Notes from “How to be a UX Team of One?” virtual seminar

TriUPA sponsors Shanna Ward (Insight) and Janey Barnes (User-View) kindly provided these notes based on their viewing of Adaptive Path’s recent virtual seminar, “How to be a UX Team of One?”

A slidecast, templates, and links relevant to the seminar are available on Leah’s website.

Overview

The discussion began by trying to turn a new leaf, instead of feeling the shame of being a UX Team of One, take pride in being a UX Team of one. Often times this role can hold the most impact, but as a team of one the UX professional is often a jack of all trades and a master of none, really a generalist as opposed to a specialist in their field.  These generalists often have to stand alone and need effective strategies to work with the other specialists, i.e. specific research teams, designers, marketers, development, etc.  One of the challenges is knowing when and where to get involved into the development process.  People with lots of experience tend to avoid being a team of one, but often this level of expertise helps in this situation.  There are several stages of growing a UX group, the first and largest is to be interested, then moving into more comitted roles are invested, committed, engaged, and completely emerged.

Stealth Skills for a UX Team of One

1. Be Smart with Documentation
2. Design Better than you Thought You Could
3. Collaborate Like a Master
4. Be Politically Correct

1.  Be Smart with Documentation: 
There is good documentation and bad documentation.

Documentation can focus attention on the wrong thing.  Documentation lends itself to “controlled ownership”, can provide an excuse/reason for procrastinating (e.g., I have to focus on the formatting of the documentation as opposed to the content), and can be an end unto itself.

It’s important to assess how the documentation is furthering UX goals and process…

• Who is reading our documentation?
• How long is the documentation?
• How much cross referencing is needed?
• Is the documentation overly glossed?
• Is the documentation communicating an idea?

Good documentation…

• Works for multiple audiences
• Tells its own story
• Is quick to produce

2.  Design Better than you Thought You Could
Sketching, simple pen and paper can have save time and is an excellent exploratory and refinement tool. 

• Exploratory sketching is the first step, in this step the goal is to generate lots and lots of ideas, some better than others.  Using a 6-up template will help push development of several concepts.  If you are stuck then play with words, pull out relevant words and design around them.  Also having an inspiration library will help to generate additional ideas, these would include interesting shapes and concepts that help to get the creative juices flowing.
• Refinement sketching is done after exploratory sketching, once several ideas are generated now is the time to refine these concepts.  For this phase Leah recommended using a 1-up Template to help define the concept in a format where it is easy to share with others and can be used as a tool for discussion.  Some sketching tips include: using weighted lines for emphasis, shading to decrease focus, and labels to add clarity and meaning.

Once sketches are refined now is the time to share and get feedback, both positive and negative.  Design is not an absolute, there is no right or wrong in design, just MY preference and YOUR preference. 

Resource: article on sketchboards.

3.  Collaborate Like a Master
This is a critical step and is a helpful way to gain a broader perspective for solutions and serve as a way to critique already established ideas.  There are three types of workshops that can be held…

1) controlled review (boring and typical documentation review)

2) collaborative review (all members review current concepts and actively generate new concepts and critique existing ones)

3) collaborative design (this workshop is a bit more challenging to conduct, but with the right group this can be very effective.

When conducting Collaborative Workshops be sure to…

1. make sure there is enough time to conduct the research, this process shouldn’t feel or be rushed
2. invite all key players
3. bring tools of the trade – sharpies, sticky notes, paper, pen, 1-ups, 6-ups, tape

Structure of an effective Collaborative Workshop…

1. Give paper/pen to everyone in the room (6-ups blank templates)
2. Explain the design problem
3. Give a set amount of time to solve and sketch the problem
4. Make sure to walk around and help
5. Discuss amongst the team

Structure of an effective Sketchboard Workshop…

1. Get large sheet of paper and place all current sketches in a structure (using tape and sticky notes), you want to be able to roll it up so it can be shared
2. Review and collaborate with others, make sure you explain all ideas and encourage the group to articulate ideas

The goal of these workshops is NOT approval, but rather discussion and critque of concepts.  Negative feedback is a good thing and if you aren’t getting it then push to receive it.  Try holding a black hat session where for 30 minutes you collectively pick the ideas apart. 

4.  Be Politically Savy
As a UX Team of One we are not the only ones that care about user needs and goals, i.e.development, marketing, and researchers are all interested in users, we all just go about understanding and meeting those needs differently.  Being an evalengist for users will often take more energy and yield little results.  Try to do fun and engaging activities to illustrate the effectiveness of UX profession, i.e. engaging collaborative workshops, trading cards, posters.  Or, get access to folks when they are a captive audience e.g., posters in a bathroom, lunch, cocktails.  Design is a process that needs to be effectively promoted.

