Hustle Bombs

7 qualities of an effective experience (and designers who create them) – Quality #1

“7 Habits of Highly Effective People” 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 “user” 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 “me too” 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.

Storytelling for Richer Usability Tests

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.

Recent Articles from Jon Kolko at Fast Company

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:

1. “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.
2. “Identify and celebrate patterns and anomalies” - begin grouping that information to identify patterns and “low hanging fruit” while being aware of outliers for innovation.
3. “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.

For more about Jon Kolko, visit his website here.

UX and startups, my talk at UX Camp DC 2011

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.

Zack Naylor on Quora

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What User Centered Design is Good For - by Dan Saffer

This is a well done, digestible presentation by Dan Saffer discussing design methodologies, their pros/cons and when each one can be used effectively.

What User-Centered Design is Good For View more presentations from Dan Saffer.

The Importance of Observation

As designers, we often come to the table with assumptions that we have all the tools and knowledge necessary to make sound recommendations for design solutions. Sometimes, we forget what it means to be a good designer. Observation is a valuable trait any ‘good’ designer practices with regularity. We observe human behavior, emotion, reactions, interactions and so on.

User centered design principles have taught us that observation can be critical in finding nuances within a problem were trying to solve. A great example that I often think of is the use of surveys to collect information. Surveys can be a great tool in collecting preference and demographic information to inform the experience but it can’t be the catch all of your research effort. Surveys can direct us to the ‘what’ but not the ‘how’ or the ‘why’.

I once read a case study of a large financial institution that allowed its users to manage assets online (as many online banking and loan systems do). They conducted surveys and combed customer feedback to gather responses on what could make their product/service more appealing to existing customers. The majority response they got was an idea of “personalization”. Customers had expressed a great deal of interest in having highly customizable settings.

The team for this organization went on to spend a considerable amount of time and effort to build what their customers said they wanted from the service.

All of the new functionality bombed.

Upon observation of customers using the service, the team had found that while people were quick to idealize their common tasks and work flow, they weren’t willing to do the work to set up all of those custom settings! The result was a highly expensive feature set that ended up being scrapped due to incredibly low use.

Another great personal example comes from some user research we conducted here at Pikimal. We were running usability tests with participants on the v.1 of our tool. When the session had ended, we followed up with informal interviews. One of the questions I’d asked participants was very open-ended, “Would you use this site?”. We collected an array of responses but some struck me as being incredibly misleading without proper context.

For instance, one participant said “…yes I would, I like the site very much, very ‘user-friendly’ and ‘easy to use’…”. The reason I say this statement is a rather dangerous one without proper context (and observation) is because upon review and reflection of the session, that particular participant had failed several tasks as we had them defined. That person had actually introduced holes in our intended interaction, yet felt completely satisfied with the result! It would have been chalked up as a success had we gotten that response without proper observation.

Indi Young in her book Mental Models provides us with a quick and easy reference guide to research techniques, what they’re good for and when they should be used.

Close, considerate observation can glean powerful insights to the solutions we seek to provide.

I’m speaking at Mobile Camp PGH

I was honored to be asked to speak at Mobile Camp PGH. The event will be held on October 30 at the Art Institute of Pittsburgh.

The speaker line-up should be a good one with Val Head, Alex Landefeld, David Hoerster, Chris Bannon, Kris Rockwell and myself.

The title of my talk:

Considerations for the Mobile Experience - Going from Desktop Web to Mobile Web.

The topic summary is here:

Translating your product or service from the ‘desktop web’ to the ‘mobile web’ has many considerations to account for. As you expand into the mobile space your users, context and value change. Additionally, your design and research process takes on an entirely different perspective.

While exploring these differences, we need to determine which delivery for our mobile experience is appropriate. In this talk, we’ll take a look at considerations that we should all make when crafting our mobile experiences and how they differ from conventional websites. We’ll examine the differences between desktop web and mobile web, as well as differences between a native app and mobile website.

UX is bullsh*t?

