Westley Knight's Blog2022-12-07T14:48:57Zhttps://westleyknight.com/Westley Knighthello@westleyknight.co.ukWhat does the advancement of AI tools mean for UX Designers?2022-12-08T09:30:00Zhttps://westleyknight.com/blog/what-does-advancement-of-ai-tools-mean-for-UX-Designers/<p>There has been a <em><strong>LOT</strong></em> of excitement around <a href="https://chat.openai.com/chat">ChatGPT</a>, and for good reason. But what do advancements in AI like this mean for the work we do as UX Designers?</p>
<p>As AI technology becomes more advanced, there is a risk that it could potentially automate certain design tasks and roles, leading to job loss for some designers. This is particularly true for tasks that are highly repetitive in nature, such as data entry or image editing. AI-powered tools can often perform these tasks more quickly and accurately than humans, making them a cost-effective alternative, and something that should actually be embraced by UX Designers to help them in their role.</p>
<p>The reason I think these tools should be embraced is that AI is not yet capable of fully replacing human designers. Many design tasks, such as conceptualization and creative problem-solving, require a level of creativity and originality that AI algorithms are not yet capable of achieving. As a result, it is unlikely that AI will completely replace human designers in the near future. So don’t worry, as long as you can use the most important tool at your disposal to solve design problems - your brain - you’ll be safe in your profession for a good few years yet.</p>
<p>However, the use of AI tools comes with a number of potential pitfalls that we need to be aware of and take steps to mitigate.</p>
<h2>The potential pitfalls of AI tools in UX design</h2>
<p>If we are going to embrace the possibilities that AI can offer us we must be wary of the potential issues with utilising AI tools in user experience design, figure out the ways in which we can ensure that the tools we use are reviewed and tested, and that we’re using them in a way that does not become a detriment to the design process.</p>
<p>This means we’ll need to educate ourselves in how to use these new tools ethically, effectively, and responsibly. Here are a few of the potential negative impacts of AI being used in UX design:</p>
<h3>Bias and discrimination</h3>
<p>AI algorithms can sometimes incorporate biases from the data they are trained on, leading to unfair or discriminatory treatment of users. Designers should be careful to use a diverse and representative dataset when training AI algorithms, and regularly review and test the algorithms to ensure they are functioning properly. In addition, designers should consider the ethical implications of using AI in their work and strive to use it in a responsible and user-focused manner.</p>
<h3>Loss of control of the design process</h3>
<p>As AI technology becomes more advanced, there is a risk that designers may become overly reliant on it, leading to a loss of control over the user experience. This can be mitigated by ensuring that designers have the skills and knowledge to use AI tools effectively, and by involving designers in the development and implementation of AI-powered design solutions.</p>
<h3>Privacy concerns</h3>
<p>User data is often collected and analyzed in order to improve the user experience, but this data must be treated with care and respect for users' privacy. Designers should be transparent about the data they are collecting and how it will be used, and should ensure that appropriate security measures are in place to protect user data.</p>
<h2>Designers aren’t being replaced</h2>
<p>If we are to embrace the use of AI-powered tools in our day-to-day work, we can ensure that the impact is more subtle and in line with our current ways of working. AI tools being used to automate certain tasks and enable designers to focus on more creative and strategic work could potentially lead to changes in the nature of design roles. We will adapt and evolve over time as we have done with other advancements through new technologies. Remember the days before Figma?</p>
<h2>What are the benefits?</h2>
<p>If we adapt and embrace a new wave of AI-powered tools, what could be the benefits not only to us as designers, but to our users?</p>
<h3>Improved user experiences</h3>
<p>By analyzing user data and behaviour, AI-powered tools can help designers create more personalized and intuitive experiences for users.</p>
<h3>Enhanced automation and efficiency</h3>
<p>AI can automate many tasks and processes in the UX design process, freeing up designers to focus on more creative and strategic work.</p>
<h3>Increased accessibility</h3>
<p>AI-powered tools and technologies can help make digital experiences more accessible to users with disabilities.</p>
<h3>Better decision-making</h3>
<p>AI can help designers make data-driven decisions, enabling them to make more informed design choices and optimize the user experience.</p>
<h3>New design possibilities</h3>
<p>As AI technology continues to advance, it will open up new possibilities for designers to create innovative and unique experiences for users.</p>
<p>As long as we can manage the tools we embrace effectively, the overall impact of AI on UX design will be positive, with the potential to greatly enhance the user experience, improve the efficiency of the design process, and enable designers to create more effective and engaging user experiences.</p>
<p>How do you feel about an AI revolution in the world of UX design?</p>
<p>Does it fill you with existential dread, or do you see an endless sea of possibilities for the future?</p>
UX Designers learning to code is really about adjacent skills2022-12-01T09:30:00Zhttps://westleyknight.com/blog/ux-designers-learning-code-is-about-adjacent-skills/<p>It’s the debate that is seemingly neverending: should designers learn to code?</p>
<p>But why is that particular skill the only one that seems to garner attention? As with every blog post, tweet or podcast episode that has gone before the writing of this, the pros and cons are weighed up, and regardless of whether the ultimate answer is either yes or no, the answer always comes with a caveat.</p>
<p>No, but it would be a great skill to have.<br />
Yes, but you can still be a designer without that knowledge.</p>
<p>UX Design is a broad discipline. Not only does it contain numerous and specific skills and disciplines under its figurative umbrella, but it also overlaps with Computer Science, Industrial Design, Architecture, and Human Factors, which themselves can be broken into specific areas of expertise.</p>
<p>Here’s how that looks in a <a href="https://raw.githubusercontent.com/envisprecisely/disciplines-of-ux/master/The-Disciplines-of-User-Experience-Design_envis-precisely.png">Venn diagram</a> created by <a href="http://www.envis-precisely.com/">Thomas Gläser</a>, based on <a href="http://www.kickerstudio.com/blog/2008/12/the-disciplines-of-user-experience/">Dan Saffer</a>’s original.</p>
<p><a href="https://raw.githubusercontent.com/envisprecisely/disciplines-of-ux/master/The-Disciplines-of-User-Experience-Design_envis-precisely.png" target="_blank"><img src="https://westleyknight.com/assets/img/articles/The-Disciplines-of-User-Experience-Design.jpg" alt="The Disciplines of User Experience Design by Thomas Gläser, based on Dan Saffer’s original" /></a></p>
<p>Down in the bottom left of the diagram we can see the larger circle of Computer Science overlapping with User Experience Design, the largest area being Software Development. This is that overlap that covers the designers who learn to code.</p>
<p>In the grand scheme of things, we can see it is just one element of User Experience Design.</p>
<p>For the last 7 years I’ve been a professional UX Designer - by which I mean I’ve had the moniker of UX Designer in my job title. I specialise in Interaction Design (as a job title), but my role doesn’t include everything within that yellow circle of the diagram above.</p>
<p>As I work predominantly on digital products and services a lot of my work involves User Interface Design, Human-Computer Interaction, and Usability Engineering. Not so much for Media Installations or Interactive Environments.</p>
<p>Then there are specific areas that exist within the larger User Experience Design circle; Navigation Design, Information Architecture, Motion Design, Writing, and Software Development (mostly in the form of prototypes). These are things that I can directly apply in my role as an Interaction or UX Designer.</p>
<p>Reaching beyond the sphere of User Experience Design, there are 2 little circles that have a huge impact on the work I do; Cognitive Science, and Psychology.</p>
<p>Every one of those areas that I’ve mentioned - whether they fall under Interaction Design, User Experience Design, or are tangentially related - are skills and knowledge that would benefit you as a designer. Depending on your role, you may find other areas far more valuable that I personally don’t have an interest in or that aren’t directly related to my role.</p>
<p>The argument isn’t whether learning to code or not is good for you as a designer, it’s whether it will help you understand more about what you’re designing.</p>
<p>Will the knowledge and skills you acquire help you understand the wider context that surrounds your work? If so, they’ll reveal the hows and whys that would otherwise remain undiscovered. You will gain a better understanding of your discipline and how it relates to others.</p>
<p>It’s this understanding of adjacent areas of knowledge and skills which will make you a better designer, not knowing what can and can’t be done with code.</p>
All UX issues are conversion issues2022-11-17T09:30:00Zhttps://westleyknight.com/blog/all-ux-issues-are-conversion-issues/<p>Before you take the headline of this article at face value, take a moment to think about what it means. Believe it or not, I had a similar reaction to an <a href="https://www.instagram.com/p/Cj3sOZMNFTI/?hl=en">Instagram post</a> with text that read:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Every UX issue is a conversion issue.<br />
Not every conversion issue is a UX issue.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Surely not! My brain immediately compiled a veritable smorgasbord of hot takes and quips to throw in the direction of the poster about what nonsense this post was daring to so openly announce. But I stopped, just for a moment, and I took a few seconds to actually think about it.</p>
<p>What if every UX issue <em>is</em> a conversion issue?</p>
<p>Before we just throw our toys out of the pram at whatever nonsense this is, let’s take some time to break down what is being said here. Specifically that first sentence: “Every UX issue is a conversion issue”.</p>
<p>Traditionally I would view a ‘conversion’ as a user getting to the end of a sales funnel and making a purchase, the process of converting a potential customer into a buyer of your product. Getting someone to buy your thing. But this is a purely sales-based type of conversion. What if your product isn’t about generating a sale? What are your goals for your users?</p>
<h2>What is a conversion if not a sale?</h2>
<p>Over the past few years, I’ve been working in government and local council departments where we’re building services for the public to use, and internal systems to help civil servants do their jobs. Neither of these audiences is there to be ‘converted’ in a sales sense. However, conversions still exist as a way of measuring the success of your product.</p>
<p>Let’s try to move away from the eCommerce perspective and break down what a ‘conversion’ involves from a user’s point of view.</p>
<p>If an eCommerce conversion is taking a prospective customer from point A - the beginning of their journey - to completing a purchase at point B, then what does that look like when it doesn’t involve a sale?</p>
<p>If we remove the context of this sales example, we can strip a conversion back to getting a user from point A to point B.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>A conversion is successfully moving a user from point A to point B</p>
</blockquote>
<h2>Getting from A to B</h2>
<p>Although you may be picturing point A as the very start of a user’s journey, and point B as the very end of it, these start and end points can actually be used more arbitrarily within a wider user journey context.</p>
<p>For example, learning to drive is one big journey starting with not being able to drive at point A and ending with being able to drive at point B. But this one journey is made up of a number of smaller journeys; checking you’re allowed to drive, getting a provisional licence, taking driving lessons, preparing for your theory test, taking your theory test, taking your driving test, and when you’ve passed both you can now legally drive! 🎉</p>
<p>Each of these smaller journeys has to be completed in order for you to complete the overall journey. Each is a smaller conversion than the whole, taking you from a starting point to an end point where you successfully reach the goal.</p>
<p>You can then break each of those smaller journeys into even smaller journeys. For example, learning to drive is about learning and perfecting all the things that come together to be able to drive a vehicle; How to accelerate and brake, how to change gears, learn to be aware of potential dangers, how to turn corners, and so on.</p>
<p>You can then break each of those down further, but I think you get the picture.</p>
<h2>Is every UX issue really a conversion issue?</h2>
<p>Now we have a different perspective of what a conversion is, let’s think about whether every UX issue is a conversion issue.</p>
<p>Obviously, we can’t go through every possible problem, so let’s use some examples to see if we can uncover if every UX issue is really a conversion issue.</p>
<h3>A public user on a learning platform</h3>
<p>Staying away from the monetary type of conversion, let’s dive into a learning platform; we’ll take Duolingo as an example.</p>
<p>A user’s goal will be to learn a language of their choice. The overarching goal might be to become fluent in that particular language or perhaps just be able to hold a conversation. The user achieving either one of those could be measured as a conversion.</p>
<p>Duolingo is a great example of the use of gamification to enhance the user experience and to encourage the user to continue along their path to complete their goal, to complete that conversion.</p>
<h3>An internal user on an internal system</h3>
<p>Surely we can’t possibly think of conversions when people are doing the day-to-day jobs on internal software systems?</p>
<p>Why not? Every task that someone might have to do on an internal system could be seen as a conversion. From updating a customer’s contact details, through processing payments, to dealing with complaints, every one of these tasks can be measured in a way that will help us to understand how efficiently the users can complete those tasks.</p>
<p>Apply the user-centred design process to any of these tasks and you’ll be aiming to improve those efficiencies, to make the user’s experience better (even though it’s their job), ultimately resulting in better conversion rates for those tasks.</p>
<p>Conversion is everywhere in UX design!</p>
<h2>Ultimately UX <em>is</em> about conversion</h2>
<p>Improving any aspect of the user experience is ultimately aiming to help the user to complete their goal, to make that conversion of getting them from point A to point B.</p>
