The User Experience Team of One

by Leah Buley

  You will hold meetings with the business stakeholders or project teams and thrash out your goals, essentially creating a quite loose but tangible set of requirements. Business people not used to the strange design world will find it easier to talk, rather than getting the Sharpies and Post-its out right away.

  Now you get to go away and start sketching, iterating, and sketching some more until you’ve got some designs that answer the questions that were raised. When you next meet, you can use the designs to test some assumptions or even push some of the boundaries. Making it real, even in a low-fidelity way (I use Balsamiq and a projector) allows your crowd to see how their ideas will play out on-screen. This gives you the validation and buy-in required to actually do the work and start to test these designs on real users in whichever way works best for you.

  Even if you come back with bad news from testing, the team is engaged, knows the history, and how they got here. They’ve bought into the process and are emotionally connected to it.

  Next time, you might even be able to start with the Sharpies and Postits! Rather than fighting for entry, you’ll start to become the “go to” problem solver.

  Well done, you’ve just introduced your business to UX thinking.

  Responses to Common Objections

  Talking about UX often leads to questions, and in some cases objections. But any seasoned salesperson will tell you that objections are an opportunity, not a threat. Think of an objection as an invitation to a more direct and honest conversation, where you can really probe about what’s driving someone else’s point of view. The following is a cheat sheet of the most common questions that UX professionals face, and some good ways to answer them.

  Objection: It’s just Web design, right?

  Answer: Researching user needs can impact the product at many levels: what features and functions are included, how content is written and presented, how support works, and how well it integrates with other touch points like mobile, desktop, and print. Limiting the scope of responsibility and involvement that the UX designer has to merely the Web or interface level limits its potential impact and effectiveness. Many UX designers never even touch the Web. (They might go by more specialized titles like mobile designer or tablet designer, but they’re practicing UX, too.) UX is a role that should span product development from start to finish and at all major product decisions.

  Objection: But we already do market research.

  Answer: 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. In design research, you look for evidence of habits, biases, needs, and native worldviews. 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. What you learn through design research can help you develop tools like “Proto-Personas” (see Chapter 6, “Research Methods,” for more information).

  NOTE THE ROI OF DESIGN RESEARCH

  To help companies determine whether design research and persona development is worth the investment, the market research firm Forrester developed an ROI model to measure the benefit of personas to the companies that undertake them. They discovered that a redesign effort with personas can provide a return of up to four times more than a redesign without personas. (From the Forrester Report “The ROI of Personas.”)

  Objection: User experience work is too expensive.

  Answer: It’s always less expensive to fix or improve the plan for a product before it’s built, instead of after. In Cost-Justifying Usability, CEO Janice Durst explains, “It costs much less to code the interface in a customer acceptable way the first time than it does to introduce a poor UI in the field and then rework that UI in version two. In addition, a poor UI will increase support costs.” You could therefore think of UX as a preventative investment to keep the costs of your product from getting out of control down the road. Ultimately, user experience work can be as expensive or as affordable as you’re prepared to make it. It only takes a quick chat with a real user or showing a proposed design to a few people to quickly uncover if there’s any major misalignment between how the product is framed and how people are likely to use it.

  Objection: It takes too much time.

  Answer: It’s important to be realistic that it might take some time to do UX well. Still, UX work doesn’t have to add months. In fact, one benefit that UX can bring to your process is the ability to rapidly prototype, test with users, and evolve the product design. Be optimistic but also realistic. The time you put in up front is an investment that defrays other, more burdensome, costs down the road. And whether your organization realizes it or not, UX is probably already in your process in some surprising forms. It currently shows up in places like time in the call center providing support, or extended time up front for sales, or time in QA testing, or time in maintenance and bug fixes. Ultimately, formalized UX can save you time by taking less time up front to address usability and experience issues that could become a lot costlier to fix once built.

  NOTE THE COST OF NOT DOING USER-CENTERED DESIGN

  In Software Engineering, A Practitioner’s Approach, Roger Pressman presents a compelling return on investment for focusing on user needs early in the product development lifecycle. For every dollar spent to resolve problems during product design, Pressman shows it would cost $10 to address the same problem during product development, and $100 or more to solve the problem after the product is released.

  Objection: But UX research isn’t statistically significant.

  Answer: To be statistically significant means that a result has been determined by statistical methods to be unlikely to have occurred by chance.

  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.

  The other big reason is that you don’t really need to do it. With even just a small sample size, you can get a sense of the big trends. Sometimes, seeing just one or two users experience the same problem can clue you into a major opportunity for improvement. You can also get some pretty fascinating and rich detail, and that ultimately is the main goal of design research. But in particularly numerate environments, people sometimes object that what you find with design research is not statistically significant. David Gilmore writing in Interactions magazine called this studying “large numbers shallowly [vs.] small numbers in depth.”

  In fact, 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. It’s also possible to combine quantitatively valid research, such as surveys, with qualitative user research, to create a complete picture of what people do (quantitative) and then why (qualitative).

  NOTE A MAGIC NUMBER FOR USER RESEARCH

  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 N
ielsen, the less you learn because you keep seeing the same issues again and again.

  In 2012, Nielsen revisited this question to see if the magic number five still held true. By analyzing the number of usability findings relative to the number of users across 83 different research studies, Nielsen concluded that “testing more users didn’t result in appreciably more insights.” The optimal number of users to test in a qualitative study is still five—just five. Conversely, warns Nielsen, “zero users give zero insights.” By taking the time to conduct research with just a few users, you gain significantly more insights than you’d have with no research at all. (See www.nngroup.com/articles/why-you-only-need-to-test-with-5-users/ for more.)

  Objection: But we already know what needs to be done.