OK, so I’m a bit late here (I’ve had a rather aggressive week thus far) but as I’m sure many of you are aware, Ryan Carson decided to post this tweet at the end of last week.

‘UX Professional’ is a bullshit job title. It’s just a way to over-charge naive clients. All web designers should be UX pros.

Aaaaand here, we, go.

I suppose it was only a matter of time until someone with a voice ‘officially’ slammed the profession of UX. Rather, I should say, undermined it’s practicality or usefulness (perhaps I’m re-stating the same thing).

In any case, I’ve decided to add my retort as I’m considerably passionate about what I do.

What was the motivation of this comment?

As I sat and considered what might be the motivation of such a statement I’m not sure that I came to a conclusion. What I will say is that the statement seems ignorant (in the literal sense). The reason I feel this way is that if one has ever spoken to, worked with or studied the broader field of what we call “UX”, I don’t see how someone could logically defend (and believe) such a statement.

Let’s consider it for a moment. “All web designers should be UX pros”. That, my friends, was the kicker to me.

If this is true, then why have some of the most talented web folk I’ve ever had the pleasure of working with never had interest or experience in any form of user research? By Ryan’s accord, he’s suggesting that everyone should be well versed or ‘pros’ in all forms of visual design, front-end development, usability, accessibility, research, information architecture, web analytics and interaction design (and some of the subsets within the aforementioned).

Are you insane?

Why I think his statement is what’s bullsh*t

One of the biggest pet peeves I’ve had of late is finding these silly job descriptions that somehow include “UX” in the title yet ask for things that I’ve not heard of real experience design pros doing on a daily basis. I’m positive we’ve all seen them, ‘UX’ jobs calling for proficiency in several back-end technologies, etc. I will speak from extensive personal experience here in saying that practitioners SHOULD NOT try to be a jack-of-all-trades.

On the most successful teams I’ve ever worked on, there was a clear distinction among roles and proficiencies. I personally had a background in front-end development and visual design. I’m also mature enough of a ‘designer’ to admit that my visual design skills don’t cut ice in terms of quality. In that I mean quite simply…I wouldn’t hire myself for visual design work. Interaction design on the other hand, certainly.

I once tried to be that ‘go-to’ guy that knew all the newest technologies and techniques. What I found was that once I focused on what I loved to do and made a decision to work in only that space, my skills flourished.

By openly stating that all web professionals should also be “UX pros” dilutes the talent in all areas across the board. If we held to this notion, it would force really good visual designers or really good front-end developers to adopt skills that they neither have passion for nor natural aptitude (please note that I don’t believe that they couldn’t learn it and even excel, I simply believe with conviction that people achieve their best when they have passion for what they do).

I happen to agree completely with Andy Budd’s response, most notably where he talks about when UX is appropriate.

In situations such as a small marketing site or establishing an online presence for a small business, I can agree that UX may not be as appropriate for reasons of time/budget/etc. However, I will agree with Mr. Carson in that case that an understanding of UX principles could suffice in some of those very cases.

Even further reason why that comment almost made me pee my pants

I’ll return to my semi-conclusion that I felt it was ignorance. Here’s another reason why: if you have actually read about the subject, you’d know that experience design has it’s roots in non digital products! That’s right, technically speaking, user experience design has been around since before the web.

Pray tell, how and why should all web professionals be trained in principles that predates their very reason for designing? Again, I am a huge proponent of all web professionals gaining an understanding of principles like usability, but completely disagree that they should be both excellent visual designers and usability professionals. In many cases, UX professionals have experience and education in sciences (read: psychology) and the like. Therefore, we cannot expect anyone who works on the web should have this same type of experience.

Furthermore, many UX professionals do not work exclusively in the web space. They often design products and services in the physical space. We would never suggest that someone designing a teapot to be proficient in CSS.

In closing, user experience design is a big umbrella and the argument can be made that we are all ‘UX designers’. That is an entirely different blog post. For the time being and the current distinctions we make between UX and visual design, development and so on, I suggest we acknowledge the quality that comes from the separation of those roles and embrace them to create a richer and more cohesive experience.