<p>The better the experience, the more chance you have of higher conversion rates, whatever way you’re measuring them.</p>
<p>If UX and business go hand in hand, then UX has to lead to conversions and therefore it makes sense for the business to continue investing in user-centred design.</p>
<p>Do you disagree?</p>
<p>Are there any examples that you can think of that aren’t related to a conversion of some kind in the end?</p>
<p>I’d love to know about it and why you think that particular UX issue stands apart from any type of conversion. Get in touch on <a href="https://twitter.com/westleyknight">Twitter</a>, <a href="https://www.instagram.com/westleyknight/">Instagram</a>, <a href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/westleyknight/">LinkedIn</a>, or email me at <a href="mailto:hello@westleyknight.co.uk">hello@westleyknight.co.uk</a>.</p>
How to gauge UX maturity in your organisation2022-11-10T07:30:00Zhttps://westleyknight.com/blog/how-to-gauge-ux-maturity/<p>Every UX Designer strives to put the user at the heart of the work they do. You’re probably familiar with those companies that are fully embracing a user-centred approach to their business; Duolingo, Spotify, Airbnb, Fitbit, Netflix, Apple. These companies are examples of the highest standard when it comes to integrating their users into their products, whether those products are digital, physical, or both. It may be your dream to work for them one day - or perhaps you already have - but there are only so many truly mature companies when it comes to their approach to UX design.</p>
<p>The highest levels of UX maturity have fully integrated user-centred design approaches and procedures, and become user-driven corporations as a result. This is the top end of the scale, where those aforementioned household names reside. What about the rest? Where does your company sit on the scale of UX maturity? Are you in the envious position of the user-centred corporation, or do you encounter hostility towards anything you do to try to bring your users into the process?</p>
<h2>Neilsen’s UX Maturity Model</h2>
<p>The <a href="https://www.nngroup.com/">Nielsen Norman Group</a> updated their <a href="https://www.nngroup.com/articles/ux-maturity-stages-1-4-original/">original stages of UX maturity model from 2006</a> to a more simplified model of <a href="https://www.nngroup.com/articles/ux-maturity-model/">the 6 level of UX maturity</a>. Here’s the graphical representation of the model taken from their article:</p>
<p><img src="https://westleyknight.com/assets/img/articles/nng-stages-of-ux-maturity.png" alt="A scale of 6 stages of UX maturity starting from the bottom and working it's way up; Abset, Limited, Emergent, Structured, Integrated, User-driven." /></p>
<p>I wrote about the original UX maturity model in <a href="https://uxfordevelopers.com/">UX for Developers (2018)</a>, summarising the then 8 stages into 3 main grouped stages consisting of low, medium and high levels of UX maturity.</p>
<p><img src="https://westleyknight.com/assets/img/articles/UX-maturity-levels.png" alt="A diagram taking the original 8 stages of UX maturity from the NN/g model and grouping them into low, medium, and high levels." /></p>
<p>I still strongly feel that the 3 stages, although not inspirationally named, still hold up against the revised NNG model with its 6 levels. The measuring and understanding of the level of UX maturity in your organisation is transient; people in the organisation are constantly learning and adapting to the challenges they face, and one area will never be completely aligned with another.</p>
<p>This messy nature of working with multiple teams or departments consisting of multiple human beings with their own drivers and goals will rarely see everyone aligned and at the same level of understanding when it comes to user experience.</p>
<p>Although the three stages encompass a set of specific levels, they can provide a broader categorization to help understand where your organisation sits in terms of its level of UX maturity.</p>
<h2>Low level of UX maturity</h2>
<p>In the updated NNG model, the low level consists of Absent and Limited stages.</p>
<p>Here you’ll find that the work of software development teams will focus on the business requirements and I.T. constraints. There may be hostility towards usability meaning that the end-users are essentially deemed irrelevant to the process, and the goal of the development team is simply to build features and make them work to the provided specifications; often referred to as a “Feature Factory”.</p>
<p>Any considerations towards the user experience will essentially be self-referential design. The teams will rely on their own intuition and experience to decide what constitutes good usability. The only time this may be successful is when the team are building tools for themselves, but for building out products for external users, not so much.</p>
<p>You may actually have people aware of UX and actively attempting to practice user centred design whilst having to ‘fly under the radar’ to establish good practice. You may even have a fully-fledged design team, but with a lack of support and understanding at a higher organisational level, they’re not afforded the time or space to do their job effectively, again resulting in a Feature Factory.</p>
<h2>Medium level of UX maturity</h2>
<p>In the updated NNG model, the medium level consists of the Emergent and Structured stages.</p>
<p>The organisation will begin to manifest an appreciation of the value that UX activities bring to the business, enough for them to create a dedicated budget. This tends to happen when those who have an individual focus on improving the user experience of the software demonstrate the value of their process to the business, working towards convincing them of the value they can provide, and proving that they can deliver that value.</p>
<p>With additional investment, the ability to generate a greater return over time becomes possible, with more and more success stories of reducing business costs, increasing productivity, and improving conversion rates, which pushes the organisation towards creating a more structured UX function.</p>
<p>Even with structured UX teams, an organisation will still have some conflicts which need to be resolved if the organisation is to move to a high level of UX maturity. User-centred design is still not a core part of the process and may clash with organisational strategy, a lack of support from leaders, being measured in ways that don’t accurately reflect the aims of user-centred design, and continuing to focus on the delivery of features rather than outcomes that benefit the user.</p>
<h2>High level of UX maturity</h2>
<p>This consists of the Integrated and User-Driven stages in the updated NN/g model.</p>
<p>Here UX is integrated and valued across the organisation. Everything within a project is driven by user data which comes from the now commonplace, and far more prominent, user research activities.</p>
<p>The foundations laid in the medium level of UX maturity evolve to produce valuable quantitative data that can be used to measure against usability goals. The vision and strategy of the business are completely aligned with the user-centred approach.</p>
<p>Unlike the previous levels, there isn’t really much you’re looking to change. But what you are looking to do is maintain a high level of UX maturity.</p>
<h2>The only way is not up</h2>
<p>Unfortunately reaching the top end of the UX maturity scale over a number of years isn’t the end of the journey. Reaching a stage where your organisation is truly user-driven was the original goal, and now that goal has to change to maintain that level.</p>
<p>Over time the organisation will change; new leadership, team members coming and going, shifts in organisational culture, these and many more factors can have an impact and potentially result in the organisation’s focus slowly shifting away from the users to the more traditional measurements we had to fight so hard against in the low and medium stages to bring the organisation to a become truly user-centred.</p>
<h2>How mature is your organisation in UX?</h2>
<p>Why not take the <a href="https://forms.nngroup.com/s3/Maturity-Quiz">NN/g UX Maturity Quiz</a> and find out where your organisation sits on their scale?</p>
Create a team of humans with personal user manuals2022-11-03T09:30:00Zhttps://westleyknight.com/blog/create-team-of-humans-with-personal-user-manuals/<p>Taking part in a workshop on figuring out ways of working in a new team, I was introduced to the Personal User Manual. I was immediately fascinated and amazed at how I hadn’t come across this tool before, and couldn’t wait to put it into practice.</p>
<h2>What is a Personal User Manual?</h2>
<p>A Personal User Manual is a document that helps you to communicate how you work best, and who you are as a human being. It gives those you will be working with an idea of who you are, and how they can best interact with you.</p>
<p>It is made up of a number of categories that are designed to surface your expertise, things you want to learn, how you like to give and receive support, signals about how you might be feeling, how things you do have been misinterpreted in the past, and what core values drive you - not only in your role at work - but as a person.</p>
<h2>Why create a Personal User Manual?</h2>
<p>In the past I’ve often found that it’s difficult to form relationships with a team of people you work with, at least not without having worked with them over a decent period - and I’m talking months rather than weeks. It takes me a fair amount of time to understand how others work, and how to adjust the ways I communicate and interact to create a better working environment.</p>
<p>Typically I would learn these better ways over time. It would happen organically through constant interactions, meetings, video calls, and asynchronous messaging, but would be down to my ability to perceive patterns, nuances, and social cues to form an understanding of how I can improve what I do to make the way we work easier.</p>
<p>The Personal User Manual is a shortcut to this understanding. It removes the need for others to figure out your quirks, what annoys you, how others can interpret your meaning in ways that were not intended, what you’re good at and what you’re not so good at, and allows you to communicate all of this and more in your own words.</p>
<h2>How to use Personal User Manuals</h2>
<p>Since being introduced to the Personal User Manual I’ve done a bit of research on how they are used by different people and organisations, and it also became apparent that they were used for different reasons.</p>
<p>The setting for my first experience in creating my own Personal User Manual was with a fellow designer and our senior stakeholder. As designers, we would be working to deliver various services/products/features with the aim of fulfilling the goals and vision of our senior stakeholder. With that in mind, the session was just an hour long to establish some ground rules and ways of working together, and the personal user manual was for us to spend a few minutes filling out a template, but we ended up just talking through it all and having a more natural flowing conversation.</p>
<p>As with any of these kinds of tools they are a framework, not a set of hard and fast rules that absolutely must be followed. For us, the whole point was to understand how we like to work, and how we can make sure that we do our work in a way that we can all agree on that would be conducive for us to reach our shared goals.</p>
<p>Instead of spending weeks, months, or perhaps even years trying to understand how you can work better with the people around you, you can use a framework like Personal User Manuals and cut to the chase by just asking!</p>
<h2>Making your Personal User Manual</h2>
<p>Our Personal User Manual templates were set up as 8 questions:</p>
<ul>
<li>Things I’m good at - the skills and experience I bring to the project</li>
<li>Things I might need help with - the skills and experience I want to develop</li>
<li>What I like help to look like - how I like to be given support or taught things</li>
<li>My key values - what I find important for myself and others</li>
<li>How I respond under stress - how I react when I'm feeling stressed</li>
<li>How I like to communicate - how I like to be briefed, given feedback, asked questions etc.</li>
<li>How I can be misunderstood - how my actions or behaviour might be misinterpreted</li>
<li>Other things to know about me - anything else?</li>
</ul>
<p>Ideally, you would provide this kind of outline prior to the workshop so that anyone who likes to give this kind of thing quite a bit of thought - people like me! - then you’re providing that window of opportunity so as to avoid any awkward silences or gaps where people can’t articulate their thoughts on the spot in front of others.</p>
<p>We had this template laid out on a shared Miro board that looked a bit like this:</p>
<p><img src="https://westleyknight.com/assets/img/articles/Personal-User-Manual.jpg" alt="Example layout for a Personal User Manual" /></p>
<p>This way we were able to easily duplicate the board for however many people would be involved in the session, with more than enough space for each person to make their notes under each section.</p>
<h2>Personal User Manuals aren’t just for creating a shared understanding</h2>
<p>One of the things I liked most about this tool is that it wouldn’t just benefit the people I work with, it would also be a method through which I could question myself.</p>
<p>As a designer, I have a fairly good understanding of what my values are, and since I’m adhering to them as much as I possibly can while I’m working, I’m very well-versed and understand those motivations of mine very deeply.</p>
<p>But the most eye-opening categories for me were “How I respond under stress” and “How I can be misunderstood”. I really spent some time thinking through what I could put under these categories, and had to really examine my behaviours on recent projects to gain a better understanding of myself so that I could then convey that to others to help them understand me.</p>
<p>Even if you don’t use this tool as a way to improve your understanding of the people you work with, and give them a better understanding of you, I urge you to spend just 15 to 30 minutes to answer these questions for yourself. You might just discover something that helps both you and your colleagues in understanding how you function as a human being.</p>
Being wrong is a fundamental part of the design process2022-10-27T09:30:00Zhttps://westleyknight.com/blog/being-wrong-fundamental-part-of-design-process/<p>One of the best things about being a designer is that it’s your job to get things wrong.</p>
<p>That isn’t to say that you can design anything you want without consequence. Your job as a designer is to get things wrong as many times as possible before your team goes on to build the “least wrong” thing.</p>
<p>In a world where the MVP - building the smallest possible thing to solve a problem, and then iterating - is held in such high regard in organisations that have adopted agile ways of working, there isn’t enough room for a design team to create the best solution they possibly can when there are deadlines and sprint goals to be met.</p>
<p>This can be a difficult compromise for designers to make; having a picture of a “gold standard” solution to a problem in their mind, but only having the space to take just a few small steps towards it.</p>
