epicBagel

Hindsight is a wonderful thing

Tue, 13 Nov 2012 17:46:12 +0000

I spent some time today looking back over some of my design work from the past year. It was an interesting exercise.

Success is rarely immediate when designing software. No matter how much you feel you understand about your customers and the problem you’re solving, first sketches and design explorations often miss the mark.

Even when you arrive at what feels like a good solution, hindsight can quickly change your perspective. A few months later, there’s niggles you want to change. After a year, looking back can be embarrassing.

We’re naturally motivated to forget bad design and be retrospectively pessimistic. Blame unforeseeable and inevitable situations.

But, we shouldn’t hide away past mistakes. Instead, embrace them. They indicate progress. The lessons you’ll learn in a few months time from the work you’re doing now will simply make you a better designer.

Designing distractions

Mon, 29 Oct 2012 14:53:30 +0000

Style can't mask poor design. Equally, design can't be used as a crutch for flawed business strategies.

If your core product isn’t right, an investment in design won't prevent the inevitable. At best, it will simply provide a distraction from the larger issues you need to tackle. Instead, use every design decision as a hypothesis to better understand and adapt to the problem you're trying to solve. Otherwise, you're just making excuses.

Road to UX perdition

Fri, 19 Oct 2012 16:13:03 +0000

Continually launching features before they're good enough leads to an increasingly distracting UX backlog. Each release adds to the list of changes needed to lift the product beyond the minimal threshold of quality. An inescapable UX perdition.

Trimming planned design improvements from your backlog is only a short term strategy for regaining focus. Instead, start delivering to a level of quality that's good enough, irrespective of scope. If you don't have time or there's too much uncertainty, flex scope.

Once you're out of UX rendition, you can iterate to designs that delight your customers, instead of an endless focus on emergencies.

Purposeful iteration

Tue, 25 Sep 2012 14:25:57 +0000

Experimentation is core to the design process. The belief that first ideas aren't final, encourages purposeful iterations to better design.

Failing to iterate through ignoring long-held assumption (e.g. "are we building the right product?") and frequently testing hypotheses which yield relatively little value (e.g. pursuing well-styled before well-designed) are both wasteful. Get into the habit of iterating better, not always looking to iterate more.

Stop trying to fail your way to success, put your hand to one thing, practice it daily and become great over time Charles Blakeman

Lean and agile methods provide guidance on what, how and when to iterate (when followed pragmatically, not idealistically). But most crucially, focus on practice and learning.

Design details and focus

Thu, 20 Sep 2012 16:36:26 +0000

An early focus on design details can feel like progress. It's also fun. Diving in and obsessively iterating pixels and copy.

The thing is, this constrained approach leads to habitual design and blocks innovation. Instead, begin with the big things that matter. What problem are you solving? How can you add value? Focus on scope, flow or design direction for a feature. Not on pixels and interactions.

So, learn to say 'no' quickly. Figuring out the problem and getting stuff on the screen naturally clarifies the things you need to refine.

What's in a name?

Thu, 06 Sep 2012 15:23:09 +0000

Like any industry, new concepts will continue to emerge within UX. Some are marketing-driven link bait (i.e. bullshit), hustling for superiority and focus. They polarize opionion and create confusion. Client's want to 'gamify' their signup process.

Identifying the concepts which add value to what we deliver or change the philosphy of how we work is hard. Lean UX is not as pervasive as we like to think. It's not a natural fit for many corporations or agencies. So, let's not get hung up on labels...

If Lean UX has traction, and it does, let’s agree that it’s an imperfect name and move on. Let’s bring these better ways of working to more organisations and improve the products we deliver to the market.

Being done

Fri, 31 Aug 2012 15:03:10 +0000

'Done' is difficult in product design. Being lean encourages scope reduction to only what's necessary, whilst achieving (at least) a minimal threshold of design quality.

So on one hand, we have to rigorously say no to features which dilute a product's focus (although the goal here isn't the reduction in complexity, but rather an iterative process around learning).

In terms of design quality, there's pressure to invest as little as possible. Make the call on each UI decision and move on. Where this threshold actually sits is complex. I don't particularly like the minimal usable design (MUD) concept, it mis-interprets aspects of the MVP (it's a process, not an end-point). There's also no clarity around where this threshold sits. Different teams have different baselines, creating opportunities to under invest and a continual increase in UX deficit.

Counter to this, there's the pressure to over-design. Here, the value of change and the boundaries between style and design become increasingly unclear. All this creates a riskier release.

Despite this, 'done' shouldn't be over-thought. Formalizing thresholds of quality is a dangerous distraction. If you are agile and iterative, you can just go back to decisions if they don't work. Equally, iterating to the design quality that delights and retains customers avoids over-designing.

Done.

Iterating quality and scope

Tue, 15 May 2012 15:13:10 +0000

A key challenge in product design is adequately balancing a minimal viable level of scope and quality. The distinction here is important. What you do (scope complexity) and how well you do it (quality) are really different things.

Regarding features, they can’t be thought of as simply an additive property. Extra features can easily dilute value and create confusion, as much as it can help differentiate your product. Also, countering the push for an elegantly minimal feature set, is the need to support complex, powerful tasks.

Irrespective of scope, quality needs to be maintained. If you decide to include a feature, it needs to be build with a base standard of quality.

Within a startup, this is one of the hardest things to accomplish. There’s a constant need to adapt to the requirements of customers in terms of feature development. Alongside this, there is a continual effort to raise the level of quality consistently across the product.

This leads to an inevitable friction within product planning. At what point do you start sacrificing quality for scope or visa versa? Embracing an agile approach, of using short iterations focused on measuring and learning, can help you make best use of the resources you have. But at some point, you need to pick a deliverable level of scope and quality.

