In this short video interview, a windswept Alberta gives an overview of her workshop and reflects on feedback from participants at UXBristol 2015:

Alberta Soranzo: Teams Are a Design Exercise from Bristol Usability Group on Vimeo.

About Alberta Soranzo

Alberta spent much of the last 20 years delivering user-focused digital solutions, creating digital frameworks that support retrieval of complex bodies of information and delivering meaningful experiences across channels, platforms and devices. Unafraid of challenging convention, she puts people at the heart of her design process and aims to create experiences which look stunning and support task completion with ease, elegance and simplicity.

She is adamant about usability, findability and making good things than anybody can use, anywhere.

Alberta is currently doing damage at Tobias & Tobias in London, where she mostly obsesses about the very small things that, she says, matter a lot.

Follow Alberta on Twitter: @albertatrebla

In this short video interview, a wind-swept Kathryn gives an overview of her workshop and reflects on feedback from participants at UXBristol 2015:

Kathryn Hegarty: Content as Data from Bristol Usability Group on Vimeo.

About Kathryn Hegarty

Kathryn is a UX Designer at MomentumFT, with a passion for information architecture, post-it notes and short meetings.

She has worked in a variety of software houses and marketing agencies and is currently embroiled in a financial planning app.

She co-runs SWUX, a monthly meet-up group in Bristol for UX and UX-curious people.

Follow Kathryn on Twitter: @kythryn

In this short video interview, Pat gives an overview of his workshop and reflects on feedback from participants at UXBristol 2015:

Patrick Jordan: The Four Pleasures from Bristol Usability Group on Vimeo.

About Pat Jordan

Pat Jordan is a consultant to many of the world’s most successful companies and to the third sector (charities and voluntary organisations). He was a policy advisor to the UK government from 2000 to 2010.

He is Chair of Design and Psychology at Middlesex University.

Follow Pat on Twitter: @patrickwjordan

In this short video interview, Birgit gives an overview of her workshop and reflects on feedback from participants at UXBristol 2015:

Birgit Geiberger: Design Your Communication from Bristol Usability Group on Vimeo.

About Birgit Geiberger

Birgit is a Creative Director UX and Consultant with a passion for user experience, design, branding and people.

By applying her deep knowledge about behavioural and communication styles, she develops design and communication strategies for products, and she helps cross-functional, cross-cultural teams in creating respectful, enjoyable work environments.

She is IxDA’s Regional Coordinator Europe, founding team member of the interaction design awards, and frequently speaks at international conferences about UX and communication.

Follow Birgit on Twitter: @birgitgcom

In this short video interview, Emma and James give an overview of their workshop and reflect on feedback from participants at UXBristol 2015:

Emma Millington & James Lang: Turning Personas into People from Bristol Usability Group on Vimeo.

About James Lang

James Lang is Research Director at cxpartners. He has worked in research for 20 years, across a variety of environments: customer insight, academia, public health and digital marketing as well as user research. He also spent a period at eBay, where he was responsible for the search experience and IA of ebay.com.au and ebay.co.nz. His particular interests are in finding new ways to disseminate usable insight, the quantification of user experience, and the role of decision-making in user journeys. He holds an MSc in Human-Centred Computer Systems.

About Emma Millington

Emma is Director of Projects at People for Research (a bespoke recruiter of participants for user testing).

Since joining the company in 2011 she has implemented tenacious recruitment methods and quality standards, grown a dedicated in-house recruitment team and expanded the recruitment portfolio across the UK.

Passionate about partnership, quality, service, and delivery, her goal is to set the bar for first class user recruitment across the globe, through clearly defined best practice, communicated to the sector through collaboration and knowledge sharing.

In this short video interview, Lon gives an overview of his workshop and reflects on feedback from participants at UXBristol 2015:

Lon Barfield: Icon Consequences from Bristol Usability Group on Vimeo.

About Lon Barfield

Lon is a user experience designer/researcher who has been working in web usability/user experience design for 16 years, and in interaction design in general for more than 20 years.

Follow Lon on Twitter: @lonbarfield

Three UX Lessons from Architecture School

Lucy McCulloch

In her short talk, Lucy reviewed 101 Things I Learned in Architecture School, which highlights a number of things we should think about in user design.