<h2>Agile isn’t the enemy of good design</h2>
<p>If you work in an agile environment, you’ll be familiar with the retrospective; a meeting held after a sprint or release to discuss what happened during the product development and release process, to improve things in future. The Retrospective Prime Directive is:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Regardless of what we discover, we understand and truly believe that everyone did the best job they could, given what they knew at the time, their skills and abilities, the resources available, and the situation at hand.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>This is a very valuable way of thinking, not just about what went before, but as something you can apply to the work you are doing, and in setting the goals of your design process when working on a solution to a given problem.</p>
<p>The agile process helps by giving you constraints to your design work in the form of timeframes, scope, technical capabilities, and so on.</p>
<blockquote>
<p><em>"Design is all about finding solutions within constraints. If there were no constraints, it’s not design - it’s art."</em><br />
Matias Duarte</p>
</blockquote>
<p>If you design without constraints, you have nothing to focus on in the delivery of a solution. You can end up spending increasing amounts of time on problems that provide diminishing returns the longer you spend on them. Going around in circles on how to ask a user to enter a date simply isn’t a valuable use of your time, and it can be easy to dive so deep into a single problem that it can be hard to maintain a higher level view of what the real problem is that you’re trying to solve.</p>
<h2>What is good design?</h2>
<p>Good design isn’t measured by the delivery of working software, and nor should it be measured by the outcomes of your work as an agile delivery team. These are still valid metrics on which to measure the success of a product or service that you have put into the hands of your users - I’m not questioning that at all - but the success of your design process shouldn’t be bundled in with what you deliver together as a team.</p>
<p>Neither should it be measured on the delivery of an interface, how your solution looks and functions.</p>
<p>In fact, it’s really difficult to measure what good design is at all, but you can gain some insight into whether your design process is working well or not by reflecting on your journey through your design process;</p>
<ul>
<li>what did you uncover that was previously unknown?</li>
<li>what ways of doing things didn’t work?</li>
<li>what problems do people currently have?</li>
<li>did you solve any of those newly discovered problems?</li>
<li>did you take positive steps towards the desired solution?</li>
</ul>
<p>Getting things wrong is a fundamental part of this process, it’s how we all learn things as human beings; we make mistakes, and then we go about changing what we did so we don’t make that mistake again in future.</p>
<blockquote>
<p><em>"It’s through mistakes that you actually can grow. You have to get bad in order to get good."</em><br />
Paula Scher</p>
</blockquote>
<p>If someone in your organisation wants to measure the performance of the design team and their process, then you should be convincing them that what you should be judged on is your ability to discover <em>why</em> the thing you did was wrong, and how that made you rethink your approach on your next attempt at getting the answer right.</p>
<p>The iteration within the design process (not in terms of the larger scope of agile working) is where you work quickly to find out the ways not to do things, so when you arrive at a solution, you have not gone down a blind alley that may result in you needing to undo the work you’ve done towards a particular solution.</p>
<h2>Aiming for the “least wrong” solution</h2>
<p>It’s worth considering that you’ll very rarely get to the “right” solution in the end. The best outcome you may often have to aim for is to create the “least wrong” solution for the problem you have to cater to the most people you are looking to solve the problem for.</p>
<p>Any number of things can prevent you from even getting to the least wrong solution; a lack of time to release, a lack of budget to continue your work or an arbitrary deadline that simply must be met.</p>
<p>Whatever constraint it is that stops you from moving any further forward on improving your solution, you will often have to settle for what is “good enough”. If you trust in your process, if you have iterated on your solution with the guidance of your users, you will always have produced something better than if you had none of that process.</p>
<p>Knowing that you tried something that didn’t work out is far more valuable than churning out designs with no input from users or validation of any kind. Being wrong means you’re learning what doesn’t work, and that can only help you towards your ultimate goal of designing the right solution.</p>
Using ROI to calculate the value of UX Design2022-10-20T09:30:00Zhttps://westleyknight.com/blog/using-roi-to-calculate-the-value-of-ux-design/<p>How do you prove the value of design in your organisation?</p>
<p>How can you take something so difficult to quantify and give it a value in terms that the world of business would understand?</p>
<p>The answer is Return on Investment (ROI).</p>
<h2>Why does ROI matter in business?</h2>
<p>ROI is used as a Key Performance Indicator (KPI) - you can tell we're into business territory here with all the acronyms 😊 - by businesses to determine the profitability of an expense. It's essentially about the business getting its money's worth from anything they invest its money in. If they buy some new software, how long until it essentially repays the business in terms of the savings it makes in its everyday use?</p>
<h2>Why use ROI to promote UX internally?</h2>
<p>It's a rare case indeed for a designer to have never had their organisation say no to a suggestion of iterating on a design or perhaps looking to solve the larger problem, or even just having a project shut down without any warning it was coming.</p>
<p>These, and many other scenarios like them, are symptoms of design not being valued in an organisation. One of the best ways to build that understanding of value is to communicate in a language that business people understand; in numbers, in return on investment.</p>
<p>So rather than talking up the potential upside of having design valued in your organisation - I'm assuming, dear reader, that you agree with the benefits of an inclusive design process - let's look at a hypothetical example that you can use as a template to communicate the ROI on UX design.</p>
<h2>Putting ROI into action for UX</h2>
<p>Your organisation has 200 sales staff. Every day the sales staff collectively make a number of the same type of errors when inputting customer information into their internal system.</p>
<p>We can take this data, along with some other easily accessible data points, and calculate the cost of these errors.</p>
<p>Here's the formula we can use:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>(Number of errors) * (Average repair time) * (Employee cost) * (Number of employees) = Cost savings</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Let's say that, on average, every user makes the same error twice per day.<br />
That's 10 of the same errors per week, per employee.<br />
With a little bit of digging, we know that the average time to rectify each of those errors is 10 minutes.<br />
The employee cost (or the hourly rate an employee is paid) is $10.<br />
And we know that we have 200 employees.</p>
<p>So here's how much these errors cost the business per week:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>(10 errors/week) * (0.1666 hours) * ($10/hour) * (200 employees) = $3,332/week</p>
</blockquote>
<p>With 52 weeks in a year, that is:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>$3,332 * 52 = $173,264</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Now we know the costs to the business if these everyday errors continue to happen, we can make a case for solving this problem with design.</p>
<p>The designer estimates the work to take 1 week (40 hours), at an hourly rate of $20.<br />
That's a total of $800.</p>
<p>But just the time spent on design isn't everything we want to cover. Let's incorporate 3 rounds of usability testing with 6 users (the sales staff making the errors), with each test taking 30 minutes.</p>
<p>That's 9 hours in total, at $10 per hour per employee, which comes to a cost of $90.</p>
<p>Let's not forget about the developers that need to build the proposed solution.<br />
8 hours of work at an hourly rate of $15.<br />
That's a total cost of development of $120.</p>
<p>So that is $800 for design, $90 for usability testing, and $120 to implement the solution.</p>
<p>So our total cost of design and development to remove that one recurring error is:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>$800 + $90 + $120 = $1,010</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Remember, that recurring error is costing the business $173,264 in employee time every year!</p>
<p>By implementing the new design, the business can realise its investment in less than 2 days!</p>
<p>This relatively tiny investment, when laid out in this way, makes it much easier to understand from a business perspective.</p>
<p>What business wouldn't spend $1,010 to save $173,264 a year?!</p>
<hr />
<p>So there you have it, a practical example of how you can use the language of business, in this case ROI, to communicate the benefits of a user-centred design process.</p>
<p>If <i>you</i> can learn to speak the language of business, you can effectively communicate the value of design. This is just one small step in building a greater understanding of design within an organisation and increasing UX maturity.</p>
UX is more than usability2022-10-17T08:30:00Zhttps://westleyknight.com/blog/ux-more-than-usability/<p>It is common for usability to be thought of as the whole user experience. The term is used to describe what a user thinks and feels about an interface; how intuitive it is, how easy it is to use, how easy it is to learn. But usability is just a small part of the user experience whole. When we examine what usability means – how easy it is to use and learn - it becomes apparent that it is an attribute of the user interface.</p>
<p>People often think that making a product usable creates a good user experience, but there is more to it than that. Whilst usability is most definitely an important factor that contributes to the user experience, only concentrating on usability neglects other aspects of the experience.</p>
<p><a href="https://twitter.com/morville">Peter Morville</a>'s UX Honeycomb was created to help his clients understand just that. Each facet is representative of a part of the user experience.</p>
<p><img src="https://westleyknight.com/assets/img/articles/UX-Honeycomb.png" alt="The UX Honeycomb consisting of 7 facets; usable, useful, desirable, valuable, findable, credible, accessible." /></p>
<h3>Useful</h3>
<p>If your product does not solve a problem or fulfill a need that its user has, then the need for that product quickly evaporates. We must always be aware of our users and their changing needs and behaviors in order for our work to stay relevant and useful.</p>
<h3>Usable</h3>
<p>Ease of use and learnability are key to retaining those who already use your product, and yet it only relates to the user interface. Although important, it does not encompass all of the considerations required for good user experience design.</p>
<h3>Desirable</h3>
<p>Although this is rather intangible, the importance and value that elements of emotional connections to a brand, an identity, or a product can have significant bearing on the overall experience.</p>
<h3>Findable</h3>
<p>A user must be able to find what it is they need to be able to get the job done.</p>
<h3>Accessible</h3>
<p>We must strive to make the things we build available to everyone, regardless of physical or cognitive impairments.</p>
<h3>Credible</h3>
<p>The product must be trustworthy. It must allow the user to believe what we tell them.</p>
<h3>Valuable</h3>
<p>The product must deliver value, not only to the user’s satisfaction, but to that of the stakeholders, and to the bottom line of the business.</p>
<p>The UX Honeycomb is a useful, high level tool to help stakeholders to get a better understanding of what user experience is, why it's important, and can help smooth the communication between the user experience practitioners and those who are not well versed in the more detailed and complex concepts of UX design.</p>
<p>You can also use it to help prioritise design work, and help you to continuously iterate and improve upon areas of your product or service that fall short of the ideals which can be held in each facet of the UX Honeycomb, and ensure that we're thinking of our users whenever we refer to these 7 aspects of good user experience design.</p>
Striking the balance between user needs and efficient development2020-11-17T18:00:00Zhttps://westleyknight.com/blog/striking-balance-between-user-needs-efficient-development/<p>As a designer in a team working together to deliver improvements to a product or service, there will be many times at which you will have to deal with compromise.</p>
<p>I have previously written about <a href="https://westleyknight.com/blog/picking-your-battles-in-the-war-for-better-user-experience/">picking your battles in the war for better user experience</a>, but it would be unfair to think of every situation in these terms; a situation where you concede smaller conflicts to put your foot down successfully when something of greater importance to the user experience is in the balance.</p>
<p>Compromising isn't necessarily about having to make trade-offs that result in a worse user experience. Oftentimes they can be the opportunity to rethink your approach to the design of a particular solution and find a way to incorporate the new constraints to the situation into your work.</p>
<p>The reason I find myself writing about this subject is because of some recent design work around a set of data only required in a particular circumstance. Let me outline a hypothetical that mirrors the functional aspects of this particular piece of work; everyone loves ice cream, right?</p>
<p>Let's imagine that I'm the owner of an ice cream company, and I control the ice cream vendors and what they are able to sell. For this example, each ice cream vendor will have the ability to sell 3 distinct products;</p>
<ol>
<li>Ice lollies</li>
<li>Ice cream tubs</li>
<li>Ice cream cones</li>
</ol>
<p>The ice lollies and ice cream tubs come as they are, but the ice cream cones can come with some tasty extras. Let's say you can choose from sprinkles, strawberry sauce, and a chocolate flake to go with your ice cream cone. As such, these options are only available to the ice cream vendors who sell ice cream cones.</p>
<p>To bring this back to interface design, we'll imagine that I have a screen listing out all of the vendors that bear my company name, and we're able to click into each of them and select which of these items they'll be able to sell to their customer. Here's what I would imagine that particular screen to look and work like:</p>
<video width="400" controls="">
<source src="https://westleyknight.com/assets/img/articles/icecream-checkboxes.webm" type="video/webm" />
Your browser does not support HTML video.