But this isn’t bad. These constraints ensure a tight focus on the right strategy. It forces us to ask hard questions around value and return on investments when planning out road maps.

However, an agile approach to design and development also means you're flexible. Sometimes design only starts to happen once people start to actually use your features with their data. An agile approach means you can rapidly develop, learn and iterate both the product scope and quality. Features vs. quality is really a false dichotomy. If you stay lean and agile, you can iterate to both.

Defining Lean UX

Fri, 13 Apr 2012 18:03:03 +0000

As a community we're starting to form a more solid understanding of Lean UX. It's easy to think of it simply as a rebrand. But there's substance. Here's my stab on defining the term a little more concretely... the Lean UX bonfire. Pick the UX deliverable or approach which provides the leanest way to discover a solution. Anything that distracts you, discourages short, agile iterations or prevents learning, burn it.

Lean UX gives you a way to systematically deal with uncertainty - perhaps an explanation for it's strong association within the lean startup movement. We can't predict the future. Lean UX embraces the idea of short iterations focused on measuring and learning to tackle complexity. It removes departmental constraints on design and communication, allowing you to get truly close to product strategy. Design solutions no longer become buried and diluted through bloated deliverables.

Lean UX ≠ Less UX

So what does this actually mean? Well, here's two changes I've made as UX'er at Brightpearl.

First, lab based usability testing and hefty reports are gone. Replaced with remote, online usability testing through bagelHint or Skype. Issues identified are prioritised and put into a UX backlog. There, they can be commented on and scoped. It enables quicker ideation. No clunky Word or Powerpoint reports.

Axure is also gone. Design now takes place on paper or in the browser, offering quicker and clearer ways to solve problems. Browser developer tools are an easy way to iterate changes within an existing UI (e.g. label/style tweaks through to adding in whole new chunks of HTML). Frameworks like Bootstrap make it super accessible to create new ones from scratch. In fact, wireframing tools now feel like an awkward compromise, slow and full of false expectations.

None of this is an exact science though. I occasionally fall back to Photoshop to splice up an interface and create rough variations, before heading back to the browser to work in the necessary fidelity. Photoshop is also very different from wireframing apps. Particularly, the ability to explore creative and branding aspects.

The approach isn't without it's faults either and I'm still not certain how these changes have improved the quality of my designs. I still feel uneasy about the term. Maybe we should start calling deliverable heavy processes Bloat UX instead. Lean UX is really how UX should be done.

Complexity and User Experience

Thu, 24 Nov 2011 12:00:00 +0000

"The best products don't focus on features, they focus on clarity. Problems should be fixed through simple solutions, something you don't have to configure, maintain, control. The perfect solution needs to be so simple and transparent you forget it's even there. However, elegantly minimal designs don’t happen by chance. They're the result of difficult decisions. Whether in the ideation, designing, or the testing phases of projects, UX practitioners have a critical role in restraining the feature sets within our designs to reduce the complexity on projects."

Read my full article over at Boxes & Arrows

Mobile design, friction and UX with Josh Clark

Tue, 18 Oct 2011 15:45:17 +0000

In this podcast, we speak with Josh Clark, designer, UX guy and author of Tapworthy about the role of friction and complexity within the user experience.

We discuss the distinctions and similarities between mobile and desktop experiences, how touch devices are now allowing us to cut through greater levels of complexity and how the role of friction relates to the concept of a minimal viable product.

Really interesting podcast and huge thanks to Josh for his time. Make sure you check out the presentation from Josh that inspired the podcast and the awesome Future Friendly site.

Download podcast

Designing for emotion with Aarron Walter

Tue, 04 Oct 2011 22:09:26 +0000

In this podcast, we speak with Aarron Walter, user experience design lead at MailChimp, about designing for emotion.

Aarron talks about why and how MailChimp aimed not just for usable, but for a pleasurable user experience. We also discuss what's fuelled the emergence of emotional design, risks with emotional design and why emotional design should be led by the UX team.

We also talk about what we can expect from Aarron's exciting new book, 'Designing for Emotion'. You can download an example of the design persona we discuss over at Aarron's blog.

Download podcast

UX, complexity & startups with Des Traynor

Tue, 27 Sep 2011 20:41:24 +0000

In this podcast, we speak with Des Traynor, COO and user experience design lead at Intercom about managing complexity in a startup. We touch on how to prioritise features, benefits and examples of reducing scope, how to handle early user feedback and why a technical understanding is useful for UX designers.

Don't forget to check out the Contrast blog which has some awesome posts on UX and startups!

Download podcast

UI design, conflicts and pain with Ryan Singer

Tue, 20 Sep 2011 22:54:30 +0000

Ryan Singer, product manager at 37signals, talks about his recent post on identifying conflicts in a UI design.

We discuss the different aspects of his approach (the domain, the pixels and the implementation) and why the process feels a lot like pain therapy!

We also touch on the importance of designing and testing early, how the approach best fits within projects, knowing where to stop and how organisations can support the process.

Big thanks to Ryan for his time and for sharing his experience, really great insights that anyone involved across UI design and development can learn from.

Download podcast

Lean UX and Agile with Austin Govella

Tue, 13 Sep 2011 14:22:11 +0000

I recently had the opportunity to speak with Austin Govella, where he shared his thoughts and experiences on how user experience practitioners can best fit within agile development teams.

We touch on an introduction to agile, the concept of parallel work streams, how to maintain vision within agile projects, how UX deliverables can be tailored to fit the needs of developers and his thoughts on some future trends.

Also, make sure you check out the balanced team blog, where you can explore insightful discussions on agile and UX.

Play podcast