For UX professionals that need to work remotely with team members Leah recommends using Concept Share. 

Communicating Designs Through Comics

Rebekah Sedaca from Capstrat led a great discussion on using comics to communicate design at our last TriUPA local lunch. You can read about Rebekah’s experience in her Boxes & Arrows article, “Comics: Not just for laughs!” If you’re interested in trying to use comics in your work, Rebekah shared a list of useful resources you can check out:

• Kevin Cheng, “Communicating Concepts through Comics”
• Carson Van Osten, “Comic Strip Artist’s Kit”
• Dan Brown, “How to Make Thought Bubbles in Visio”
• Scott McCloud, “Understanding Comics” — Buy at Amazon
• Microsoft’s Clip Art Gallery Live
• Comic Visio Stencil from Capstrat

Article: “Comics: Not just for laughs!”

Congratulations to TriUPA member Rebekah Sedaca (Capstrat), on her recent article in Boxes and Arrows:

Comics: Not just for laughs!
Using comics is a novel means of communicating complex design concepts. There is has been a lot of talk about it recently, but it this medium only reserved for artists? Rebekah Sedaca decided to give it a try. It worked and she’s outlined her process and tools that you may be able to use.

UNC Interactionary Team Profile #3 — Lisa Thursby

How did you become interested in user experience design?
I began my career as an anthropologist studying material culture.  I was particularly interested in how object design manipulated human behavior and how to interpret the messages people send to each other through their ownership of objects and related designs.  When I started investigating how these concepts applied to technology and electronic environments, I discovered user experience design.      

What’s your favorite aspect of user experience design?
Discovering how users relate to objects and electronic spaces in terms of understanding the layers of needs and impetus behind object use.  

What’s one of your favorite designs (of any kind)?  One of your least favorite?
Any object perfectly balanced between aesthetically driven design, and functionality.  When I find such objects, I tend to buy them for inspiration.  Once, I saw a thermos at a local grocer that was so beautifully designed I simply had to touch it.  Once in my hands, I noticed it had some ingenious features.  I had no interest in using a thermos until I encountered that design.  I want my designs to compel other people in the same way.                

Least favorite: Insert name of website you despise the most here >[_____].

What do you do when you’re not dreaming about how to improve all of the world’s broken products?
I’m a long-distance runner.  I use the proverbial “runner’s high” as a creative space.  Some of my best creative ideas were birthed during 6-10 mile brainstorms. 

Motricity looks for simpler ways for cell phone users to download content

A story in today’s News & Observer profiled some of Motricity’s recent user research.  Congratulations to Rick Cecil, TriUPA president, and the rest of the Motricity UX team!

newsobserver.com | Rest for an overworked digit
Motricity looks for simpler ways for cell phone users to download content

Motricity of Durham studied how people use their cell phones so that it could make the interaction easier. The goal: to get more people to spend more money.

It’s Time the Right Rail Advertising Bubble Bursts

by Rebekah Sedaca.
–originally published at Capstrat

Way back when the Web first started and before the corporate advertisers caught on to the whole information superhighway concept, Web designers and developers had all of this screen real estate in which we could display functionality, design, content, and information. Literally, we had a plethora of real estate in which to communicate our ideas and information.

Over time, as the heads in those corporate offices turned from their offline advertising to the Web, we saw a flurry of onsite advertising. With varying levels of success, popup ads, spam emails, banner ads and right rail promotions cluttered our minds, inboxes and screens. (The right rail is the rightmost column or section of a Web page that is often used to display advertisements.) With time and technology, tools like spam and popup blockers have diminished the effectiveness of online advertising. This has left advertisers with few online “safe” spaces, one of which is the right rail.

We have sold out the right rail to advertisers to the point that it’s becoming ineffective for even that purpose. User testing shows right rail, or column, “blindness” and it is only getting worse with the likes of Google sponsored links. Info World also recently published an article, “What Users Hate Most About Web Sites”, that lists “invasive advertising” among its top gripes along with a note about “right rail blindness.” There are a number of hypotheses around the root cause of right rail blindness including the western convention of reading from left to right and superfluous advertising.

Rather than surrender the rightmost sections of our screens as useless for containing content and information (and ads, for that matter), we must take back that section of our screens. Web site navigation is one option. User testing on the subject has shown that users perform as well when navigation is on the right side of the screen as on the left. In one study, users were divided into two groups and asked to complete a series of tasks: one group using a left navigation-based site and the other a right navigation-based site. The results showed no significant different in time completion between the two sites.

There is even an argument to suggest that in following with Fitt’s Law, right navigation would be a more effective solution if convention could be ignored, since it is closer in proximity to the scroll bar. (And considering that the Web in its current state is relatively young, how set in stone can convention be?)