</video>
<p>So we have three unchecked checkboxes for our three distinct products. We want this particular vendor to sell all 3 products, so we check all 3 of the boxes. However, when we check the box for ice cream cones, we open up a set of 3 related checkboxes under it for those tasty extras that can come with the ice cream cone.</p>
<p>As a solution to the problem of displaying related options to a choice on a single screen, it feels rather eloquent if I do say so myself.</p>
<h2>Consider the development approach</h2>
<p>Back to the real world and walking through this design and how it is intended to work with developers brings another perspective to the conversation; how do we build this. In the conversations I had around this particular approach to the design of this interface, we would be making more than one call to different data stores to both display the content of the page and to save the choices made by the user. With the underlying framework of the software, this meant that there would be much more work and a longer time to build from a developer point of view.</p>
<p>Although the developers agreed that the solution was ideal for this scenario and incorporated everything the user needed to do in a simple interface, the amount of work needed to implement this steered us to scrutinise the solution more thoroughly. As I mentioned at the top of this article, there are ways in which we can make trade-offs without compromising the user experience.</p>
<h2>Less eloquent, but still usable</h2>
<p>For this particular piece of work, designing and building using the guidelines in the <a href="http://gov.uk/">GOV.UK</a> Design System provides us with a set of standards we can follow to deliver a consistent user experience. One of these guidelines when designing transactional journeys – journeys which require data input to move forward in a process – is to deal with <a href="https://design-system.service.gov.uk/patterns/question-pages/#start-by-asking-one-question-per-page">one question per page</a>.</p>
<p>This is what our solution above did; you could handle the inventory of an ice cream vendor on a single screen. But we now have our additional technical constraints and need to split this interaction out into separate screens, so we removed the second checklist that is revealed, and moved it to its own page that only gets displayed in the user journey if the relevant option is selected.</p>
<p>We are still designing to our principles with this solution as one page deals with the products and the next deals with the associated toppings that can go with one of the products selected.</p>
<p>Although it doesn't feel as neat and efficient to me, we are still only asking the user to complete the additional information in the situation where it is required. If the user doesn't select ice cream cones, they won't see the next screen to select the associated toppings.</p>
<p>The result is that we are delivering a consistent experience to our users and easily understandable interface, and we are also considering the needs of our developers along with the technical constraints they have to deal with.</p>
<h2>What can you do to strike the same balance?</h2>
<h3>Involve your developers early</h3>
<p>If we had not had these conversations after our first attempt at designing this particular user journey, we may have gone into user testing, iterated some more, and spent much more time on the design only to find out that technical constraints would have prevented this from working as we had intended.</p>
<p>Having conversations around your work early and often helps to bridge what would otherwise be a large gap in understanding throughout your team. As part of these conversations, the later stages of the process will go more smoothly as there will be fewer surprises to spring on developers as these conversations involve them so they have a good idea of what kind of things they're going to be building in the near future.</p>
<h3>Realise that not all compromise is bad for design</h3>
<p>The main thing I have learned while working through this particular problem is that not everything that appears to be a compromise in your design is actually a compromise. Sometimes these discussions and uncovering of new constraints result in delivering a better all-round user experience.</p>
<p>In the real world away from the simplified example ice cream example, our discussion with the developers brought to light a number of additional consequences that would have required their own workaround solutions to handle the fallout from the originally proposed design.</p>
<p>By other team members having the opportunity to share their knowledge of the system, we were able to design a solution that would result in less work for our internal teams, and reduce the cognitive load of our users by keeping our user journeys more streamlined and usable.</p>
<h3>Value the input of non-designers</h3>
<p>Although I have been specifically referring to developers in this article, the value of input from other members of your team will always help to guide you in a direction that takes all of their concerns into consideration.</p>
<p>You will only be able to gain invaluable insight of others by sharing what you have done.</p>
<p>You have to be open to constructive criticism of your work, and remind yourself that any feedback of this nature is not a criticism of your ability, but a collaborative process with the ultimate aim of providing a better experience to the people that you are designing and building your product for.</p>
How do you know when your design work is done?2020-11-10T10:00:00Zhttps://westleyknight.com/blog/how-do-you-know-when-your-design-work-is-done/<p>If you're working on a digital product or service for a larger organisation, you may be working in a multi-disciplinary team utilising a form of Agile methodology. Your team might be made up of many people each with their specialisms in design, development or research, or there may be fewer of you and that cover more areas of expertise as required by the team. Whatever the composition, you will (hopefully!) have some process to track your upcoming work, the progress during it, and the completion of it.</p>
<p>In the world of business, product teams such as these are ultimately measured on their ability to deliver. It can be used as a single indicator of how well a team is performing in terms of being able to release new software into the world. Now, I have many arguments against finding a single indicator to measure what is an extremely complex process of inter-related tasks and disciplines, but that is a whole subject that could be discussed across numerous blog posts or its own book, so we'll deal with this as a given for the time being.</p>
<p>If your team is put up alongside others in the number of releases made in a given period, initial impressions will be that the teams releasing often and successfully (by which I mean not breaking everything once the release has been deployed) will be held aloft as a shining example, whilst those working on something much larger that requires bigger releases with more risk will be under far more scrutiny. Yes, there is far more nuanced reasoning behind why teams are working the way that they are, but again, we'll have to save that conversation for another time.</p>
<p>These releases are ultimately a measure of developers reaching their definition of done. The work that was set out before them has been completed, it was deemed to meet the acceptance criteria, and has been tested and proven to meet those criteria. The criteria defined by the work done by designers and researchers. But what criteria do designers have to meet for their work to be considered done?</p>
<h2>Designers, how do you know when you are done?</h2>
<p>You can look to answer this question in a couple of ways.</p>
<p>If you're a design idealist, you may be thinking something along the lines of "the work is never done", and there's always something that can be made better, or there will be changing needs of the user for which we will need to provide.</p>
<p>If you're more of a pragmatist, your focus might be delivering the minimal viable product, with your focus on the minimal. What is the smallest amount of work that can be done to move things forward and make things slightly better than they were before?</p>
<p>Business analysts and developers will set their definition of done for a given ticket using the agile ceremonies at their disposal and create the set of criteria that must be fulfilled before the ticket is considered complete.</p>
<p>Without having all of the requirements and specifics to hand, the designer's role and progress to completing their design work on a given task are obfuscated by the nature of design work itself; the discovery and exploration involved in the design process to uncover what it is you should be building for your users.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Every block of stone has a sculpture inside it and it is the task of the sculptor to discover it.</p>
<p>~ Michelangelo (not the turtle)</p>
</blockquote>
<p>What do you need to understand as a designer before you can set your criteria for you to know when your work is done?</p>
<h2>Are you building a product or a service?</h2>
<p>In reality, the nature of business – and the role of digital product design attached to it – requires things to be finished at some point, especially if you're creating a product. The parallels with the real world still exist when it comes to shipping products; once the product is completed, it is shipped and available to customers. Yes, in the digital world we can improve upon it and iterate based on how people are using it in the real world, but for the business, it can be seen as something that has been completed, and to spend more time on something that is already out there being used has diminishing returns.</p>
<p>Unfortunately, the same kind of expectation can be held against a digital service. A quick distinction is probably needed here... I see a digital product as something which can be designed, implemented and released, and can be bought again and again by consumers with little changing over time, whereas a service is an evolving piece of software that will likely launch with core features and will improve over time to meet the ever-changing needs of its users.</p>
<p>In either of these scenarios, whether you're building a product or a service, you will have a goal that you are aiming for to be able to say that it is ready for release; this could be a beta version with only a core set of features, or a fully-fledged product with all of the bells and whistles.</p>
<h2>Do you work alone or in teams?</h2>
<p>Working in teams tends to provide a framework within which you can set your own definition of done, and find a consensus within your team of what that means for you. If your work doesn’t reach that definition of done in your given timeframes, it will have a negative impact on your team and its ability to deliver overall. The constraints provided by the combination of timeframes and your definition of done make it easier for you to break up your work into manageable chunks that can help you keep up your momentum (or velocity if you want to use agile terminology) of work.</p>
<p>If you’re working alone, whether on a side project or running your own business that focuses on a digital product – and I'm leaning heavily on my own experience here – it can be difficult to set your sights on what done means to you. I have always had the temptation to continue working towards perfection when your product is already “good enough” and it should already be out there in the hands of your users. Again, much like when working in a team, defining what done looks like, and sticking to that will help you to deliver your products into the real world.</p>
<h2>How to set your definition of done for design</h2>
<p>Depending on your situation, whether working solo or in a team, or building a product or maintaining a service, there are still some guidelines I would recommend that you follow to know when you are done as a designer and help you to draw a line under one piece of work so that you can move on to the next and keep moving things forward.</p>
<h3>Set your criteria</h3>
<p>As part of understanding the work that you need to do, and that you need to reach an endpoint for a developer to pick up and implement the work you have done, you can define the amount of work you need to do in each specific instance.</p>
<p>Understanding what the developers need from you to complete the work, or what a business analyst may need to write the ticket and acceptance criteria, will be the main factors that help you to set your goals at the outset.</p>
<p>Do you need to have tested your work with users and for the findings of that research to have been acceptable before you are happy for developers to pick up that work? Do you need to have ironed out all of the possible bugs and loopholes through multiple iterations before you're happy for that to go into development?</p>
<p>Understanding how your organisation works and what they value in terms of delivering to their users will be a useful guide on how to set your criteria. However, you should not use this alone...</p>
<h3>Adapt to suit your team</h3>
<p>Maybe your team is small and low on budget and as a result, you have to move quickly to deliver things into the hands of your users so that you can evaluate the impact of your work, and quickly iterate on those to help fix the experience of your users. Or maybe your team just likes the "move fast and break things" approach to get real data from real people using your product.</p>
<p>Perhaps you have a larger multi-disciplinary team which includes user research capabilities, meaning that you can iterate on your design work to a point where you know what will work best for your users before you even go into development.</p>
<p>These scenarios represent different ends of the same spectrum, and where you are upon it will help you to determine what your definition of done as a designer should look like.</p>
<p>At the end where the speed of delivery and putting things in front of people is paramount, your live product is your sandbox in which you are playing, and your definition of done will be less detailed as there is less for you to do before things will go into development. At the other end of this spectrum, there is more likely to be a lot of iteration, testing, and proving that the designs work as needed before they go anywhere near the developers to build and deploy.</p>
<p>Of course, there is everything in between these two extremes, and part of your role as a designer will be to understand where you fit in that spectrum, and the amount of specificity required from your design outputs will vary accordingly. By understanding your team, you can adapt your definition of done – and the work needed to get to that point – so that it aligns with the needs of the team as a whole.</p>
<h3>Iterate on your process</h3>
<p>Once you have found a method or framework for setting your definition of done, you should always bear in mind that circumstances may change, the dynamics of the team may shift, or perhaps your role may take on a different meaning or change in terms of responsibility.</p>
<p>One thing that we can always be sure of is that things will change over time, and that will include how you do your work and what your team may need from you. Your ability to iterate should already exist and be well-practised in your line of work, and this concept of iteration can be transferred to your process and how you work with your team.</p>
<p>Be sure to revisit how you do things and how you define when your work is done whenever it feels like things are becoming misaligned, or maybe just to check in on a regular basis to keep yourself familiar with how you should be working and whether you need to make any adjustments.</p>
<p>You have to be willing to evolve the way in which you work so that what you do and how you do it can be integrated as successfully as possible within an ever-changing workplace.</p>
4 things that make a good user story for designers2020-11-03T10:00:00Zhttps://westleyknight.com/blog/four-things-that-make-a-good-user-story-for-designers/<p>User stories are a prominent part of an agile software development approach. They are the main reason why we have been able to move away from lengthy requirement specification documents associated with the waterfall approach to short statements based on a number of conversations around desired functionality. For that accomplishment alone we should be hugely thankful!</p>
<p>User stories are generally structured in this manner:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>As an [actor], I want [action] so that [goal].</p>
</blockquote>
<p>As the title of this article may suggest, I will be looking at what makes a good user story for a designer or design team to pick up and run with in order to design a solution that can be researched and refined with your users. Therefore I won't be diving into things like acceptance criteria that are required for taking a fully fleshed out user story into development, but only that which gives us design constraints and yet allows us freedom in the process to create usable solutions.</p>
<h2>Good user stories are based on real user needs</h2>
<p>It's right there in the name. A good user story is based around the real needs of actual users. They do not start with phrases like "as a developer", or "as a product owner", these are internal needs of the business and part of developing better ways of working as a team and in no way should be bundled together with real user stories.</p>
<p>I am not saying that these requirements do not exist, but filing them as user stories is a misnomer. This generally doesn't happen in the early stages of discovery before going into a design phase, but it is worth mentioning as user stories are far more refined and detailed before they arrive in the hands of the developers, and can be introduced from other avenues aside from the results of research with users. If you do have these stories, may I recommend calling them "stakeholder stories" as this more accurately reflects their need to exist.</p>
