My book on user experience design. Experience Matters, is now available on the Kindle. A paperback version will be available for purchase within the week, and a more interactive version of the work will be available through the iBooks storefront shortly.
Here’s an exhibit of sculptures made from LEGO bricks by artist Nathan Sawaya that is currently being shown in Town Hall, Sydney.
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Walk them through a previous design project. Pull out all the design artifacts, from concept design to detailed specifications. Show them video from any usability tests that took place. Demonstrate the process that was followed to go from a high-level problem statement and concept(s) to a detailed and final solution. And don’t try and do this all at once… take your time to tell the story about the design and the steps taken.
Then, throw them in the deep end - give them a small project to design, and leverage the same methodology you just detailed. Mentor, encourage, and be constructive when being critical. Let them learn by doing.
Confidence is good. Arrogance is not. The key is to be confident but also open to other people’s ideas and to the possibility that you may be mistaken and/or your design could be improved.
Let’s use Sherlock Holmes as an example. Sherlock Holmes was the world’s first consulting detective, and he was incredibly skilled in deduction and the history of crime. He was very confident in his abilities, and his repeated successes reinforced that confidence. He also was often arrogant, and this character flaw alienated many he worked with, even his “Boswell” Dr. Watson. His arrogance sometimes distracted from his ability to convince people, as it “turned off” the people he needed to believe him.
Now, obviously, we are not all at the super-expert level of a Sherlock Holmes or a Dr. House (his modern-day counterpart), but if we were it would probably be hard to NOT be arrogant… though, as I note below, such arrogance is self-defeating. He needed a partner to keep such arrogance in check - to keep him “grounded.”
Confidence comes with experience, and experience is the best teacher. But the key is to know what you DON’T know, and to ask questions whenever they need to be asked.
Finally, I’m a very passionate advocate of “peer designing,” where two designers work together on a problem. Not only does it double the brainpower that is being applied, but it also allows for easy peer reviews and design critique. Much like Holmes needed Watson, I think we work best when we work with a partner to keep us in check.
When it comes to tracking productivity in UX design, the focus should always be on the outcomes, quality and hitting key milestones, and not on day-to-day activity. Because there is no one “perfect” UX design process (just as there is no one perfect software development process) each project is going to have different timeliness and needs. One project may be heavy on detailed design documentation, and is easier to “track” than one that is focused on user research and foundational understanding.
But even with a project that is “documentation-heavy”, you have to be careful not to fall into the “to do list trap” of just crossing off things. Here’s why: You can get all your design work done in a timely matter, but if the design sucks, who benefits? Certainly not the user, and definitely not your company. Yes, you will “look good” in the short term, in that management sees you are “hitting your dates”… but you will be burned later if the design was rushed and ill-concieved. Trust me, I’ve been there.
How does an individual designer measure his own productivity? There are many different techniques I have seen and used, including the GTD methodology. But in the end, I think UX design isn’t about “productivity” it’s more about problem solving, and making a difference for users. So I look at satisfaction as a more important personal metric around my design work than the number of UI widgets I can crank out in a week.
As a design manager, how to track productivity? Well, in addition to the above, I make sure that the designers have time to refine, iterate, and fail. Yes, fail. We learn a lot by piloting early designs with users and finding out what doesn’t work. Identify key milestones, let the designers follow the process that they are comfortable with, and focus on quality. Keeping in mind, of course, that deadlines are absolutely necessary as a motivator and a way to “focus the brain.”
I have used multiple techniques to do this, depending upon the amount of time available on the design project. At the very least, you need to have focus as to what you are designing, and know the target audience for what you are doing. Shakespeare wrote “the readiness is all” and before you are ready to dive into the UI “layer” you have to understand those two core things
There are best practices that can be borrowed and applied from other industries, and I’ve borrowed two key processes from journalism and film pre-production to define my “foundation”
The first is the Journalism 101 principle of Who What When Where and Why:
Who is this design for?
What will they be doing?
When will they use it (how often)?
Where will they use it?
Why would they use it (as oppossed to another process or application)?
This last question gets to the heart of the value proposition of what is being designed/developed. In my opinion, if you can answer all these questions to YOUR satisfaction, then you are ready to get to the next step in designing the interface.
So, how do you get the answers? Well, some of these answers can be provided by the business analysts you are working with, or the key stakeholders… But I’ve found that the best way to get the answers is to talk to the users themselves, to understand thier workflows, thier needs and frustrations… by doing it yourself the answers will be more “personal” to you and will remain “top of mind” as you do your design work.
The second process is storyboarding or user stories. I think you don’t need both, as they both service the same need. You should do whatever you are most comfortable doing. if you’re a person who sketches a lot, do storyboards. If you enjoy writing, then do user stories. The point of this is to define a “flow” of the tasks that the users do in and with what you are designing - always keep in mind this is NOT UI design, you are capturing and defining the user experience. You can share these artifacts with key stakeholders to review and get concensus and THEN, after all are agreed, start doing the interface design work.
