, or a process is only as good as we allow it to be
- Because Innovation is by its nature, undefined
- Leaders need to create a culture that allows people to take chances and move forward without a complete, logical understanding of a problem.
- A sort of “creative confidence”
- Give designers business context and allow them to identify opportunities that grow the business
- and you will soon see how each individual figures out how to be impactful
- Thank you
