My presentation is available on Slideshare:
My presentation is available on Slideshare:
“EVERY DOLLAR SPENT ON UX BRINGS IN BETWEEN $2 AND $100 DOLLARS IN RETURN.”
We all know the business case for doing user experience work: investing upfront in making products easy to use really pays off. It reduces project risk, cost and time while improving end user satisfaction, efficiency and effectiveness.
(Don’t know the business case? Read this, or this. Or this.)
But what happens if you’re investing in UX work and not getting results?
There could be many factors behind an under-performing user experience effort. Anything from lack of tools to an impending zombie apocalypse could wreak havoc on your teams. Addressing those are outside my area of expertise.
Here’s where I know what I’m talking about. First, rule out the obvious: your UX folks are jerks, they don’t communicate well, they don’t understand business, they aren’t team players, they have such terrible body odour people stay 10 feet away…
Next, look at your organization.
I’ve based the following list on observations accumulated over my years as a UX professional. These are some common organizational “behaviour” patterns that can make even the best UX efforts ineffective.
User experience design is getting a lot of attention lately and UX is a buzzword many want to add to their resumes. But the field has been around for many years now (although under different names) and is fairly mature. Until a person has done full-time UX work – not as an aspect of their job, but as the job) for at least 2-3 years, they are generally not yet at a professional level.
Great! You’ve got a solid UX pro or team and an exciting project kicked off. I hate to say it, but sometimes the very organization that values UX and hires us to do UX work is also the biggest impediment to their UX team’s success. Here are some rules of engagement that will enable them to do their best work.
User experience work touches almost every aspect of an application or website project. Your UX resources will need regular check-ins with a multi-disciplinary team. At the very least, a development resource must be available to vet designs for technical feasibility, and a business resource needs to make sure you’re aligned with their goals.
The risk of not having a technical resource aware of the design direction from the beginning is that time gets wasted working on a design that the coders can’t build. The risk of not having a business resource is that your design will not meet business needs, making it a waste of time and effort.
Although there is a UX team responsible for designing your product, many other groups contribute to the final user experience. Establishing a shared vision across all the groups involved in a project can go a long way towards effective teamwork a coordinated effort, and a great design.
Ironically, many people view UX work as something that is done after coding to “make it look good”. They couldn’t be more wrong. We not-so-secretly call doing this “putting lipstick on a pig”.
The best time to bring in your UX team is at the initiation phase of the project lifecycle. The role of UX at this stage is to help define requirements and structural design based on user needs. This is where we have the biggest impact.
Because user experience pros follow a methodology called User Centred Design, they need to stay consistently ahead of the development team. For product design to be user-centred, the design should be iterated and validated before it’s coded.
Thanks for reading this post. Have you observed other reasons UX teams might fall short? Please share your own experiences and thoughts by commenting.
As a little girl, my favorite rainy day activity was heading outside to rescue the worms. A sensitive kid, I felt sad to see these distressed creatures bravely escape their flooding burrows, only to find themselves languishing as they drowned in puddles. So, on went the rain boots and the rescue mission began: bring them to dry land.
I was proud to have rescued many worms over the years.
Not too long ago, I learned something that shocked me.
I hadn’t helped those worms. At all.
In fact, I had single-handedly impeded the progress of scores of unsuspecting megadriles.
You see, it turns out that the worms were not in danger of drowning – they can stay fully submerged in water for several days. They flee the soil because they can. Worms breathe through their skin, and it must be moist for oxygen to pass through it. The wet conditions give worms a chance to move quickly and safely to new locations without dehydrating.
These worms were not reacting to mortal danger. They were reacting to a most excellent opportunity to really truck it across the yard. And spending the day in a puddle was really no big whoop. Drying out in the evening sun, however, would prove fatal.
User experience design is about, at its most fundamental level, not presuming we know what’s best for our users. Sure, we know heuristics and best practices and cognitive psychology principles that help us get to better solutions faster. But we also regularly confirm that our proposed solution works for users as it evolves, from conception all the way through detailed design. And that is what is most important.
At the early stages of a project, the role of user experience design (UX ) is to make sure that we’re understanding the problem space from the user’s perspective. If we have not identified the right problems, no solution we dream up will succeed. As advocates for our users, we must make sure that we not only observe them in context, but that we understand their goals and priorities.
In addition, we must make sure a solution is at least useful if not also desired. Even the most elegant design and easy to use solution will fail if it doesn’t offer any real benefit to users.
As we move into the design phase, the role of UX is to validate rough concepts with users. Not by asking if they like them or not, but by walking through flows and evaluating how well the proposed solution matches the way they understand things and approach tasks. We won’t be successful unless the fundamental design structure supports how users already think about their tasks.
By the time we start detailed design, we’re evaluating how well our users can actually use the design to complete tasks. We create realistic mockups and observe users interacting with them. We measure speed and accuracy, task completion rate and satisfaction. By this point, we know how well we’re meeting their needs – or not.
With this process of regular check-ins, it’s hard to get too far off course. That course being (of course): designing user-focused solutions.
I know I’ve benefited from applying user-focused solutions design in both work and life. What about you?
As for worm rescuing, I still pluck one up now and then.
But only if it’s dry.
Whether you realize it or not, you’re designing every day. It might be a simple document, an updated resume, or a presentation, but either way you’re making design choices, in particular about typefaces and layout. These decisions can have a significant impact that makes your work more compelling, or they can turn it into a boring, lifeless turd. Here’s how you can use a few simple design principles to quickly improve the way you use type and layout in your everyday work.
Read the whole article at Lifehacker: A Non-Designers Guide to Typefaces and Layout.
This is just brilliant. Artists have taken the Adobe Photoshop user interface and made a “real life” version of it – complete with real objects like paints and scissors. It’s worth looking at the Flickr gallery to see how it was created. Great stuff!
What NOT to do – a list of things people never say about restaurant websites:
This website is an excellent resource for all types of design – web, interaction, information and user experience.