There’s more things that you can do (persona definition, ethnographic research, competitive analysis, focus groups) but I consider the above to be the bare minimum.
Apple created the iBookstore and the new iBook Author tool. As creator of said platform/application, they can put stuff in their EULA that says “you must never use this tool without wearing pants” if they want. It’s their IP, they can do what they want. But just because they can set whatever terms they want doesn’t mean they should set unreasonable ones. To many, the “if you want to profit from this work you need to cut us in on it and you can’t go anywhere else” clause is unreasonable, like the aforementioned hypothetical “pants” restriction. Personally, I don’t think it’s unreasonable… I do however think it’s self-defeating for Apple.
The “exclusivity” clause will make creative people think twice, and many will avoid the iBooks storefront/platform all together due to it. Who does that hurt? Certainly not the creative types because they have multiple tools they can use and multiple channels to promote and sell their content (look up “the Internet”). It will end up reducing the variety and choice in the iBookstore… making users less likely to think of iBooks as the “first choice” for ebook shopping. it hurts Apple more.
I have two books available for sale on both the Kindle and the iBooks store. I’m working on two more. One of them will be available anywhere, the other will only be on iBooks and be created using the iBooks Author tool. Why? Because I am selling the first book and giving away the second, so the restriction doesn’t “hurt” me…. and I don’t “need” the iBooks Author tool to create my work. Would it make my life easier if I can use iBooks Author to do ALL my ebooks? Sure. But it’s not a deal breaker for me.
Retailers have noticed a disturbing trend of the past few months. Many of the people visiting their stores are browsing but not spending any money… At least, not at your store. They’re still spending their money… just online. These customers go to shops and then whip out thier smart phones to find cheaper prices for items they discover there. The nickname for this behavior is “showrooming,” where the store is a place for picking out items… just not for buying them.
This has become an especially painful phenomenon for booksellers, made worse when online retailer Amazon added a barcode scanner to thier mobile app last fall. This addition, combined with one-click checkout, zero sales tax and low shipping prices (or, in the case of Amazon Prime customers, free shipping), made it almost effortless for customers to save money and order items from Amazon and not the bookstore. A recent study stated that 4 out of 10 Amazon customers have browsed retailers to look at an item before buying it from Amazon. It’s not just books, either - Best Buy is seeing the same phenomenon for consumer electronics, and even the big box retailers such as Target and Wal-Mart are seeing customers comparison shop with thier mobile phones.
This is not just a problem for retailers - it’s also an problem websites have long faced, where the offerings or products sold there that can easily and quickly be compared with others at the click of the mouse. So, whether you sell a physical good or software, have a store or a storefront, here’s some ways you can avoid “showrooming” and keep
Technology doesn’t care. Don’t complain about “showrooming”, it is not going away. The technology will, if anything, be more and more ubiquitous in the years to come. Man up and realize that you can’t change this.
Empasize the “now” and “quick checkout”. No matter what your “storefront” is, emphasize the fact that you can get the item RIGHT NOW, and with no waiting. Make sure your “checkout” process is streamlined and quick (which means if you own a retail store you have enough staff on hand to ensure purchases are quick and with no waiting).
Reward loyalty, forever. The whole idea of a “loyalty program” is so simple we forget how effective it is: Reward repeat customers. Get a free coffee or donut with your nth purchase. Get free perks like no bag fees and free upgrades. Get faster “check-ins.” And so on. It costs a lot more to aquire a new customer than to retain an old one. Loyalty programs not only help retain customers, but also influence behavior in many individuals (paying more to retain earned “status,” for example). And once you set up a loyalty program, never take perks away… you’ll upset the most loyal customers by doing so.
Focus on what you are really “selling.” I did a large research project many years ago for a cellular phone company who was looking to roll out a new point of sale system in their stores. I went to several of these stores to study the inetractions customers had with people who came in the stores, and quickly found out that stores weren’t selling phones at all - they were customer support centers, and what they really needed was a better designed account lookup program and knowledge base. You may be trying to sell the wrong thing… Case in point: staff at Apple stores don’t really “sell” thier computers or ipods, they are trained to solve customer problems… and that often ends up in a sale.
Here’s a couple of videos I shot - the first is a look inside the Assembly Building:
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The second is the recreation of how the launch of Apollo 8 went:
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I’ve always wanted to visit Kennedy Space Center and I finally got around to crossing that particular item off my “bucket list” this past weekend. Even better, I was able to tour the Vehicle Assembly Building, where all the Saturn V rockets made for the Apollo program was constructed… and I got really close to the just-retired Endeavor space shuttle, being prepped for retirement. Here’s lots of pictures:
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