Is UX Killing the Art of Communication?

Kathryn Hegarty (@kythryn)

Is [fill in the blank] killing the art of communication? Kathryn Hegarty argued that this phrase gets bandied about all the time and it is bloody annoying!

Imagine it is 2045. A new thing has come out. Someone, somewhere will say it is killing the art of communication/conversation!

This is not a new thing. Kathryn looked back through history highlighting how every technology is viewed as killing communication.

We are human beings. We change to stay the same. The key things Kathryn believes really change the way we communicate are celebrity, acceptability and power.

From a UX perspective, we are communication town planners. We should be concerned about the aspects communication we can affect, such as permanence, findability, who gets heard and verifiability.

These things are not new in our industry. We have been doing these things all along and we will continue to do so, whatever the medium.

What is the User Need?

Jay Spanton (@Spanty)

Jay discussed the ways in which the Government Digital Service (GDS) talks about user needs and how this relates to the ways UX designers more widely might use/understand the term.

Government is currently trying to become more user centred and understand user needs. Government and civil servants really struggle with this. They are moving towards having a discovery phase in every project, starting with educated guessing, followed by data gathering, then talking to real people. He noted that you often have to explain what ‘real people’ are, compared to ‘representative people’.

When they talk to real people, Jay emphasised that the main thing they found was that people lacked reassurance from Government services.

Consequences

Joe Leech (@mrjoe)

Joe Leech posed a question: Do you agree with the statement ‘UX is a force for good’?

There was unanimous agreement, with suggestions that UX makes businesses better and people’s live better.

He highlighted the experience of working with the online appliance seller ao.com and their efforts to work on the user’s experience at every level of the process.

This has consequences. He listed many of the companies (large and small) that have blamed ‘the internet’ for the closure of their business. However, Joe argued that this is because the internet services offer better user experiences. The consequence of good UX is putting some companies out of business. Some are larger companies that offered a poor user experience. Others are small high street retailers who lack the skills to make use of the internet to improve the user experience they deliver.

He stressed that he still thinks UX is a force for good. However, we are now facing a challenge: we are in the minority who have the skills to create good online experiences. We need to share this knowledge so that others can come along for the ride and not go out of business.

Systems Thinking in 3 Minutes

Nic Price (@nicprice)

Nic discussed the importance of systems thinking, including the quote:

‘Systems thinking begins when first we see the world through the eyes of another’

He explained that it is important to keep in mind the well-known illustration of the six blind men touching an elephant and interpreting their experience of an elephant differently. This idea of a personal world view is core to systems thinking.

Every system exists within another system. When you recognise something as a system you start to break these down into components, without each of which the system will not work. When we are designing something, we have to remember what it is a part of and how any changes may affect that system.

He also observed that the boundaries of a system can be changed: a bicycle is a system, but add a cyclist and you end up with a new system. When you change the design of a part of a system you have to think about the whole system to understand the consequences.

Brand is not your logo. It is an idea. A small idea that sticks in our minds. It is a promise to our customers about what to expect. It is a mental association we make when thinking about a product or company.

Mike Atherton explained that brand is about instinct – it starts on a personal level and can be fairly primal. We tend to base our product choices on trust, so brand builds loyalty, preference and price premium.

In this workshop, Mike examined some of the aspects of building a brand, focussing on vision, values and voice.

Vision

“People don’t buy what you do. They buy why you do it.”

A brand aligns people to your cause and creates not only customers, but ambassadors for the brand.

Mike discussed how the UX-based approach of “the five whys” can help people to establish the core purpose of their business by working backwards from any action and asking “why?” five times.

Exercise

Workshop participants were given five minutes to work backwards from an activity of a fictitious company to their core purpose by using the five whys principle to develop a best guess about what the core purpose of that company ought to be.

They were then challenged to set a big, hairy audacious goal for the company that speaks to that purpose.

Values

Generic company values often seem vague and useless, or do not represent a company as we see it.

However, core values are the qualities and virtues we care most deeply about. They’re not what we want to be – they are what we actually are. Mike discussed several examples of company values that are visible in the way a company works, including Zappos, and Etsy.

So how do you find values?

Mike suggested a technique where you have to recreate your organisation on Mars. Who would you pick to go? Consider who best embodies the company spirit, the values they have and why should they go. Things that sound more like genuine, recognisable core values usually emerge from this process.

“A distinctive value is a fork in the road… something where you can’t say ‘who wouldn’t want to be like that?'”

Voice

Mike argued that a brand is a personification of a company, so it has a name, a voice and a personality.

If we are trying to express our company’s true personality, then our brand voice must be:

• Talkable
• Authentic
• Unique

He stressed that the brand voice has to be an accurate reflection of your brand – the over-familiar, ‘matey’ approach is not the only voice available and may not be appropriate.

To practice developing a brand voice, workshop participants were invited to take some dry service statements and re-write these in a voice based on personality traits that best match their fictitious company from the earlier exercise.

Mike suggested using a brand personality scale to pick two traits that represent the brand and one that does not in order to get a clear picture of what the brand is, i.e.

We are…playful and daring, but never wholesome.