<p>Sorry, back to real user stories after that brief departure!</p>
<p>User stories should be derived from user research; the uncovering of real problems that need a solution in relation to the digital product you are working on. A user will have a particular goal, they want to use your product to reach that goal, and will provide you with their specific context in which they find themselves.</p>
<p>This will help you to create your single statement outlining a user story.</p>
<h2>Good user stories are aligned with business goals</h2>
<p>Even though I'm am a strong advocate of user-centred design, I am not blind to the fact that you wouldn't be able to design anything for your users if there wasn't some kind of business or organisation which provides the product which you are working on for the benefit of your users.</p>
<p>To this end, the user stories that you are able to work on will align to the needs of the business, and help to achieve the business goals as well as the goals of the user.</p>
<p>If you're working for a bank and the user wants to be able to easily set up a savings account for their goal of putting a deposit on a house or apply for a credit card to build a better credit rating, these will most likely be well aligned to the business, but maybe there is a drive within the business to build their number of customers who hold a credit card with them, in which case the latter of the two examples would take priority.</p>
<p>Pragmatically speaking, without the business there will be no users, therefore a good user story helps both the business and the user to achieve their goals.</p>
<h2>Good user stories come from collaboration</h2>
<p>The single line of a user story only provides the starting point from which the user story develops from this initial statement into a designed, researched, and tested solution. The real value in a good user story comes from the conversations around it; the collaboration within your team and organisation.</p>
<p>Your discussions will involve your findings from user research, what those findings could mean within the context of your product, how some approaches may dovetail nicely with existing features and journeys or how some may break down at the first hurdle. You should involve everyone in your team (not necessarily all at once) to make sure that the work you are doing on your proposed solution to the given problem in the user story is feasible, in keeping with recognised flows and patterns, delivers value to the business, and is actually delivering a real solution to that problem.</p>
<p>These conversations and collaboration happen as part of the process whilst you are designing and building prototypes of your solution. As you go you can involve different members of the team for their input, making sure that you haven't missed out on anything obvious, introducing things that shouldn't be there, and essentially making sure that everyone is happy with the direction in which the work is moving towards that solution for the user need.</p>
<p>It is through this process that the user story will grow in terms of understanding within your team, and will begin transforming into a more fleshed out story that you would see handed over to a development team that includes elements like acceptance criteria, dependencies, considerations, related artefacts and more.</p>
<h2>Good user stories do not prescribe a solution</h2>
<p>When it comes to the design process, constraints are great, but building out a prototype to the letter of a specified solution does not leave room for exploration and experimentation. Part of the design process is being afforded the freedom to make mistakes early, discover the wrong paths, and cease pursual of them in light of the evidence you will obtain from user research and usability testing.</p>
<p>If your user story describes precisely how a problem should be solved, or even hints to a specific direction, it is possible that the design work will be railroaded in that specific direction, and it then becomes an uphill battle to attempt to deviate from the set course.</p>
<p>By only posing the problem that needs solving can you effectively carry out the design process to explore the avenues available to you, and to verify whether the direction you are taking is the right thing for your users through research and testing.</p>
<h2>In conclusion</h2>
<p>Good user stories that have these four characteristics are the spark that puts starts design process on the right foot and enables you to go and create something the will satisfy, or perhaps even delight the user when it comes to serving their needs and helping them to reach their goals. They are a focal point around which conversations happen and decisions can be made, and are a great way to encourage collaboration with your entire team in the early phases of your work, and everyone can have an impact in shaping what your product will become.</p>
Picking your battles in the war for better user experience2020-10-27T10:00:00Zhttps://westleyknight.com/blog/picking-your-battles-in-the-war-for-better-user-experience/<p>Whenever I have started a new project or role as a user experience designer, the possibilities are seemingly endless. Approaching a project with a fresh set of eyes provides you with a broad scope in how you might make a product better for its users, and a hope that you'll be able to fulfil your visions of what could be.</p>
<p>Soon after this initial excitement, you will begin to have conversations about the direction the project is headed with its road map, what the goals for the business are, and the scope of the particular project you are working on within the grander scheme of things. This may feel like a narrowing of those broad horizons - and perhaps your ideas that went along with them - but in many cases, this can give you focus as a designer, and some of your best work will come when working within a set of constraints and pushing those boundaries.</p>
<p>In the early stages of working in a project (and no doubt many instances throughout the time I have worked on an individual project) there comes the almost inevitable request for a small change.</p>
<p>You are given a minor problem that needs fixing, but whilst you are working on that relatively small solution you find a huge opportunity which could make the whole experience so much better for the user. If you're like me, you'll excitedly come up with a plan of action, how the solution to a problem that seems to have been largely ignored can be implemented, and all of the benefits that solution would have for both the user and the business. It's a win for everyone.</p>
<p>You put your proposal to your superiors but are given a firm answer of no.</p>
<p>Whatever the reason may be, this is where the reality of working as a designer can hit hard. But you should know right now that this is a huge part of your job. Your ability to accept these kinds of decisions from your colleagues, superiors, and stakeholders is something you will have to learn to handle but should never be seen as a dead-end. At this point you may feel like you have two choices; do you want to fight for this particular cause or simply let it go?</p>
<h2>Your choices aren't black or white</h2>
<p>Although you may feel like this is a do or die moment for whatever it is you're fighting for on behalf of your users, there are many ways forward from this juncture, just as there tends to be with most design problems.</p>
<p>Your first move should be to have a conversation around this negative decision. The rejection may feel non-sensical when all you have is your drive to create a better experience for your users, and the only way to remedy this is to gain more perspective on the issues, and this can only be done in conversation with the decision-maker.</p>
<p>Be calm and considerate in your questioning. Frame it in such a way that you are the one that needs to understand why so that you can make better and more informed decisions going forward. Take your time to understand why the decision was made based on the answers you receive, and weigh up whether it makes sense to leave this issue where it is for now whilst aiming to leave it on the table to come back at a later date to review again. If this does not feel like an option for you and there is too much at stake, you'll need to ask yourself; is this the hill you really want to die on?</p>
<h2>Leave things better than you found them</h2>
<p>Before you dive headlong into a decision that may define your working relationships for the foreseeable future, casting you as the difficult designer who can be impossible to work with, give yourself some more perspective by thinking of the bigger picture.</p>
<p>I have long been an advocate of leaving things in a better place than you initially found them.</p>
<p>Take a step back and look at the scope of your role. Will you possibly get the opportunity to have a greater effect in another area of the product you will be working on in the future? Can you help direct the focus of work to areas that create a poorer user experience that need more attention? Are there more pressing issues that would benefit your users aside from this change you wanted to make? What about any low-hanging fruit that hasn't yet been taken into consideration?</p>
<p>A better user experience will not only be created from the thing you are working on right now, but from the next thing you will work on, or maybe the thing after that, or even after that. It is a culmination of your work over time across the product as a whole. Sometimes you just have to bite the bullet and do the simple fix to get something done in a way that you otherwise would not want to do it. If that means sacrificing what you would see as an easy win right now to be able to continue your good work in other areas, you have to be able to accept that loss and move on.</p>
<h2>Which hill should you decide to die on?</h2>
<p>So far we have only addressed when you need to concede defeat in a battle for the benefit of the user experience in the long run, but what do you do when you come to the battle which you feel you have to win for your product to move forward and become a better experience because of it?</p>
<p>One thing worth thinking about is that you can build up a kind of 'credit' in conceding previous battles. Every time that you have brought a potential improvement to the table which you have then agreed to leave, for the time being, you are building up this 'credit' in the minds of the decision-makers which you can use when you feel the time is right.</p>
<p>Ideally, you wouldn't spring this so-called 'credit' that you intend to use as a surprise. Without being over the top, you must be able to build your case for your specific metaphorical hill, and state that you are not willing to compromise the integrity of the design or the user experience on the issue. In the majority of cases you will find that your team and stakeholders are willing to compromise and deliver something better for their users, especially if you can sprinkle in the notion of how you have (hopefully begrudgingly) conceded on other issues in the past.</p>
<h2>Everyone wants to build a better product</h2>
<p>Everyone in your team will always be looking to deliver the best possible product, and you should not lose sight of that. Your ability to make the right calls on the relevant pieces of work, alongside the additional effort required across the team to deliver on those decisions for the benefit of the user, are what will ultimately make a success of the product, and a success of you as a designer within your team.</p>
<p>You will need to be pragmatic at times to continue improving your product, although sometimes that may not be as fast or to the order of magnitude that you would like. In those pieces of work that you feel are of paramount importance to the user and their experience, you will need to stand your ground and be prepared to make your case.</p>
<p>Whichever path you choose to take at whatever juncture you find yourself if you are moving the product forward, regardless of the distance, you are leaving things in a better place than you found them. Battles will come and go, but the war to deliver a better experience for your users will be never-ending.</p>
The 8 hallmarks of great content design2020-10-20T19:00:00Zhttps://westleyknight.com/blog/the-8-hallmarks-of-great-content-design/<p>It is fair to say that without good content your digital product will not be as successful as you may hope or want it to be. The words that surround and permeate your product are what conveys meaning to its users, guides them through a journey and convinces others to become users in the first place. But how do you ensure that your written communication will help your product to be a success?</p>
<p>What are the things that you need to think about to create content that is useful to the people in your audience? What does good content design consist of, and how can you improve what you write for the people who use your online product or service?</p>
<h2>Accessible and understandable</h2>
<p>One of the key elements of content design that I have learned whilst working on digital services under the <a href="http://gov.uk/">GOV.UK</a> domain is how to make your content accessible and understandable by as many people as possible.</p>
<p>To do this you should be writing for the comprehension and reading level of a 9-year-old. Initially, I was surprised by that, but understanding the thinking behind it made more sense. By age 9, children have developed a primary vocabulary of 5,000 words which they use the most, and stop reading the words and recognise them by shape, allowing them to read much faster.</p>
<p>People also tend to read online by bouncing around the page, and not taking in everything that is written. Thankfully your brain can drop up to 30% of the text you are reading, and still understand what it is communicating to you. Although your vocabulary may expand throughout adulthood, your baseline reading skill stays with you, and this approach allows a wider audience to understand what you are writing about.</p>
<h2>Clear, concise, and consistent</h2>
<p>Clear communication is what helps your readers to understand your content, and although this may seem fairly obvious, in practice it can be far more difficult to execute effectively. If it is your job to help the people reading your content to understand it, it must be concise and cut straight to the point.</p>
<p>In the past, I have struggled to communicate a single concept clearly and concisely, and as a result end up going round in circles, attempting to explain the same thing in different ways hoping to stumble upon the correct way to communicate. This only leads to further confusion and is not the way to help others understand what you are trying to communicate.</p>
<p>To communicate something clearly, I like to apply the "Steve McQueen technique" of halving the number of words you use to communicate a particular thing and keep halving it until you find the optimal way to deliver your message (it may be apocryphal, but Steve would reduce the words he had to read from the script again and again until he could communicate the line just by giving a look).</p>
<p>Consistency in the words you use in your product and its surrounding communication is also a key factor in better content design. Using the same words to describe the same things or actions build a better understanding for the user regarding the content. For example, if you were to use the words 'location' and 'venue' interchangeably, in some instances you may be referring to something specific, say by using the word 'venue' for a specific physical place and then switch to the word 'location', which may have been used elsewhere for a more vague physical place such as a town or county. Avoiding using terms interchangeably will help your readers to understand specific meanings across all of your content.</p>
<h2>Purposeful and contextual</h2>
<p>Why are you writing what you're writing? What is it that the readers of this content will get from it? Will they be able to complete the task they set out to do, or reach the end goal that they are aiming for? These are the kinds of questions you'll need to ask yourself whilst writing your content for your users. You must guide them to the actions they wish to take, and help them to feel confident in understanding what will happen when they take that action. To do this, you will need to understand your reader's motivations and goals. What brought them to this page? What are they looking to do to complete their task or reach their goal?</p>
<p>This leads us on to understanding the context of the user concerning the content they are reading. We should understand the journey that they have taken from their first action all the way along until they have reached a particular screen. What are the different ways they could have reached this point? Does the content cater to the needs of the users that have taken different paths to get here?</p>
<p>Understanding how a user arrived and where they are trying to get to will help shape the content you deliver at any given point. You must meet the user where they are to take them to where they want to be.</p>
<h2>Relevance</h2>
<p>Everything you write as part of your content should be written for your reader. We should no longer be in the business of trying to game search engine algorithms to try to have them ranking our pages more highly for specific search terms.</p>
<p>You should work to understand your audience, how they search, what terms they are looking for, and what they want to do as a result of these actions. If you can understand the way they communicate, you can leverage that to your advantage, and speak to them in the same way they would speak on the same subject.</p>
<p>Essentially, being relevant is about being able to communicate through the written word as you would in conversation with another human being. You need to communicate in a common language, provide the right information to them at the right time, and keep everything pertinent to the situation and context you find them in.</p>