She highlighted three key lessons:

Lesson 1: Improved design process, not a perfectly realised building is the best result
Lesson 2: If you can’t explain your ideas to your grandmother in terms she would recognise, you don’t know your subject well enough.
Lesson 3: A good graphic presentation meets the ten-foot test

Watch Lucy’s talk in full:
 

 

Emotional Triggers

Shazmin Jagot

Despite her height, Shazmin plays basketball and finds that carrying her ball down the street triggers conversations with strangers – sport triggers emotions. Children and pets do a similar thing.

If you stroke a puppy, you are using all of your senses, which makes the experience more memorable. She demonstrated this by asking the audience to close their eyes whilst she read a passage of text – transporting them into someone else’s memory and experience.

She stressed that the way a message is conveyed is vital to how it is perceived. In digital, we are limited to sight, sound and touch. We cannot add smell, which is most associated with memory. In UX we focus on our mental models of the product, but Shazmin suggested using a mental model of our culture instead. She used Siri as an example, which has been programmed to be sarcastic. Maybe one day the digital devices we programme will be able to understand us better than we understand ourselves.

Watch Shazmin’s talk in full:
 

 

Working in Harmony

Sophie Dennis

In our industry, we are good at arguing who’s job is more important:

“Content First!”

“But design is important too!”

Sophie feels that the problem is the word ‘first’. In our culture, first is the most important and should therefore tell everyone else what to do. This creates a major problem in waterfall projects, where content actually comes last.

Sophie argued that we do is fundamentally collaborative. She suggested that the web is more like music: If we think as content as the musical score and design as the musician who interprets it and ask “which is more important?” we find that actually you need both for the experience.

Like a musical score, structured content is abstract content. There are very few people can read a score and hear the music in our head. We may need to create structured content, but we still need to experience it in context.

Sophie concluded by emphasising that we have to stop sitting in silos arguing who has the most important job – we need to organise our teams as collaborative groups, sharing the vision.

Watch Sophie’s talk in full:
 

 

The Power of Make Believe

Ben Hayes

As a teenager, Ben was into role playing games. For him, it was about creating a world, being someone else and doing things he couldn’t do in the real world.

In his job as a designer, he feels he still uses this capacity to make believe. When he builds something, he imagines he is the user who is going to use the product.

He discussed the scenarios described in About Face by Alan Cooper, which are concrete, specific stories about your user and what they do in their daily life as they use your product. He is always surprised how simple it is to be innovative when using these scenarios. You have constraints: your persona, your intuitive understanding of how the world works, and your goal, but you also have the freedom to let the storytelling find a natural flow towards the user’s goal.

He focussed on one key quote from Cooper: “Pretend the interface is magic”. This allows him to concentrate on how to get to the goal.

You obviously have to dial, back as you can’t build everything you can imagine. However, you do find things are novel and unexpected.

Watch Ben’s talk in full:
 

 

UX is Dead. Long live UX

Andy Budd

User experience came into many of our lives around 10 years ago. However, Andy argued that over the last few year user experience has been unwell.

Many of us may not be aware that user experience design has died. It became very niche, fixating on process and the minutia. Younger, smarter people have come an taken over with a broader skill set.

Andy believes there is still room for user experience in the world, but we don’t need this really specific skill any more – we need a mix of skills. He argued that we are moving away from the interface and Artificial Intelligence will soon take over from the UI, so it is time for user experience to die.

Andy feels we should mourn the loss of UX, but from the ashes there are a lot of good things to take away: collaboration, thoughtful approach to craftsmanship, thinking about the details of a problem. It will be interesting to see what happens in the next ten years.

The hypothesis is the crux at the centre of a lot of our work. Every time you make a change to the design of a product it is based on an informed guess – a hypothesis.

The hypothesis is one of the places people can wrong with AB testing, so it is crucial to get it right.

A hypothesis is a proposed explanation for a phenomenon. The scientific method requires that one can test it. This means you should collect data that tells us if we have failed.

Craig summarised a good hypothesis as:

“Because we observe data A and feedback B, we believe that doing C with People D, will cause outcome E, we will know this when we observe data and obtain feedback.”

He stressed that you need to decide your measurement metrics before you conduct your experiment.

Exercise

Craig provided a real client website from a client that has asked for AB testing. However, the client has done no market research or usability testing previously. They would like to AB test, but it would take nine years to run based on their current rates of traffic. The targets for testing are the home page and the up sell mechanic, as these can be modified fairly quickly.

Craig challenged participants to re-sketch one of these two elements of the site on their own and to think about why they are changing these elements. He then asked everyone to present their ideas in groups of five to expose the ideas that went into each sketch.

Following this, Craig asked participants to group sketch on a larger piece of paper to combine the best of these ideas.

Feedback

Problems highlighted within the sample website included:

• The absence of a primary navigation
• The need for key benefits/what they do to be clearer
• The product strap line (explaining the point of the site) is buried

Suggestions to improve the sample website included:

• Showing a sample report to clearly show the product offering
• Reorganising website elements to bring key information further up the home page
• Adding clear navigation

Conclusions

Craig emphasised the artificial nature of doing this exercise under such tight timescales. He outlined the real process, including gathering inputs from session replays, analytics, usability testing, voice of customers reports, service interviews, sales team interviews, surveys, cross device QA testing, social network analysis, competitor analysis and any other data they can get to inform a hypothesis sketching session.

Based on this evidence, he would then ask everyone to sketch their ideas and combine these using the pattern demonstrated by the workshop exercise so that design meetings are not dominated by one individual and all ideas can be explored.

Craig concluded by stressing that UX research with data and testing is a vital starting point. This gives you motivation and helps clients to evolve – throwing away ideas that aren’t working and improve those who do. Variation and the heritability of good ideas are key. Qualitative insight and quantitate data are vital to achieve these.

About Craig Sullivan

Craig has been blending UX, Analytics, Split Testing, Voice of Customer and Conversion Optimisation techniques for over 12 years. He’s also been building teams, launching products and hacking the growth of websites for companies like Google, LOVEFiLM, Lego, John Lewis, eBay and more.

He’s been bringing together the often isolated worlds of qual and quant measurement within organisations – to integrate a variety of discovery and inspection techniques and use these to prioritise, fix, improve or split test hypotheses about product design.

You can find him tweeting from @OptimiseOrDie on everything to do with Numbers, UX and Psychology. Although Craig confesses to being a shameless hacker of numbers, growth and marketing initiatives – his lifelong love has been in the boundary region between customers heads and the interface with products and services.

Follow Craig on Twitter: @OptimiseOrDie

Harry explained that a lot of organisations want to deliver a good user experience, but don’t know how to go about it. They often think they can create a product based on what their business needs, then sprinkle UX on top like a cake decoration. He argued that we need to educate clients about user centred design and help them to change their processes.

This workshop was designed to help participants learn how to do this using empathy maps, which are rough personas depicting the users you are designing for, and user journey maps, which is a map of a user’s experience with something, broken down into steps through time.

Empathy Maps

This method is good to use when you have a room full of people who understand the user(s) and you want to collate that information. The user persona is loosely defined, and participants are asked to consider what this user might be:

• Saying
• Seeing
• Thinking and Feeling
• Hearing

This method allows you to externalise and capture this information from the people in the room in a way that can be used constructively in the next stage of the process.

User Journey Maps

This method uses the empathy map and applies it to an experience the user has already had (a retrospective experience) or might have in the future (a prospective experience).

The user journey map itself is a grid that features columns describing the steps involved in the experience. The rows of the grid include actions, questions, happy moments, pain points and opportunities. The opportunities and pain points allow you to identify ways to improve the user experience.

Harry and Andy guided participants through two exercises using these methods:

Exercise 1:

Client: A hen and stag event company

Brief: You have been brought on board to help your client create products that tap into this massive market. The current offering is poor, so the client is keen to use UX to create a killer offering.

Assumptions: You’re already done 30 user interviews, you’ve logged and categorised their statements and you’ve created a user personas. Harry and Andy provided one for use in the exercise.

Activity: Participants were asked to complete the user journey map using an empathy map covering the experiences of a maid of honour or best man who organised a hen/stag party in the last year.

Exercise 2:

Add an “Opportunities” row suggesting solutions to the problems identified

Conclusions

Each group presented their solutions to each other, explaining how they arrived at their ideas based on the results of their user journey map.

In conclusion, Harry recommended using these techniques to help clients to think about users and journey, rather than specs and features, which will help them to adjust their thinking. However, he warned against skipping ahead and using these techniques at the development stage of the design process. He stressed that they should be used in the discovery stage, and followed by validation activities, such as user research, competition evaluations and stakeholder activities.

About Harry Brignull

Having worked for many top UX agencies and well known clients, Harry is now an independent user experience consultant helping businesses understand users and design products.

Harry’s clients have included The Telegraph, Dennis Publishing, Celesio, The Guardian, Sainsbury’s, Vodafone and many others. Prior to his UX consultancy career Harry was an academic researcher, doing a PhD in Cognitive Science and a research fellowship in CSCW and Ubiquitous Computing.