Mike noted that there is currently a trend towards having an over-familiar brand voice, but you can only really pull that off if you that really reflects your company. It is ok to be more corporate if that truly represents your company culture and identify. It is important to be authentic.

Conclusion

Brand is an idea, driven by a purpose that genuinely comes from the individuals in an organisation.

Brand is what people say about you when you’re not in the room.

Jon and Paul gave a quick fire introduction to conducting a design sprint, including the key lessons to remember and interactive exercises to help workshop participants practice the technique.

Lesson 1: The Power of 2

Jon and Paul argued that working in pairs you get a broad range of skills and ideas. You work faster and catch each other going off at a tangent. Working in pairs also encourages quick review and shared responsibility for design output.

They were keen to stress that whilst there’s can be a wider project team, design sprints are best used to crack a difficult problem at the centre of your project quickly. Working as a pair to deal with these specific issues means that you end up with stalemates, which means bad designs get rejected quickly rather than fought over. Larger teams trying to solve these problems can lead to compromised designs by a committee.

Lesson 2: Don’t Just Jump In

Don’t go into a design sprint-based format until you’ve done your homework. You need a good structure for a design sprint to work – including a good understanding of the relationships between the content.

Lesson 3: Information Architecture

As a minimum you will need:

• An understanding of any user research that has been done
• An understanding of content relationships – we believe this is being missed in many design teams
• An indication fo possible user journeys
• An understanding of the user vs business needs

Lesson 4: Sketch, Compare, Discuss, Repeat (Exercise)

Each team was provided with a pack with a brief from a client, a draft content model for the website described in the brief, and draft content elements.

Each pair were encouraged to work through the pattern: sketch, compare, discuss, repeat. Under pressure from the Starsky and Hutch theme tune, each participant worked on their own to sketch a design without showing their partner. After six minutes of private sketching, the pairs were given a further six minutes to compare and discuss their sketches.

Lesson 5: Kill your Darlings

Don’t be precious about your ideas. At this stage you are getting insight into your partner’s ideas. There will be discarded ideas.

Lesson 6: Respect

Everyone is equal in a design sprint. Each partner brings different knowledge and experience to a partnership. You have more skills in the room with two of you.

Jon and Paul also stressed the importance of looking beyond the quality of the sketching skills of individual members to the quality of the idea.

Lesson 7: Take Breaks

Design partnerships can be intense, so it is important to take a break – as long as you don’t get sucked into another project!

Lesson 8: Adapt to Change

You have already done your homework. You have already done the systemic level of thinking. You don’t need to design every aspect of every page in the design sprint if you have done this level of thinking.

This means that when your client emails with a change, you can assess the damage and consider how to resolve it, or whether to bump the change to the next sprint.

“You can’t do lean UX without deep systemic understanding of what you are trying to design.”

Workshop participants were asked to carry out the ‘repeat’ section of the earlier exercise after such a client email – adapting their original ideas to match the new requirements.

Lesson 9: Content, Content, Content, Lorem Ipsum

Jon and Paul argued that because you are working with more piecemeal timescales, you may not have content. They advocated starting with the structure, then thinking about the content.

When you do need content, this can be sourced in a variety of ways:

• You could work with your client to produce new content. Often, your clients are best place to develop the copy.
• You can use existing content from a previous design/other channels.
• You can write the content yourself!
• You can use Lorem Ipsum – the issue is not what you’re doing but why you are doing it. There is nothing wrong with using lorem ipsum if the content is not relevant to the problem you are trying to solve.

Lesson 10: Prototype

Don’t get hung up on the tools you are going to use or the fidelity of the prototype – just choose something that gets it done.

Conclusion

Jon and Paul concluded by summing up the benefits of design sprints:

• They maximise use of time
• They give you a higher quality design output
• They minimise interaction and update times
• They encourage the sharing of skills and learning
• They promote shared responsibility and support
• They fit within any project management framework
• They are enjoyable!

Repertory grids use the idea of personal construct psychology, and was designed to work in the clinical psychology setting. However, it became popular with market researchers and education for career planning. It has recently come to be used in UX for inspiration and evaluation.

Advantages

Paul and Henry outlined the main advantages of using repertory grids within a UX contents. These included:

• Repertory grids give structure to interviews and create a tangible record of the interview ready for analysis.
• They are fun – interviews using a repertory grid tend to be easier, clearer and teach users something about themselves.
• You get an honest opinion and a deeper sense of how the interviewee thinks about the issue under consideration, rather than a yes/no response.

What Goes into a Repertory Grid

Henry explained that there are three core parts to a repertory:

• Elements – These are the topics or materials for the grid.
• Constructs/contrasts – Opposing concepts about the elements.
• Ratings – The scale between constructs and contrasts.

Example:

Activity

This is an activity used with a user on a one-to-one basis, working with them to fill in the grid.

Each participant had a copy of the grid and were asked to think of they five most favourite or commonly used mobile/tablet apps. They wrote these on pieces of paper and shuffled them together.

Participants were then asked to pick three and consider the ways in which two of the apps are similar and one is different. From this, they were asked to come up with a name for this concept and add this to the grid.