  Answer: UX tells you not just what’s wrong, but also why and how to fix it. It also gives you an opportunity to validate that you got it right. Sometimes, things that seem pretty straightforward or that users may even have asked for explicitly really come from a deeper need that you can only discover by getting out of the office and into people’s lives. And, in the long run, observing real people using your products (or their preferred alternatives) may teach the team some things they didn’t know before.

  Objection: That’s [marketing’s/engineering’s/product management’s] job.

  Answer: 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.

  NOTE THE ROLE OF USER EXPERIENCE

  A 2005 article from IEEE called “Why Software Fails” listed the top 12 reasons why software projects are unsuccessful. Of the 12, three were directly connected to issues that user experience practitioners can help with:

  • Badly defined system requirements

  • Poor communication among customers, developers, and users

  • Stakeholder politics

  While UX isn’t a silver bullet for all the complexities of product development, 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. A user experience practitioner can help the team ensure that system requirements and product designs are aligned with what’s usable and desirable for users.

  If You Only Do One Thing...

  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. This chapter encourages you to address those challenges and objections head on. Having the right attitude matters. Be vigilant against feelings of defensiveness or combativeness in yourself. Rather, cultivate a collaborative, curious, and respectful mindset.

  So if you do nothing else from this chapter, be sure to think about the principles at the start: invite non-UX people into your process. Listen with genuine curiosity. Make ideas tangible. And, above all else, be patient with yourself and others, remembering that design is an iterative process that takes time to get right.

  PHOTO BY JAMISON YOUNG (FLICKR)

  CHAPTER 4

  Growing Yourself and Your Career

  Professional Communities

  Continuing Education

  Making a Case for Career Growth

  Moving Out and On

  If You Only Do One Thing...

  For teams of one, it’s important to establish a few growth strategies that are just for you, regardless of what your colleagues think or say about UX. They will keep you passionate, motivated, and may even give you skills that you can bring back into your practice to help advance the commitment to UX shared by all. In this chapter, we’ll look at a range of resources for continual growth. This includes not only finding opportunities in your own organization, but also taking advantage of the extensive range of external options that are available for user experience professionals.

  Professional Communities

  Be it formal or informal, having a community of like-minded professionals can be one of the most important things you do for your career. It will give you people you can learn from (or mentor), people you can share experiences and best practices with, people to commiserate with, and can often lead to future job opportunities. In short, it will keep you sane. Professional communities come in lots of different flavors.

  Professional Associations

  Most professions have professional communities. These are third-party organizations that exist for the sole purpose of connecting professionals and advancing the cause of their field. User experience is no exception. There are several well-established professional communities that UX professionals can belong to. Members typically receive benefits, such as access to job listings, access to other members of the network, special publications of the professional community, discount rates at events and conferences, and access to community discussion lists. For the UX field, the following associations shown in Figures 4.1–4.7 have vibrant communities.

  IXDA (the Interaction Design Association) is dedicated to the field of interaction design, but judging by its vibrant discussion list, it covers all aspects of user experience design. With 20,000+ members, it’s an active global community (www.ixda.org/).

  SIGCHI (Special Interest Group of Computer-Human Interaction) is a part of the ACM, or Association for Computing Machinery. This long-standing group has been around since the 1980s and tends to have a more academic focus than some of the other professional associations (www.sigchi.org/).

  FIGURE 4.1

  IXDA (Interaction Design Association).

  FIGURE 4.2

  SIGCHI (Special Interest Group of Computer-Human Interaction).

  FIGURE 4.3

  IA Institute (Information Architecture Institute).

  The IA (Information Architecture) Institute was founded with a focus on information architecture. This professional association today exists to support individuals who specialize in the design and construction of “shared information environments” (http://iainstitute.org/en/).

  Known until recently as the Usability Professionals’ Association, the UXPA (User Experience Professionals’ Association) has a broader purview than mere usability, and aims to support user experience designers and researchers worldwide. UXPA has very active local chapters in a number of major cities. Don’t give up hope if your city isn’t listed. In addition to “official” listed local chapters some “tech hub” cities are likely to have unofficial or unlisted groups that organize events and meet-ups on an informal ad-hoc basis. These may be hosted or sponsored by companies interested in promoting UX within the local community—perhaps even as a way of identifying potential hires (www.uxpa.org/ and www.usabilityprofessionals.org.).

  ASIST (American Society for Information Science and Technology) has been in existence since 1937, when it was founded as the American Documentation Institute and focused mainly on the then prevalent technology of microfilm. In addition to having special interest groups focused on topics such as information architecture and human-computer interaction, ASIST hosts the IA Summit and the Euro IA Summit, two annual conferences that draw a large turnout from the user experience community (www.asist.org.).

  Formerly known as the American Institute for Graphic Arts, this organization is now just called the AIGA. This group is focused broadly on design, including graphic design, user experience design, and product design (www.aiga.org.).

  FIGURE 4.4

  UXPA (User Experience Professionals’ Association).

  FIGURE 4.5

  ASIST (Ame
rican Society for Information Science and Technology).

  FIGURE 4.6

  AIGA.

  FIGURE 4.7

  STC (Society for Technical Communication).

  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/).

  Discussion Lists and Online Communities

  All of these professional associations have discussion lists that you can sign up for. You’ll also find discussion lists and online communities that aren’t sponsored by any particular association. For many people, discussion lists are the richest and most active resource that a professional community provides. Discussion lists are usually freely available to the public, which means that a vast catalog of first-hand knowledge from practicing professionals can be conjured forth with a simple Google search. Often, for a specific question or just a bit of perspective, the discussion thread will give you more ideas than you need. Many UX practitioners subscribe to these lists by email or through RSS feeds.

  These are some popular discussion lists for user experience professionals: