Unicorn: a visual designer with UX skills
I was speaking to an entrepreneur the other day when he mentioned he was looking for a “creative director with UX skills.” He added,”…someone whose aesthetic I really like.” I responded ,”Good luck.”
No two are alike!
Every person grows up thinking they are unique and special. Your mother told you that and, to this day, you believe it. The customers coming to your web site are no different. They each come expecting you to deliver an experience that is custom-tailored to their exact needs and desires. They want you to remember them, what they did, what they like/dislike and what they will likely do in the immediate future. Meet these demands and your product (website, et al) is the shit! Meet it not (sorry for the pseudo-Braveheart riff) and your site is shite (which is the opposite of “the shit!”).
There is no possible way you could deliver each of your customers a generic experience that would meet their expectations – they believe. But they’re wrong. With enough traffic through your application, patterns emerge. These patterns become evident through regular, vigilant review and analysis of your usage analytics (aka “the data”). Very quickly you start to see which users are performing specific actions and the correlations between those users. Add in a healthy dose of user profiling and you start to fill out your “typical” customers. Augment your findings with some qualitative research (yep, talk to your customers) to understand their motivations and very quickly you’ve moved away from individual snowflakes into similar “piles” snow – also known as personas.
This was NOT me in my band but still.....
For a good portion of the 90’s and early 00’s I was a touring musician. There were 5 or 6 of us (depending on the band), we were young, determined and hungry – both figuratively (we wanted to be rock stars) and literally (we were broke). Seemingly unrelated, I’ve been drawn to the startup world over the last few years and have found it to be quite comfortable. The excitement, the drive, the hunger – all qualities of successful entrepreneurial teams looking to change to world – surrounded me in this world as well.
And then it dawned on me that my time as a touring musician set a surprisingly solid foundation for my work now and here’s why: bands are the musical versions of startups.
UX and Product Owner: The two-headed beast!
For the past 4 months I’ve been functioning as the Product Owner for my Scrum team. Interestingly, I’m also the UX designer for the team. Many articles point to the challenges, at times seemingly insurmountable, that this dual-role creates. While those challenges are indeed rearing their, err, challenging heads, let me recap how the team has worked through them.
Challenge #1: There is not enough time to be the PO and the UX person
Both roles are full-time jobs. How does one reconcile and/or prioritize the obligations pulling in different directions?
The answer is to get those obligations pulling in the same direction. The PO has the business’ needs in mind. The UX designer has the user in mind. But, the UX designer’s job is to bridge the gap of business and customer. By having both those needs clearly defined and in the same person’s brain, a synergy is created which allows the singular UXPO (yes, I like that) to conceive early design ideas that already conform to the business’ requirements.
Challenge #2: developers need constant direction about what’s coming in each iteration.
The UX designer, working in parallel with the rest of the team, is constantly providing assets, answers, and feedback. The PO is looking ahead to the next iteration, as well as the next theme. The challenge has been focusing on the present and the future at the same time.
The way I’ve handled this is by splitting my time in the iteration. Early in the cycle I work on the immediate needs of the team. The thing you’ll find is that even if you’re employing Lean UX tactics, you still design well ahead of the dev team’s capacity very quickly. This turns out to be a good thing when you’re the UXPO as it opens up days in iteration for you to look towards the next set of cycles. What I’ve also found effective is, as you’re deciding where to focus in the near-term, bringing in the team for quick brainstorms, affinity mapping exercises and design studios offers perspective, insight and a welcome (short) break for them from the monotony of long coding days.
But wait! There’s more! The added bonus is that by involving the scrum team in these activities, they’re a part of the planning, know exactly what’s coming up and are already bought in to the plan (because they helped create it).
Challenge #3: Approval cycles can be notoriously long. How can the UXPO keep the trains moving while securing executive buy-in for the team’s efforts?
To solve this challenge I’ve had to become a UXPOlitician (hot!). I have a vision of where I’d like the product to go. While we execute tactically on the immediate needs I’m constantly chatting, formally and informally, with my internal stakeholders. We bounce our new ideas off of them and get a read of the general vibe. This shapes the vision and we discuss it further. By having these conversations well upstream in the process, our review cycles focus on the very tactical elements of the work – not the strategic choices we’ve made. Those decisions were settled a while back outside of the iteration machinery allowing us to keep the cyclical nature of Agile development moving forward at constant and, hopefully, increasing velocities.
These are just three challenges I’ve faced as the UXPO. What have you faced? How have you solved it?
[Jeff]
I once sat next to a newly-diagnosed MS patient while walking him through an online description of the progression of that disease. It was devastating.
Another time I interviewed a long-suffering Psoriasis patient about her frustration with the lack of progress on treatment. It was infuriating.
I once sat next to a job seeker who had been unemployed for 2 weeks. He was invincible. And so was I.
Yet another time I sat next to a jobseeker who was unemployed for 6 months. He was desperate for communication – of any kind. So we talked.
Empathy is the true comprehension of what our customers, visitors and users feel when they reach out for our service. Without it, we’re designing blind.
Get out of your cube, office or co-working space. Go meet your customers. Ask them how they’re feeling. Understand them and they’ll know it. You’ll find them in your products and services.
[Jeff]
UX Design portfolios and deliverables are overrated and rarely useful.
“Can they draw straight lines?”
That’s what my boss asks me each time I meet a new UX Design candidate.
I’ve interviewed a lot of UX Designers over the past two years. Inevitably (and at my request in most cases) we end up going through some of their past deliverables. Whether it’s in a book or an online portfolio, a series of wireframes is typically shown along with some kind of flow diagram, perhaps an old spec or a use case template as well. What I’ve found from these hours of interviews is that, for UX Designers, an online portfolio is overrated and rarely useful.
I totally wasn’t. And the image below proves it:
The award I got for "inspiring" off-spec feature development
I received this illustrious award after coining the phrase “rogue developer” while on the AOL Explorer project (a surprisingly successful browser AOL launched in the early-mid 00′s). To me, a rogue developer was a software engineer who came up with and implemented their own feature or, at the very least, presented a prototype to the team for consideration.
As the Lead UI Designer on the project, this infuriated me at the time. I took great pride (not to mention time and pain-staking detail) in the thoroughness of my designs and, equally as important, my spec documents. They were pixel perfect and they were 100% correct and rigid. No deviations or the project would slip!
It’s worth mentioning that AOL in the early-mid 00′s was a waterfall shop. Very very waterfall. So waterfall in fact, they should’ve named our conference rooms Niagara and Iguazu. I was only 5 or 6 years into my career and waterfall was all I knew so I followed process. It was no surprise then that when “rogue development” took place it drew my ire.
How could this developer think he knows what customers want? What makes him think he can design an interface? That was MY job and I’ll be damned if someone else took that responsibility away from me.
None of these, of course, were valid concerns. Reading that award now, I am actually proud to have received it. I inspired “undocumented creativity.” 2010 Jeff is very proud of 2004 Jeff for doing that — even if 2004 Jeff didn’t like it very much at the time. I’ve come around to seeing the benefits of working closely with developers (and product mangers, and QA, and marketing et al) on concepting and developing product ideas. Together we create better finished products.
I look forward to inspiring a lot more undocumented creativity in my career.
[Jeff]
P.S. – Interesting side note: The junior product manager on the AOL Explorer project was Tim O’Shaughnessy who is now the CEO and co-founder of a little company you may have heard of – Living Social. Nice.
Designing the experience (not defining it)
Over and over again, it seems, practitioners within the User Experience world stir up flame wars and heated debates about what it is exactly that we do and what it should be called. From Interaction Design to User Experience Design to Information Architecture to UI Design, titles and job specifications vary as frequently as Sean Combs’ stage names.
Here’s a suggestion: stop trying to define the damn thing and, instead, design the damn thing.
Design it. Get your hands dirty. Make sketches, push pixels, build prototypes and create experiences. Just do it. Forget your title. Forget your job description. Focus on the business problem you’re solving. Then figure out what you’re best capable of doing that will lead to a successful solution for that problem. Work within your organizational constraints or break new ground. Regardless, solve the problem. Understand your user. Understand the business goals. Do the right research and apply that learning to the solution.
Instead of using titles and job specs to describe the value you bring, show it. If you spend your time designing the experience and solving problems instead of defining where your cog fits in the machine, your true value will become obvious. The more your value becomes obvious, the less the need for specific job titles and descriptions.
Pretty please, let’s stop defining the name, boundaries and specifications of our profession. Instead, let’s solve problems, innovate and simply design good experiences.
[Jeff]
A little dotmocracy
“What are you going to do this weekend?”
“I’m going to hang out in the Financial District with a bunch of folks from various disciplines and locations to discuss the intersection of Agile and User Experience.”
“All weekend? Um, that sounds like fun.”
As it turns out, it was a lot more than fun.
Jeff Patton speaks!
More than 20 people gathered this past weekend at Pivotal Labs’ temporary NYC offices to conduct the next installment of the Agile UX Retreat. With previous retreats taking place in San Francisco, Grad Rapids and an impromptu one in Orlando during Agile 2010, this one brought the ever-growing crew to New York. And I was fortunate enough to get an invitation.
Lane Halley, Johanna Kollman, and Tim McCoy
In true agile, self-organizing fashion there was little up-front agenda presented. Instead the participants gathered together, provided their desired topics and discussions, the group voted and formed an agenda surprisingly fast. The first evening consisted of a night for newbies. Us first-timers were encouraged to get to know the returning participants, share a bit about ourselves and to start building relationships with the (instantly evident) tightly knit crew. Folks came in from San Francisco, Seattle, Chicago, London, Brooklyn and Michigan (to name a few) emphasizing the dedication the participants had to pursuing the topic of Agile and User Experience. Friday night’s discussions focused on the tactical facilitated by a “fishbowl conversation.” This was a new facilitation technique for me and involved providing 4 chairs at the front of the room. Only 3 chairs can be filled at a time and the participants in the chair have a conversation with each other. A seed question is proposed and the conversation begins there. As other participants in the room feel the desire to join the conversation, they simply walk up and sit down. At this point someone from the panel has to step down. One chair must always stay empty.
Not a PC in sight
In this way the conversation grows organically and weaves a meandering path through each participant’s viewpoints and topics of interest. We covered tactics, philosophies and the broader arena of organizational change. We got to know our fellow participants without the need of roles or titles – simply through their opinions and arguments. It was refreshing, engaging and rewarding.
Heated discussion with Alan Cooper, Anders Ramsay, Chris and Craig
Day two provided opportunities for discussions and talks. As before, topics were proposed, voted and prioritized. Some folks had prepared talks (like me), others simply had ideas they wanted to share and discuss. It was a long day filled with tactics, philosophies and theories about how to drive change through organizations from the bottom up as well as from the top down.
Janice Fraser talks about Lean UX
At the end of the second day we held a retrospective to see what went well, what went poorly and any outstanding questions. My main point of contention was the fact we had seemingly few points of contention. The constructive conflict that should drive folks struggling to rationalize new philosophies in existing structures and organizations was missing. In its place was a room full of nodding heads (and waving hands J ). I was concerned we were all preaching to choir and not doing enough to move the discussion forward. Interestingly, everyone agreed with my point that we were very much in agreement but many disagreed that this was a bad thing. Instead, several folks called this general agreement a sign that the group had become unified and could now begin pushing its message beyond the retreat’s boundaries.
Sometimes shit got deep
Which led nicely into the third and final day’s discussion topic: getting the message out. But what exactly was the message? And who should we target with it? This was part of the third day’s conversation and the general consensus was that promoting organizational change to create cultures that support collaboration, conversation, fail early/fail fast product design philosophies should be a primary focus for the group. Proving, ultimately, that this approach delivers better products, faster, to happier customers resulting in engaged, invested employees who are trusted by their managers. And what better way to do this then to hold a conference? The room focused on early stage planning for such an event and I look forward to continued efforts to bring it to life next year.
Anders hearing from Marcy Swenson
I took away many things from the weekend, not the least of them were new friendships with folks I’ve admired for a long time. What surprised me the most though (and perhaps this is a little bit self-serving) was the group’s reaction to the work we’ve been doing at TheLadders in the Agile and UX space. We’ve been evolving and iterating our process for 2 years now and it’s easy to stay in our isolated world without the context of the broader software industry. This weekend (coupled with the other outreach efforts I’ve been involved in like Agile 2010 and Agile Day NYC) gave me that context and helped me see that TheLadders is at the forefront of a lot of this thinking. We’re trying new and better ways to make products – with great results! Perhaps most enlightening though was my realization that we’ve successfully created the culture that allows us to try these new methods without the fear of failure. We’ve created a culture of innovation. That became clear to me and if that was the only positive outcome of the weekend it still would’ve been worth it. Thankfully there was so much more and I look forward to the next convening of the Agile UX Retreat.
The whole crew
[Jeff]
Many thanks to Ian McFarland, Anders Ramsay and Lane Halley for putting the weekend event together.
CEO’s can be a tough group to design for – after all, it’s their vision with which you are now entrusted. I’ve been fortunate enough throughout my career to work closely with several CEO’s. From fledgling ideas to high-growth companies like TheLadders (where I’m the Director of User Experience), I’ve whiteboarded, wireframed and prototyped my way through a wide array of exciting ideas side by side with the minds who created them. Along the way I’ve picked up a few tips and tricks that can make your next startup design gig that much more successful.
Without further ado:
These tactics are not unique to designing with CEO’s in a startup environment. They’ll work in many environments but if you’re lucky enough to be working closely with the CEO employ these tactics to maximize your success and the success of the product.
[Jeff]