<br />
<p>The ability to write great content for your users is part of the design process. These hallmarks are only developed through research and iteration, combined with the knowledge of how you want your content to be received by your audience. By keeping all of this in mind, you’ll find yourself on the path to creating great content that your users understand and that helps them to reach their goals.</p>
How communication turns a good designer into a great designer2020-10-13T18:00:00Zhttps://westleyknight.com/blog/how-communication-makes-turns-a-good-designer-into-a-great-designer/<p>Throughout my career, I have been continuously learning. Starting as a developer, I was building websites using HTML tables for layout and Active Server Pages to integrate with databases. Then CSS came along and changed everything, and my growing appreciation of how you could make a simple webpage look completely different just by changing properties within a different file sent me down the path of specialising as a front-end developer.</p>
<p>I then worked more and more closely with the designers whose Photoshop compositions of web pages I would bring to life in the browser. I began to pick up the skills and knowledge of how to design webpages and applications to solve a problem for the client, whether that was getting people to sign up for a newsletter, request a valuation on their house, or buy the products that they were selling. My working life in an agency environment was truly varied. Aspects of visual design and the psychology intertwined with it began to fascinate me as I moved along the path towards a user experience designer.</p>
<p>Upon leaping to a full-time UX role, I began to understand the importance of research, not only in how we design and build a digital product but in whether we were even building the right thing in the first place. Throughout my whole career, I was learning new tools and techniques to implement the knowledge and understanding I had gained throughout those years. I always prided myself on being technically proficient, applying the best possible solutions to the problems we were trying to solve in the constraints which we were given.</p>
<p>Although this technical proficiency and the ability to deliver work on time and budget were great skills to have as a team member – whether a developer, designer or any other role you may find in a modern multi-disciplinary digital team – there is one area that, if you cultivate and improve your abilities within it, will lift you above others in your field and will have you held in high esteem with your work colleagues. I am, of course, talking about communication.</p>
<h2>Communication skills are undervalued</h2>
<p>Although this sounds like a click-bait heading, I'm referring to how communication skills within the design practice are not valued in how they are communicated. That sounds a bit meta, so bear with me here.</p>
<p>Take a look at any design job description for a design role. It will no doubt require good communication skills, and may even be fleshed out a little in the description of the role into a sentence along the lines of "candidates must show the ability to communicate with stakeholders, and have experience in running workshops". Now, to be fair, these are only job descriptions - essentially a single page blurb which will usually be easily interchangeable with another similar design role in another organisation - and although it states that it is an important skill for you to have, I don't believe it accurately represents the need for clear communication in a design role within a large organisation, in a team, and with your wider user base.</p>
<p>As a designer, you are working on communication both in and around your work.</p>
<p>The interfaces and interactions you are designing are the way in which you make an otherwise static digital thing to communicate how it works and how it is intended to be used by the person interacting with it. You are a specialist in communication through a medium which the vast majority of the human beings on the planet have access to.</p>
<p>On the other hand, your day-to-day work rests upon you communicating with the members of your team, having the conversations to help you make decisions to move things forward, listening to your users to make sure that what you're doing is right for them, and convincing the powers that be that what you're doing is the right thing for them and their users. These days we have to do this in ways that may have seemed impossible not so long ago.</p>
<h2>Remote working requires better communication</h2>
<p>Now that remote working has become more commonplace in larger organisations which previously held the belief that you get better work done by being in the same physical space - some may still believe that and are itching to get back to that familiarity - the ability to work remotely has come on leaps and bounds in individuals who aren't as tech-savvy, and enables us to carry out the same work we would have done in a room together by harnessing the tools and technology at our disposal.</p>
<p>Using any manner of tools from Google Docs to Confluence, Trello to Jira, Slack to Zoom, every type and avenue of communication is possible through the technology we have on our computers as we work predominantly in the digital space.</p>
<p>But these tools do not do our communication for us, they are just the conduit through which we can work more effectively with our teams. The onus is still on us to make communication happen, to make time for the conversations we need to have to do better work, and to keep people informed of our progress and to plan our next steps forward.</p>
<h2>Better communication is not more communication</h2>
<p>As was also the problem whilst working in the same physical location, the number of meetings when working remotely can spiral out of control of you don't stay on top of them, and enforce a strict ruleset of when you should be spending your time in meetings.</p>
<p>If you are in a meeting, and it becomes clear that none of the discussions will benefit from your input, speak up and ask if you are still needed. There are likely more constructive things that you can do with your time and you can always catch up on the outcomes through meeting minutes or quicker catch-up calls.</p>
<p>Better communication is about efficiency and relevance. If you're making a point, be clear and concise. If you're in a discussion or a workshop setting, create a framework which gives everyone the time and platform on which they can share their thoughts without being sidelined. If you're there to listen, just make sure you're on mute!</p>
<h2>Communicating your design work</h2>
<p>The previous points I have made are more general and can apply to most people working in multi-disciplinary teams, whether that be colocated or in a remote working situation, but there is a more nuanced understanding of communication required when it comes to design work and how you present this to your team and your stakeholders.</p>
<p>Your ability to communicate your design process, the decisions you have made in your work, and more importantly why you made them, are the three key areas in which you will need to excel to go from good designer to great designer.</p>
<p>Any designer can share a link or throw a bunch of screen designs in front of someone without explanation or reasoning; something akin to the use of Dribbble or Instagram to show off your user interface design skills in purely visual terms.</p>
<p>But as a certain Mr Jobs once said, "It's not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works."</p>
<p>Your true value as a designer is in your ability to bring people along for the ride, to involve them in the process, to share your thoughts and decisions with them so that they understand the why behind your decisions and ways of working.</p>
<p>Providing your colleagues with this kind of understanding will not only build their appreciation of the design process and the work that goes into the design process, but it is also what will elevate your professional standing from a good designer to a great designer.</p>
How to design without a user researcher2020-10-06T05:00:00Zhttps://westleyknight.com/blog/how-to-design-without-a-user-researcher/<p>First and foremost, this is in no way a recommendation to do any user experience design without research. Seeing as the word 'user' is in the job title of a user experience designer, they must be involved in the design process.</p>
<p>That being said, when working in a multi-disciplinary team, or perhaps even as an external consultant you may find yourself without a user researcher, whether by design or accident. What do you do when you find yourself in this situation? Your need for user input in the design process doesn't just disappear because you have no access to an individual (or even team of people) whose main responsibility is handling the kind of research you need.</p>
<p>Research is a tool that helps you to gain a better understanding of your chosen subject, and when applied with care and consideration, can save you, your team, and your clients a large amount of time and effort.</p>
<p>So what steps can you take as a designer to make sure that you consult with your users to make sure that you're on the right path, even without the aid of a specialist?</p>
<h2>Catch up on previous research</h2>
<p>If your team has previously had a research function, or have utilised an external agency for some kind of insight, these findings can be a valuable resource.</p>
<p>Firstly, you can help to narrow your focus on any future research that may need undertaking by analysing the paths that others have already taken. Utilising older research to build up a picture of previous understanding gives you context when you overlay future research findings and can help you to uncover changes and trends in your users' behaviours over time.</p>
<p>Secondly, you can highlight the areas in which you have a lack of understanding of your user despite the work carried out before. If you can correlate the research required to an improved outcome – not only for the user experience but also for the business – you are more likely to garner support for carrying out that additional research.</p>
<h2>Lean on similar insight from others</h2>
<p>If you work in an environment with multiple teams working on different products or features, you may be able to learn from your colleagues' findings.</p>
<p>Yes, your research is far more valuable when carried out in the context of your product with your users, but in situations where either the product, your user, or neither of those are available, then you need to look elsewhere to look for guidance on the path you should take.</p>
<p>If you can gain insight from other teams who have carried out research on a similar piece of functionality, a similar user journey, or have uncovered more about their types of user that intersect with your own, you should look to combine that knowledge with your current understanding to build a more rounded picture. Although this is not the ideal source of information, you can still use it to help guide you in roughly the right direction until you can carry out the research to the level you require.</p>
<h2>Piggyback on other research</h2>
<p>Again, this will tend to work better in an environment with multiple teams and/or research capabilities that you can reach out to. If other people in your organisation have readily available access to researchers, then you should reach out to see if they can help you out.</p>
<p>In my experience, nine times out of ten, researchers will be more than happy to try to help you to gain insight on the work your doing, as long as it fits well with what they are researching themselves. Yes, it's a workaround that will need you to fly under the radar and avoid some red tape, but anything you can gain in relation to your designs with the right kind of users starts to provide real value and insight when compared to the approaches I've mentioned so far.</p>
<p>Never take this kind of help for granted, and never overburden another team's researcher with everything you could possibly be looking to understand about your users and your designs. Be selective in the research that you want to conduct, pick the one thing on your biggest priority, only ask for 5 minutes or so of someone else's research session, and always be on hand to return the favour in the future.</p>
<h2>Conduct research yourself</h2>
<p>If you're not familiar with conducting research, this can be a daunting proposition, but there are many tools out there that can help you to gain just a little more insight than you currently have, and a little research is far better than no research at all.</p>
<p>This is not about you carrying the full weight of research on your shoulders when it is not officially part of your responsibilities, but simply making a contribution to gathering more insight than you had before you started.</p>
<p>If you've previously worked with a researcher and joined in with their research activities, how did you contribute to that process? Were you posing questions that needed answering in research? Then ask the questions that you need answers for on this piece of work. Did you build the prototypes to put in front of the user? Then keep making the things that you need testing. But what do you do when it comes to the research itself? These are the things that you can pull together to structure some research such as a survey or a usability testing session.</p>
<p>As I have mentioned, there are many tools that can help you in conducting this research, and if you're not comfortable to moderate a research session on your work (which I think is never a good idea anyway), you can use unmoderated testing software. The Nielsen Norman Group have published an article on <a href="notion://www.notion.so/westleyknight/%5B%3Chttps://www.nngroup.com/articles/unmoderated-user-testing-tools/%3E%5D(%3Chttps://www.nngroup.com/articles/unmoderated-user-testing-tools/%3E)">Tools for Unmoderated Usability Testing</a> which focuses on software that you can use in the later stages of design, and also advises on when <em><strong>not</strong></em> to use an unmoderated remote solution.</p>
<p>You're going to need to do your research on what research method is the best fit for your situation and what you are trying to learn, and you'll have to learn as you go.</p>
<h2>Something is better than nothing</h2>
<p>Although this article is about how to deal with your lack of access to a user researcher, it should be fairly clear by now that this should not be an excuse to carry out zero user research.</p>
<p>When it comes to understanding your users, something is always better than nothing.</p>
<p>Many times I have been tempted to rely on my experience and my knowledge of tried and tested design patterns to deliver a successful solution and experience to the user – in fact, I have done exactly this earlier in my career – and I can tell you that every time we have conducted more research into the work we are doing, we have gained a better understanding of our users, a better understanding of what they expect, and what does and does not work for them.</p>
<p>As I learned this, I would then argue the case for more user research at every available opportunity. If I was ever asked to just implement a solution without the insight that research would give me, I would start to talk in numbers to help the stakeholders understand it's value.</p>
<p>I would say that my solution would be 50-75% effective in its goals (which, looking back, may have been rather generous and probably should have been no more than 50%). If you want me to build a better product for the users - and by extension, the business - I will need to talk to and understand the needs and motivations of our users, and only then would I be able to raise the level of quality of the product beyond that threshold to a level that both the users and the business should expect.</p>
How to deliver better design without good feedback2020-09-29T05:00:00Zhttps://westleyknight.com/blog/how-to-deliver-better-design-without-good-feedback/<p>As I was writing about the <a href="https://westleyknight.com/blog/seven-ways-to-get-better-feedback-on-your-designs/">7 ways to get better feedback on your designs</a>, it occurred to me that in some cases you may not be working in an organisation or team that has the right infrastructure or support to help facilitate those ways of getting better feedback. If you don't work in house - perhaps as an external agency or consultant - or in an organisation with a lower level of UX maturity, you may find that your opportunities for gathering meaningful feedback can be restricted.</p>
<p>Perhaps you've been asked to "make it pop", or that "something needs to change but I can't quite put my finger on what", even though you have fulfilled the brief within the constraints you were given, you now feel like you haven't met the criteria for some unwritten or uncommunicated rule.</p>
<p>If this is the case for you, what are the things we can do to deliver better-designed solutions without having good constructive feedback?</p>
<h2>Realise when you have exhausted the possibilities</h2>
<p>If you're reading this because you are not getting the right kind of feedback you need to deliver an acceptable solution, then you may feel like you have already exhausted all of the possible approaches to solving the design problem you have.</p>
<p>If you're at a stage where you can foresee that you will exhaust all of your potential solutions without making any headway with your stakeholders, but you're not quite there yet, there is no need to continue to push with the only options that you have remaining. At this point, you have recognised the likely outcome, and the solutions you are looking to are generally more obscure and less intuitive than your earlier designs.</p>
<p>If you're heading down this dead end, this is the time to take a different approach to solve your problem.</p>
<h2>Free yourself from constraints</h2>
<p>The most effective way to resolve this kind of situation is to reduce the constraints to which you are designing, preferably down to one.</p>