As a side project, Harry runs darkpatterns.org – a website dedicated to naming and shaming unethical businesses that profit by intentionally deceiving their customers.

Follow Harry on Twitter: @harrybr

About Andy Parker

A believer in accessible web design, Andy is an evangelist for progressive enhancement and designing with content-first. He is passionate about developing prototypes for just about anything including furniture and is often found with a hacksaw rather than a keyboard.

Follow Andy on Twitter: @theavangelist

Giles provided examples of insight-driven ideas and discussed how to manage the conversation surrounding these ideas, including how to know if you have a credible insight and how to demonstrate why an idea might not be a good one.

Anatomy of a Design Opportunity

 
Giles described what he termed the anatomy of a design opportunity, using the following features to help assess an idea and identify a genuine opportunity:

1. Goal – what do people want?
2. Effort – how much effort are they prepared to put in?
3. Behaviour – what do they do?
4. Influences – what influences their behaviour?
5. Outcome – what does a good outcome look like?

Goals

Giles broke goals down into three complexity: practical, emotional, values.

Often, when you are discussing goals with users, you start with practical goals, but you should dig further to discuss how they want to feel and how they want to express their values before assessing whether an idea is a genuine opportunity. The further down you can dig through these issues, the greater chance you have of success.

Effort

Giles argued that thinking about the frequency and complexity of a task is a good way to think about effort. Mainstream activities have low complexity and low frequency, whilst other tasks may require higher complexity or higher frequency. However, he advised avoiding high complexity/high frequency tasks, as there is a higher chance of user failure. He also noted the differences between ‘experts’ and ‘mainstreamers’ and the importance of understanding where your audience fits on this scale when considering attitudes to effort.

Behaviour

Giles explained how he uses a combination of experience maps and personas to map out how a task will look for particular user types. Once you have an experience map like this you can start to look at drop off rates and other layers of contextual data, and compare the experience you are offering to the experience the user wants and the experience a competitor might be offering. This is valuable as it allows you to identify opportunities to add features that bridge a genuine gap or fix a pain point where everyone is doing something badly.

Influences

An experience map will allow you layer in some of the context as users are going through a task. Giles discussed how to think about contextual issues such as environment and paths, and information and signs.

Outcome

The user’s intended outcome is often tied very tightly to the original goals.

Applying the Anatomy of a Design Opportunity Structure

The anatomy of design opportunity structure allows us to assess an idea in a structured way to identify opportunities. To put this into practice, Giles challenged participants to look at an existing interaction and come up with something better.

Exercise:

Giles compared how shopping lists look for online retailers, such as Tesco, and what shopping lists actually look like for real people:

Workshop participants were asked to analyse what these handwritten shopping lists tell us about the users goals/effort/behaviour/influences/outcomes, then consider how they could redesign an online shopping list to better match the practices of users.

Feedback:

Ideas included:

• Using an app (preferably with voice recognition) to allow users to build up their shopping list easily over time
• Using the list to provide an augmented experience when shopping in store by highlighting the relevant aisles on a store map and including a help button to request staff assistance when finding an item
• Allowing users to send their list from the application of their choice to Tesco directly so they don’t have to use the complex data picker functionality on the website
• Allowing users to create top-level lists early on, rather than asking for a specific brand from the outset
• ‘Shop for me’ style features for time-poor users, who can request recommendations to feed a family of three for £5
• Allowing users to take a photo of a recipe in a book and send that to the retailer to add the items to their shopping list
• Using the massive amount of online shopping data to predict suitable products based on previous purchases, and an up sell
• Ability to build a list by scanning or photographing items as you throw the packaging away (or recycle it!)

Conclusions

Giles concluded by emphasising that thinking through each of the elements of this structure helps to deconstruct poor ideas and interrogate genuine opportunities, based on real knowledge and real data.

About Giles Colborne

Giles is author of Simple and Usable and a frequent speaker on the topics of simplicity and delight at UX conferences around the world. He began his career at British Aerospace, working on the usability of critical systems before creating some of the first commercial websites at Institute of Physics Publishing and creating groundbreaking experiences at Euro RSCG network. Today, he’s Managing Director and owner of cxpartners, one of the UK’s most respected UX consultancies working with clients around the world designing next-generation user interfaces. He’s also active in the UX community as a mentor and as 2013 co-chair of IA Summit.

Follow Giles on Twitter: @gilescolborne