Right rail navigation also proved successful for audi.com. The right rail placement not only supported their “innovation in design” brand message, but also proved successful in user testing and rollout to the market. Furthermore, many blogging tools, like Word Press, are using the right rail of pages to capture tags, recent activities and the like. As blogging becomes more and more mainstream, the right rail may be able to rise to its former stature.

So can we change user behavior over time by removing advertising from the right rail and putting navigation and other site essential items there in its place? Only time will tell, but it sure beats the alternative of giving up on the right rail and losing that real estate all together.

I would love to get some feedback from the Triangle User Experience community on right rail usage, testing, and ideas about reclaiming it. Thoughts?

Re: mySpace.com/soc395m

By Lee Cherry

There has been an interesting chain of events happening behind the use of MySpace as an educational teaching tool by one of the professors here at NC State University – MySpace coursework under microscope. It appears, yet again, a new form of technology has far outpaced the policy and administration of technology in a large organization.

I am a big proponent of using “mashups” to create an environment for both blended learning and enhancing an application or web experience – facebook, linkedin, youtube, wordpress, movabletype, meebo, del.icio.us, etc. Integrating functionality of another succesful venture into product can be an added benefit in many instances. MySpace has been on a short list of “what ifs”… I think MySpace has managed to capture a lot of attention and loyalty among its users – of all age groups. Therefore, it was a matter of time before someone would adapt it in other innovative ways for their needs.

Now, I’m not saying MySpace is a silver bullet for any one particular thing, but it is definitely something that has caught a lot of people’s attention and eyeballs – more eyeballs, more audience, more channels for revenue, more chances for change and learning; superficial maybe, time will only tell. I believe we are just scratching the surface for building a business use for presenting something on MySpace. On the other hand, I believe MySpace has a long way to go to correctly implement a more powerful means of adjusting some of the interface and usability issues.

To the University’s credit, it has spent a lot of time and money on developing a series of tools that offer a method and a means to carry out distance education on a large scale – which is both the trend of the consumer education arena and the desire of the University (see more eyeballs statement from before). However, these tools still have a lot of room to grow before they really can address professor and student issues on usability and effectiveness.

I have trained with these distance learning tools and personally used them for classes but have found they can detract from the experience and are difficult to integrate into people’s learning routine. I have also tried talking to the other professors here about utilizing the resources but only to receive bit of pushback. Not only must one have a professor willing to understand how to fit the technology into their traditional (and often entrenched) pedagogy; you must also have to have a technology that can adapt to their needs. However, that’s a whole other debate.

You can spend lots of money, to build a toolset that you expect your users to fully utilize and enjoy; only to discover they are using a more personal and effective means to fulfill their needs. It’s up to your organization if you decide to force the situation and build walls around your application for the sake of efficiency and coherence or work with your users to integrate and adapt the situation to create the most effective and desirable product to surpass their needs.

Research on the Quick

By Michael Gowan

Continuing a series of posts on redesigning a section of a Web site (see first post).

Since we’re talking about user-centered design, getting user input into a project at the beginning seems pretty important. But conducting interviews at the beginning of a project is often the first stepped dropped when deadlines get crunched.

On this project, I had planned to run an online survey and conduct follow up interviews with some respondents. But after entering that into my project schedule I ended up with a January 2007 launch date. That wasn’t going to fly — I needed to have an outlet for new content no later than November 2006.

So I looked for other forms of user input that I already had on hand. Sacrilege, perhaps, for the readers of this blog. But with a little effort, I found enough to provide a user voice in defining the requirements.

First I looked at previous research that we had performed. Earlier this year we conducted some pretty extensive focus group and user testing work around what existing patients and prospective patients wanted from our site. A portion of this testing was dedicated to the health library. Bingo.

We’d conducted user testing during our Service section redesign that covered, indirectly, user needs in the health library. We had found how users interacted with the library when seeking information about treatments. It was enough to piece together a user task.

I also turned to the Web for other published research. The Pew Internet & American Life project has some specific health related research that provided high-level user needs. Paired with our own existing research, I started to get a good picture of what our users would want.

Other sources of external research included Jupiter and Forrester.

What quick methods have you used for getting user input before writing requirements? Post in the comments section to let me know.

Viso wireframing resources

Anita Crescenzi has provided this helpful summary of wireframing/Visio resources [note: Word document].

Real Wireframes Get Real Results

Hot on the heels of our tonight’s TriUPA wireframe panel, a timely piece from Boxes and Arrows: Real Wireframes Get Real Results.

Fortunately, there are a few simple steps that will make wireframes be understood by anyone. They don’t even have to be much more work. It’s simply a matter of choosing to “get real” from the start.