<p>Now, this may seem counter-intuitive as you are essentially trying to fulfil the criteria of a brief so that you deliver a solution that satisfies all of the requirements for it to be successful. However, our aim at this stage is not to fulfil every requirement within every constraint; we have already been trying to do this and ended up going in circles or even getting nowhere at all.</p>
<p>Out of all of the constraints you have been given, you have to isolate the single most important one for both users and stakeholders, and fulfil the hell out of that one single requirement.</p>
<p>For example, we'll say we're designing a landing page intending to get the user to click a call to action button. If this button were to be the most crucial thing on the page, how would it look? What would you do to this button to make sure that your user clicks on it?</p>
<p>I'm imagining flashing animated arrows pointing to it from all angles, the button is on fire, and there's some kind of urgent messaging on the button to the tune of "Click me to save your life!". Yes, this is ridiculous and outrageous, and would very likely not be fitting with your style guide or design system, but that is exactly what we're aiming for.</p>
<p>With this kind of exercise, we're looking to reset expectations, to break the cycle of continuous iterations that take us nowhere, and to ultimately bring us back to a simple and satisfactory solution.</p>
<h2>Reset your constraints</h2>
<p>After producing your ridiculous solution with only a single constraint, and the likely graphical abomination it will be, you need to reintroduce your constraints, and work backwards from your single constraint solution to deliver the single best solution to the problem at hand, and the requirements that go hand-in-hand with it. You will likely have all of the ingredients for this solution from all of your previous iterations, or it may simply just be one of those solutions that you have already designed.</p>
<p>There is no need to design multiple versions of a possible solution, just a single design that delivers on the requirements. You don't need to play one idea of any of your others as you have your single constraint solution for that. 😊</p>
<p>Once you arrive at your best possible solution, it's time to take it to the stakeholders.</p>
<h2>Presenting your masterpiece</h2>
<p>This is all about handling your stakeholders and being clear in your communication about the situation you found yourselves in. You will need to set the scene by bringing up the lack of progress towards a solution. This will not be easy, and should never be part of a blame game. You will need to describe the situation you were in, and that you have now taken some rather radical steps to come to a solution that can all be agreed upon.</p>
<p>Now you need to set the scene for the monstrosity of design you are about to show them! Be clear in the approach you took; how you decided on the highest single priority, and created a design around that to fulfil that most important requirement, and how you discarded everything else. If you're in a position to make this light-hearted I would recommend doing so, but I can sympathise that your stakeholders may not be receptive to such an approach depending on the situation and your working relationship.</p>
<p>Walk them through the monstrosity you have created, why you made each design decision you did, and even call it horrible whilst you're presenting it. What your aim is at this point is to get everyone in the room to agree that this is the worst possible solution to the problem at hand, even though it is trying to successfully deliver against the most important of constraints.</p>
<p>This will provide you with the platform to deliver the presentation of your more sensible solution that was designed within the agreed constraints, and is what you believe to be the most suitable solution to the problem, and finger crossed, it helps to move your work forward.</p>
<h2>How do you handle getting poor feedback?</h2>
<p>This is just one way in which you can handle receiving poor feedback from your stakeholders, and I would love to learn how you deal with similar situations. Feel free to share your stories on Twitter (<a href="https://twitter.com/westleyknight">@westleyknight</a>), email me on <a href="mailto:hello@westleyknight.co.uk">hello@westleyknight.co.uk</a>, or sign up to my newsletter below.</p>
7 ways to get better feedback on your designs2020-09-22T05:00:00Zhttps://westleyknight.com/blog/seven-ways-to-get-better-feedback-on-your-designs/<p>At some point as a designer, you will have received feedback on your work, whether you asked for it or not. Feedback can come in all shapes and sizes but is only useful when it is relevant to the design and the problem that it is attempting to solve, and is structured in such a way to help you move the design forward.</p>
<p>One of the main things to remember about asking for feedback on a design is that you are not looking for validation, even if it might be nice to have. What you are looking for is a way to move forward and improve the design you are currently presenting. What you are showing to your stakeholders when requesting feedback is very rarely the finished article - it is usually very far from it - and you need to gain some insight as to whether the work you are doing is headed in the right direction.</p>
<p>Keeping in mind that you are looking for ways in which your current design can be improved, here are 7 things you should do when soliciting feedback from your stakeholders.</p>
<h2>1. Avoid big reveals</h2>
<p>As much as some people might like surprises, it is rarely welcome when it comes to revealing a new solution to a particular problem. To get to the point at which you can do a big reveal, you will likely have spent weeks or even months on designing a solution to a problem, and whether it goes on to be built is completely reliant on the delivery of a single presentation.</p>
<p>Reducing risk is one of the key concerns in business, and building up to a big reveal is just piling risk on top of more risk. You will need to bring people along on the journey of the design process and the iterations that you go through. With this approach, you breed familiarity between your stakeholders and the problem you are working to solve.</p>
<p>By communicating consistently at regular intervals, you are not only able to help grow the stakeholder's involvement with the development of a solution, but you can use them to guide you with their feedback which will be more informed due to their participation.</p>
<h2>2. Explain the thinking behind your design</h2>
<p>In order to solicit the right feedback, you need to be clear on what the intention of your design is. You will need your stakeholders to understand the problem space within which you are working, and even how that fits into the larger scale of everything that they have a knowledge of; you need to communicate how this particular problem affects other areas and how solving it will be beneficial, not just for your project, but for other areas of the business.</p>
<p>If you can describe the problem that you are trying to fix with your design, you should be able to make a sound logical argument by walking through your process and how the decisions you have made along the way intended to address those problems.</p>
<p>You will also need to be armed with the evidence upon which you have based those decisions, whether this is from user research, analytical data from current usage of whatever it is you are working on, or insights you may have gained elsewhere. You will need to add proof as to why your decisions, and the resulting design, should be the solution to the problem.</p>
<h2>3. Choose the right tools for providing feedback</h2>
<p>The methods and tools through which you obtain your feedback must be aligned to the way you are working, and reflect the stage of the design process you find yourselves at.</p>
<p>If you are in the early stages of discovery, you will be having many conversations way before you deliver a prototype, open Sketch (or your design software of choice), or place a pen or pencil to a sheet of paper. At this stage, your feedback is part of these conversations and will need to be documented, whether that be through minutes of meetings, fleshing out a requirements document, or pulling relevant information out of email.</p>
<p>Once you begin the design process in earnest, you will be able to utilise different tools for the stage you are at. If you're doing early sketches and flowing out the initial journeys, it's great to put these up on a wall and annotate with post-it notes. Set up sessions where you can walk your team through your thinking in front of this wall of diagrams and place your feedback directly on them. In the case that you're working remotely, tools like Miro and even InVision can be used to upload your early work for collaborative feedback sessions.</p>
<p>If you work in a distributed team across multiple timezones, you'll most likely need to lean on a form of asynchronous feedback, whether that comes from many individuals into one place which then needs to be collated (perhaps via email or individual sessions that walk through the design), or on an online platform that allows constant access and stores all feedback as it is given.</p>
<p>You will be able to experiment in this area, and you may find that your preferred methods continually evolve as your team's and your own needs change.</p>
<h2>4. Be clear on how you should receive feedback</h2>
<p>This aligns very closely with the tools you will use to collect your feedback but is worth stating that you should be very specific about the channel through which you want your feedback to be provided.</p>
<p>Your aim with being clear on the channel through which you gather your feedback is to make the process more efficient. If you have one person who prefers email, someone who likes to give their feedback verbally, or an individual who writes detail notes, it can be extremely time-consuming to pull all of these different kinds of input into a single repository of feedback.</p>
<p>If you're planning on gathering asynchronous feedback, you would be wise to provide a deadline for feedback and be sure to also reinforce the framework through which the feedback is to be supplied. Again, this is closely aligned to your choice of tool, so be prepared for some trial and error to find the best way that works with your team.</p>
<h2>5. State what you require feedback on</h2>
<p>Depending on the situation in which you are requesting feedback, you will need to be specific in what you are looking for feedback on. If you are working on a particular part of a particular feature in a much larger product, you must specify precisely what it is you are looking for feedback on.</p>
<p>You can provide a better understanding of what you need from this feedback by telling your stakeholders exactly what will and will not be acted upon. If any feedback is provided outside of the scope that has been requested, you can say that it will not be actioned at this time, but will instead be added to a 'feedback backlog' which can be revisited at a later date.</p>
<p>Often you will find your stakeholders will prefer a more defined area for them to concentrate on, as everyone's time is valuable, and setting these kinds of constraints upfront is beneficial for both them and you. This more pointed approach provides benefits to the team as you can act faster incorporating that feedback into your designs and cover more in each iteration of your product.</p>
<h2>6. Don't ask for solutions, ask for problems</h2>
<p>Closely aligned to be precise about what you need feedback on, you need to be clear on what helpful feedback looks like. Opinions on what a stakeholder likes or does not like have no real bearing on what you should or shouldn't be doing with your designs.</p>
<p>You should not be asking for feedback on the colour of a button or the placement of a certain component on the screen. If you do receive feedback like this, it is your job to try to get to the bottom of what this feedback is actually about. Using <a href="https://westleyknight.com/blog/how-and-when-to-use-the-5-whys/">The 5 Whys</a> helps to figure this out, but in an ideal scenario, you shouldn't have to dig into the meaning of the feedback given.</p>
<p>What you are looking for is the problems that they see with the design. Whether the lack of prominence on a button might have a negative effect on people signing up to their platform or service, or whatever the measurable impact may be for your product. You want their concerns about why they think a certain thing needs changing, and what that means for the business. When you know this, you can address these concerns directly and try to understand where they fit in as part of the project and if it changes your scope in any way.</p>
<p>Ultimately your stakeholders want a solution that solves a problem, both for them and the users, and being candid about what helps you to achieve this is beneficial for both the user and stakeholders, as well as you, the designer.</p>
<h2>7. Don't take feedback personally</h2>
<p>This is one thing that took me several years to understand, and now it is something that I announce to everyone at the start of any feedback session.</p>
<p>Every piece of feedback given will not be taken personally, we are all here to uncover any problems with this design so that we can make it better.</p>
<p>As a designer, you have to come to the realisation that the work you create does not belong to you. Neither does it belong to the stakeholders within your organisation. The people who will come closest to the product you are creating will be its users. They are the ones who will be most affected by the use of your creation, and so it is them for whom we are designing.</p>
<p>Negative yet constructive feedback on something you have designed is exactly what you should be striving for. What you put in front of people for them to openly criticise can be a daunting thing, but it is a step that is needed to be able to push your solutions to be better.</p>
<p>You will also need to be aware of the negative effects of positive feedback. This sounds crazy at first, but one positive feedback session in the early stages of design can stagnate your progress and reduce the need you feel for improving your solution. If you're working on a specific problem that has never really been solved in an elegant fashion before, then simply making the process work puts you head and shoulders above the competition. This can lead to a loss of impetus - even complacency - in making your product the best it can be. If everyone is already so happy with it, why should we do more?</p>
<p>As a designer, our success lies in the creation of something that the people who use it find valuable. It helps them to achieve their goals and does so in a way that provides a good experience to them.</p>
<h2>Go forth and gather feedback</h2>
<p>Has this given you any ideas on how to improve the way you gather feedback on your designs? Is there anything I may have missed out or has worked well for you in the past? I'd love to know your stories so feel free to get in touch on Twitter (<a href="https://twitter.com/westleyknight">@westleyknight</a>) or email me on <a href="mailto:hello@westleyknight.co.uk">hello@westleyknight.co.uk</a>.</p>
How to design a better product using the 6 minds of experience2020-09-15T05:00:00Zhttps://westleyknight.com/blog/how-to-design-a-better-product-using-the-6-minds-of-experience/<p>One of the many things you will need to understand when designing a product or feature to provide a good experience for the user is that every individual will have a unique experience. This is not a direct result of your design work, but it simply a representation of a person's experience being multidimensional. We are never directly designing an experience, we are designing something that a person will have their own experience with.</p>
<p>One of the ways we can better understand how to design something to create a better experience for our users is to use the 6 minds of experience from Dr John Whalen's book "<a href="https://www.amazon.com/Designing-How-People-Think-Products/dp/1491985453/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1516391793&sr=8-1&keywords=john+whalen+ux">Design for How People Think</a>".</p>
<h2>Vision/Attention</h2>
<p>Perhaps the most obvious of the six, designers working on digital products will understand the impact their visual design can have on a user. The visual aspect of the design allows the designer to create a visual interface that draws the attention of the user to their next task, creates a consistent visual flow between screens and features of the product, and helps them to find their way to their next task and guides them to complete it.</p>
<p>From a more ethical standpoint, the use of visual cues to direct the focus of the user must be done in such a way as to help them to complete their tasks, and not seen as an opportunity to force someone down a route they do not wish to go by using dark patterns.</p>
<p>The power of grabbing the user's attention with the purely visual aspect of an interface is a double-edged sword that should be wielded in a way to protect and guide the user, figuratively holding their hand through a journey within your product.</p>
<h2>Wayfinding</h2>
<p>Although this sounds similar to one of the points I made under vision and attention in helping the user onto their next task, wayfinding is far deeper than just a visual element that a user can interact with to make their way to the thing they want to do next.</p>
<p>Essentially it is about helping the user get from where they are to where they want to be in the digital space, and it relies heavily on information architecture and the content within your product.</p>
<p>You will need to think about how you are telling the user where they are at any given moment, how they expect to navigate their way around and the interactions that are required to do that, and if the structure of the information they are moving through makes sense to them.</p>
