ENGL 8122  ※  User-Experience Research & Writitng

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The User Experience Team of One: A Research and Design Survival Guide

INTRODUCTION

  • I'm tired of working for orgs who say they care about their customer but don't do testing to even know what their customers want from them...

    PART I Philosophy

    CHAPTER 1 UX 101

  • To be a user experience designer means to practice a set of methods and techniques for researching what users want and need, and to design products and services for them. Through good UX, you are trying to reduce the friction between the task someone wants to accomplish and the tool that they are using to complete that task.
  • In a simple working definition, you might say that a user experience is the overall effect created by the interactions and perceptions that someone has when using a product or service ... User research is about understanding users and their needs, and user experience design is about designing a user's interactions with a product from moment to moment. ... The term user experience probably originated in the early 1990s at Apple when cognitive psychologist Donald Norman joined the staff. Various accounts from people who were there at the time say that Norman introduced user experience to encompass what had theretofore been described as human interface research.
  • How can they design flowing experiences that respect, empower, and delight real people?

    CHAPTER 2 Getting Started

  • I spent time thinking about solutions for navigating large repositories of information.
  • Sales pros have a clever technique called the “alternative close.” Instead of asking permission to close the deal (or, in this case, to do the work), they provide two alternatives for how to go about it. Not, “Can I ring you up?” but rather, “Will that be cash or charge?” In UX, an equivalent would be not “Can we do some research,” but rather “We could do a large research study, or we could do a small informal evaluation to get some quick feedback.” Then the negotiation becomes not if, but how.
  • Real UX teams of one are committed to knowing not just “users” in the abstract, but the people who really use their products.
  • The challenge for user experience professionals is to understand user needs well enough to look past the prosaic solutions to discover the elegant ones
  • Learn from other successful products. Create inspiration libraries to keep abreast of current standards and have a place to turn for multiple ideas when working on a new problem (see Figure 2.14). But also question things.

    CHAPTER 3 Building Support for Your Work

    The more you can facilitate a cross-functional team, the more you will empower others to feel ownership and involvement in the process.
  • Pre-meetings help you get people to commit their support for your approach prior to going in for the big reveal, and they give your colleagues a very important gift: the time and space to really think about proposed designs and establish their own point of view.
  • User experience practitioners, due to their focus on both user needs and business needs, opportunity. One common problem for teams of one is getting called in only near the end of development to do a quick usability review—in others words, to rubber stamp a product. This can be frustrating and makes it very hard to suggest anything beyond the most surface changes. But you can treat this as a teachable moment to expose others to what user-centered design really entails.
  • People love stories. Instead of talking about the deliverables that you produce or UX concepts in the abstract, case studies and stories give people a memorable narrative that they can envision themselves in. ... makes it easier for you to remember what you did, so you can tell your stories confidently and on the fly.
  • User-centered research is, fundamentally, design research. Design research differs from market research in approach and intent. They are complementary but different. Market research is about identifying what people want, whereas design research is about identifying how best to achieve what people want, i.e., what versus how.
  • The goal in design research is to develop empathy and insight into why people do what they do and to spark inspiring ideas for how products can meet unmet needs and enhance their lives. .... think of UX as a preventative investment to keep the costs of your product from getting out of control down the road.
  • Statistical significance creates confidence about the linkage between cause and effect. With quantitative research (for example, research conducted with large numbers of people), it is easier to prove statistical significance. In qualitative research (for example, research focused on gathering in-depth understanding of behavior, but often based on relatively small sample sizes), statistical significance is pretty hard to prove. Usercentered research typically errs on the side of the qualitative, which means small sample sizes, usually somewhere between six and a dozen people. The main reason for this is that you spend more time with each participant one-on-one—a lot more—and thus a larger sample is prohibitive in terms of time and cost.
  • Rich contextual research probably should not be used to influence major business decisions because it is not necessarily representative of market averages. But it's perfect for getting inspired, and for triggering empathetic thinking about the context and mindset that people will have when interacting with your product, which enables you to think creatively about how to help your customers.
  • Usability experts Jakob Nielsen and Tom Landauer conducted research in the early 1990s that showed that by testing with just five users, you can uncover 85% of the usability issues with a product. The more users you add, says Nielsen, the less you learn because you keep seeing the same issues again and again.
  • In product development, there are a lot of people who are thinking about the product from various angles. Engineers think about how to write code that's efficient and reliable. Marketers think about how to connect to and engage the target market for the product. Quality assurance folks think about whether people can use the product to complete the intended use cases. UX is, in some respects, the glue that binds these considerations together, ensuring that the actual experience of using the product is, from moment to moment, clear, fluid, and even a little bit delightful.
  • Much of a user experience practitioner's work is about making sure that what is being built is relevant to both customers' goals and business goals.
  • In UX, designing great products is only half the work. The other half is handling all the “people stuff” that goes along with it: building support, ferreting out lingering objections and concerns, untangling a knot of competing agendas, and rallying your colleagues around a new direction.
  • While the STC (Society for Technical Communication) focuses more broadly on the field of technical communication and supports people with titles like “proposal manager” and “documentation specialist,” their usability and user experience special interest group is squarely focused on UX (www.stcsig.org/usability/).

    CHAPTER 4 Growing Yourself and Your Career

  • If you want to increase your opportunities, you need to grow your second and third ring networks. Becoming a part of a professional community is how you do it.
  • The UX field has a lot of independent practitioners. One reason is that many organizations can't yet justify hiring a full-time UX person, so an expert on call is just right for them.