The names of the apps were written across the top of the grid under the ‘elements’ heading. Each was rated against each of the constructs and contrasts.

Participants then discussed their grids in pairs to understand how the grids could be used to stimulate discussion within an interview.

Feedback

Paul and Henry invited participants to reflect on the activity and the issues this raised. Comments included:

• Coming up with constructs was difficult, as many favourite apps are quite similar.
• Constructs might need breaking down/revising – Henry noted that if two constructs are similar, you can use a technique called laddering to get the interviewee to breakdown these constructs.
• Constructs/contrasts can reveal personal values and how interviewees see the world.
• Sometimes constructs were not applicable to all elements – Henry emphasised that you need to avoid this if possible, or get interviewees to contribute new constructs that fill the gap (without being leading!)
• Should elements should be discrete items or part of a larger design? – Henry advised that competitive items may work best with this technique
• The exercise highlighted crossovers and connections between elements – Henry suggested asking interviewees to suggest additional constructs to explain how they are thinking when these arise.

Using a Repertory Grid in a Quantitative Way

Paul recommended OpenRepGrid to work with the data generated by repertory grids and allow you to create visualisations of individual or groups of grids to identify patterns that may be useful.

As the repertory grid was designed as an individual, subjective activity, this doesn’t necessarily allow you to compare groups of people. There is some debate about whether you can/should aggregate results.

Paul concluded by suggesting some techniques that could be used to account for variations in constructs between individuals to get some useful information, including looking at the patterns of ratings to identify constructs that may be similar.

“Why things take longer than you think… and what you can do about it.”

Estimating is relatively easy: it is controlling projects that hard.

Nairn Robertson kicked off his workshop by recommending several techniques to keep control of projects, including:

• Establishing a crystal clear scope before the project begins
• Estimating for this scope
• Clarifying project/company/client objectives firmly before commencing work

He also advised chasing down risks and unknowns aggressively throughout the project, noting that good project manager does these two things really well.

Workshop participants were challenged to estimate a range of things, including the length of the River Severn and the year of Alexander the Great’s birth. They were asked to give their answers as a range that gives a 90% change of including the right answer.

Participants worked together and then combined their efforts. The results match Steve McConnell’s research, that shows that people usually only achieve 25% accuracy or less. Even when giving an estimate as a range, people are generally bad at estimating.

You can be more lucky. You can’t be more accurate.

You can improve the certainty of estimates by removing unknowns, making decisions and designing.

Robertson also emphasised the difference between estimates and commitments. Estimates should be objective, unfettered by commercial/client pressures and most accurate estimate you can make. It will be wrong by its very nature. Commitments are based on those estimates. Other factors may come into the commitment.

Making a commitment to a client must be done carefully, as the estimate is always going to be wrong. The estimate will become narrower and more accurate as the project progresses, so it is worth considering strategies to manage client expectations until you reach a point where you know enough to estimate more accurately.

Exercises

Robertson then led a series of practical exercises that can be used in planning meetings to work with a team to improve the estimating process:

Fingers and Thumbs

Robertson challenged workshop participants to another practice exercise, asking them to estimate the population of various countries individually and as a group, using a technique called ‘fingers and thumbs’.

Each group member put their hands behind their back, and on a cue, all showed their hands with the number of fingers extended reflecting the number of million people in each country. Each group then reflected on the different answers and agreed a number.

Robertson noted that showing your hands to give an estimate before discussing it can be a good way to draw out opinions from quieter members of the team. It also highlights where there is a wide variation perspectives on the estimate under discussion. This is a good thing, as it highlights differences in understanding, which can be a risk that you need to unpick.

Relative Estimating

Next, groups were asked to rank a selection of animals by weight, then estimate the weight of each when told that one of the animals (the antelope) weighs three units using a selection of number cards.

This technique requires preparation, but promotes discussion. Taking the unit itself out of the equation also makes the estimate more objective, by not focussing on the unit.

Affinity Estimating

The groups were asked to layout cards bearing the names of various vehicles against a number line. By taking it in turns, members of the group were asked to move a card relative to the others, or select a new card and place this on the number line. However, they were not told the basis upon which they were judging the vehicles.

Planning Fallacy

Robertson defined this broadly as wishful thinking. People focus on the most optimistic scenario for a task, and only affects things we estimate ourselves. Anecdotally, people miss predictions but make deadlines.

He stressed the importance of being aware of this when doing an estimate. He suggested doing an estimate, then going back and recalculating assuming everything will go wrong. He also suggested getting a second opinions and treating variations in estimates as a positive insight, as this is the stage when you can do something about any variations and improve your estimate as a result.

To Under Estimate or Over Estimate?

Both have their downsides:

If you under estimate you spend a lot of time in emergency status meetings, dealing with clients, re-estimating, and managing extra resource. This weakens your position with the client and delays other projects.

If you over estimate, work will expand to fill the time available. However, you may not get the business, so this is a risky strategy too.

Conclusion

Robertson concluded with Brook’s Law:

Adding manpower to a late software project makes it later.

The conference is being held at the same time as Bristol’s Harbour Festival, and kicked off with a spectacular water display from the Pyronaut fire boat!