<h2>Memory/Semantics</h2>
<p>Any user will come to use your product with their own experiences behind them, which shapes their expectations of how they will use your product. This is not just limited to how someone would navigate your product, but their expected interactions and flows through journeys.</p>
<p>Picture in your mind the product detail page on a retail website. Most likely you will imagine a prominent image of the product, and perhaps multiple images which you can scroll through with some kind of carousel function. This is an expectation you have developed due to the common implementation of such a pattern across the majority of retail websites you have used in the past. But what if your ability to view the product image was somehow changed? What is it used an unfamiliar pattern to you which required you to learn a whole new kind of interaction for you to be able to see what you would be buying?</p>
<p>People's past experiences help to define what to expect and how things should work in a given context. If you ignore the mental models that most users have created and avoided familiar patterns that people are now used to, you will be actively harming the experience people will have with your product.</p>
<h2>Language</h2>
<p>The language used in the content of your product is key to a user being able to understand what you're trying to tell them, and also reflects the brand in the tone of voice.</p>
<p>If you were looking to book your car in for a service at a mechanics, and your knowledge of cars and their inner workings were limited, you wouldn't want to be overwhelmed with complex terminology of the work they would carry out, and neither would you want something oversimplified. Although the former may display expertise it can make the customer feel inferior, whilst the latter could generate feelings of contempt, with both not making for an enjoyable or comforting experience.</p>
<p>The <a href="https://www.gov.uk/guidance/content-design/writing-for-gov-uk">guide to writing for GOV.UK</a> advises that everything for a Government Digital Service should be written for a 9-year-old reading age. This boils down to using the 'common words' vocabulary which consists of a primary set of 5,000 words, and a secondary set of around 10,000 words, which enables them to communicate more effectively with their users.</p>
<p>You need to know your users to communicate effectively with them.</p>
<h2>Emotion</h2>
<p>Much in the same way people bring their learned behaviours with them, they also bring their emotions. Some people may be worried of making mistakes in a technical environment for the fear of what may go wrong, may have frustrations when things don't work as they're expected to, or hesitate when unsure of the result of their actions.</p>
<p>You will need to be mindful of the automatic triggers being fired in your users as they engage with your product. What are their goals and desires? What are their fears and what do they stand to lose? Does your product provide the user with satisfaction when a task is completed?</p>
<p>Again, only by understanding your users through research will you be able to cater to their emotions, and generate a better experience for them as a result.</p>
<h2>Decision Making</h2>
<p>How do you get people to commit to a decision? How do you help them to make the decision that they're ready to commit to an action, whether that's signing up to a newsletter, clicking the buy button, or clicking an ad?</p>
<p>Consider the factors that people base their decision upon in the context of your product, and fulfil those needs by providing the information required, generating trust, and giving them an easy journey through to completion.</p>
<p>All of the previous minds of experience come together to support the user in their decision making, and this is the point at which you need the user to be confident in what they understand, the path they have taken to get here, and will be confident about what will happen after they make this decision.</p>
<h2>Creating an emergent user experience</h2>
<p>The 6 minds of experience come together to form the multidimensional experience that emerges as a result of all of these factors. This emergent experience is what we see as a singular entity from a distance, but understanding the complexities within gives us greater insight to develop a product that will cater to the needs of each of these minds, and generate a better overall experience for our users.</p>
<p>When you're next thinking about the experience you're designing as part of your product, think about these 6 minds, and how you can create a better experience by using them as a guide.</p>
How to make the case for user research in the face of adversity2020-09-08T05:00:00Zhttps://westleyknight.com/blog/how-to-make-the-case-for-user-research-in-the-face-of-adversity/<p>Have you ever been in a situation where the deadline is fast approaching, there's still a huge amount of work to do, and something needed to be cut to get it over the line? I'm pretty confident in saying that anyone who has worked in a large organisation will have been in this situation. What was the first thing to be culled from your process? My guess (albeit an educated one from years of encountering this very situation) would be user research.</p>
<p>To make the case for cutting user research to pull in those tight timelines to aim for a predefined delivery date, you'll hear things like "we already know what our users want", or "it's too hard to find the right people in such a small amount of time". There are many more, but you can read about those in the article titled "<a href="https://uxdesign.cc/most-common-excuses-for-not-doing-user-research-6c7eec5076ee">The most common excuses for not doing user research</a>" from the <a href="https://uxdesign.cc/">UX Collective</a>.</p>
<p>It's hard to argue against these excuses in this kind of situation. Or is it?</p>
<p>Many times we find ourselves in a situation where we - as user-centred designers - believe the right course of action is to follow the process through to ensure we are building the right thing for the right people, but this can be viewed as a juxtaposition to those stakeholders who may be more business-focused and intent on delivering what has been promised.</p>
<p>So how do we overcome this impasse where these different viewpoints clash?</p>
<h2>Meet them where they are</h2>
<p>To communicate effectively and push our agenda of a user-centred approach, we must speak in terms that are more easily understood by the business-driven stakeholder.</p>
<p>People in business follow the numbers.</p>
<p>If you can display the value of a particular approach in how it will 'move the needle' towards the business goals, then you are halfway to convincing them that your approach is viable. However, the real value comes from your ability as a designer to mitigate risk.</p>
<p>Nobody who is driven by business needs in this way likes to invite risk. Anything that helps to make the outcome more certain is a welcome addition. It helps to set more achievable targets and helps to avoid numerous possible roadblocks as a project moves forward.</p>
<p>Ask your stakeholder; Do you want us to spend time on designing this new idea that has been handed down to us, or would you prefer evidence-driven decision making? Do you want us to prove that we're doing the right thing for our users and our stakeholders?</p>
<p>If they don't want increased risk in their project, it becomes a no-brainer. They know what they have to invest in research to obtain that evidence.</p>
<h2>Take them where they want to go</h2>
<p>As a User Experience Designer or Researcher, you have to provide the evidence to the stakeholders that utilising research as part of the process is a step that should never be skipped. Whether your results reveal that we are about to build something that none of our users would ever use, that it would be the best feature to be made available to them, or anywhere in between, we now have evidence as to what our next course of action should be, whereas previously we were essentially flying blind and trusting our ideas to deliver what the users need.</p>
<p>If we are building something that will be used by anybody outside of our organisation, then it is safe to say we are not our users. The only way we can understand what our users need and want is to find out from them.</p>
<p>Do the stakeholders want to trust designers to design a solution to a problem based purely on their experience and/or intuition? Or do you want to <em><strong>know</strong></em> that we are not only building the right solution for their problem but that we're solving the right problem in the first place?</p>
<p>For the cost of a small dent in the budget, and the minimal time needed to test with a handful of participants, you can gather enough evidence to prove what your doing is taking you down the right or wrong path.</p>
<p>A couple of days in terms of cost to a deadline when compared to weeks or even months of development and testing time easily tips the scales in favour to know which direction you should be going before you take those first steps on a path.</p>
<p>If you want to build the right thing to solve the right problems for the right people, and you need to mitigate the risk of your project, the answer is to do your research.</p>
<h2>Let me know how it works out for you</h2>
<p>Have you had problems with research being cut from your project due to timelines, budgets or other constraints? What did you do to make sure you did the right thing for your users and your business?</p>
<p>Feel free to get in touch on Twitter (<a href="https://twitter.com/westleyknight">@westleyknight</a>), email me on <a href="mailto:hello@westleyknight.co.uk">hello@westleyknight.co.uk</a>, or sign up for my newsletter below.</p>
How And When To Use The 5 Whys2020-09-01T05:00:00Zhttps://westleyknight.com/blog/how-and-when-to-use-the-5-whys/<p>The 5 Whys is a technique that was developed by Sakichi Toyoda, the founder of Toyota Industries, as a problem-solving framework. It was utilised to drill down to the root cause when a problem occurs, in order to develop a counter-measure to prevent that problem from recurring.</p>
<p>Today, we can utilise this technique in User Experience Design as a counter-measure when something doesn't go as expected, but also as a pre-emptive tool to understand if we are solving the right problem in the first place.</p>
<h2>Using The 5 Whys as a counter-measure</h2>
<p>This is the original intention of this technique; to define the problem that arises, and dig to the root cause to understand what needs to be fixed in order to prevent the problem from happening again. It is a reactive process that fits in very well with the iterative and agile nature of the digital product design and development process, especially if you're releasing new iterations in every sprint.</p>
<p>With each iteration of your product, you will be tracking usage and analysing metrics to make sure that your latest updates are delivering on the goals. If you are falling short of your objectives following a release, or another issue becomes apparent, you can ask The 5 Whys to figure out how to resolve the problem.</p>
<p>Here's a hypothetical scenario to illustrate the process.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Problem: People are only visiting our website for less than 5 seconds and leaving.</p>
<p><em>Why are they leaving?</em><br /><br />
There is no content displayed on the page.</p>
<p><em>Why is no content being displayed?</em><br /><br />
The content takes more than 5 seconds to load.</p>
<p><em>Why does it take so long to load?</em><br /><br />
Because the browser downloads lots of tracking scripts before the content.</p>
<p><em>Why do we have so many tracking scripts?</em><br /><br />
Different ones have been added over time, and redundant ones have not been removed.</p>
<p><em>Why have they not been removed?</em><br /><br />
Because nobody told us that they were no longer being used.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>From asking why 5 times, we have gone from knowing that people aren't staying on the website, to the reason why they are not staying on the website. Sometimes it may take fewer or more whys, but your ultimate aim is to find the actionable conclusion.</p>
<p>Utilising The 5 Whys as a reactionary tool is great to find these problems, but is there a way to prevent bigger issues from happening in the first place?</p>
<h2>Using The 5 Whys in discovery</h2>
<p>The value in the design process is the ability to uncover problems early, and therefore reduce the amount of heavy investment required in designing and developing a new product or feature for release.</p>
<p>When used in the discovery phase of the design process, The 5 Whys can be used to make sure that we are focusing on the real problem, and not acting on making a solution to cover up a symptom of that problem.</p>
<p>Here's a hypothetical example to illustrate.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>The product owner comes to the team with a new feature that is to be developed. There is little information aside from that one of the senior stakeholders is adamant that this is the most important thing that needs to be worked on to get it to market as quickly as possible.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>This is where we can utilise The 5 Whys as a tool to understand why we need to build this particular feature (if at all), and why it should be placed ahead of everything else that is in the backlog of work.</p>
<p>You will likely need the relevant stakeholder involved in this kind of exercise in order for you to find the answers you need, not only as to whether you should be working on this as a priority, but also to gain a better understanding of the origin of the work.</p>
<p>In some cases this can be a difficult conversation, but it is part of your job as a designer to understand the problem that the suggested feature is trying to solve, rather than just understanding the feature itself. When a feature is suggested in such a way, it can often be a sign that many conversations have happened before this point, and a solution has been decided upon at a higher level that is intended to address the problem.</p>
<p>Whatever the origin of this new feature, you need to understand the problem itself, and not a pre-defined answer aimed at solving that problem.</p>
<p>By utilising the same steps outlined when using The 5 Whys as a counter-measure, we can drill down to the underlying problem that the proposed feature is meant to solve, and from there begin to look at ways to solve that problem without a prescribed path with little to no flexibility in the design of a more effective solution.</p>
<p>In understanding the real underlying problem to be solved, you may find that the feature suggested will be the best way to create a solution. The time you have taken to arrive back at the original proposal should not be considered a waste of any time, as you will likely have a far greater understanding of the reasons why you are going to design and build this new feature.</p>
<p>However, sometimes the opposite may be true, and you will find that the proposed feature would not be a real solution to the underlying problem, but would perhaps alleviate some of the symptoms caused by that underlying problem. In this case, you may have just saved a huge investment of time and money in developing something that would have done nothing more than cover up a bigger problem with a figurative sticking plaster.</p>
<h2>Real-world outcomes of The 5 Whys</h2>
<p>Those possible outcomes covered above regarding the use of The 5 Whys in discovery are examples of the opposite ends of the spectrum. In the business world, decisions will be made on far more criteria than just the result of a single exploratory exercise into the problems that need to be solved. These will include the feasibility of a proposed solution, a timeline to get your feature out to market, providing value to the business, providing value to the users, and many more besides.</p>
<p>You may end up with business being in agreement that the larger underlying problem does need to be fixed, and assign you to undertake initial design work on a solution. But you may also discover that the amount of work required to implement the best solution will take far more time, more budget, and more people to address it effectively.</p>
<p>Your ability to make compromises as a designer in these kinds of situations will be key to the success of your product. Weighing up all of the different aspects of how to deliver a solution, setting a path that will ultimately lead to the best solution in the long run, and in some cases accepting that it will take many smaller steps over a longer time to get you there.</p>
<p>Losing a battle to win the war in the longer term is often how things pan out in the real world when it comes to designing products that a business relies on for income. Every case is a learning experience, but being armed with tools like The 5 Whys gives you the ammunition you need to make the right decisions for both your users and your stakeholders.</p>
<h2>Let me know how it works out for you</h2>
<p>Have you used The 5 Whys in your process before?</p>
<p>I'd love to hear how it worked out for you, or if your planning to use it soon, so feel free to get in touch on Twitter (<a href="https://twitter.com/westleyknight">@westleyknight</a>) or email me on <a href="mailto:hello@westleyknight.co.uk">hello@westleyknight.co.uk</a>.</p>
How to utilise recognised patterns to create new interactions2020-08-25T05:00:00Zhttps://westleyknight.com/blog/how-to-utilise-recognised-patterns-to-create-new-interactions/<p>The elements we place on a screen in a digital product are very much akin to the words on a page in a book. Individually they have their own function, their own meaning. When multiple elements are placed next to each other in a specific order, they begin to form a broader picture and provide a narrative which a user can understand.</p>
<p>Take a simple text input for starters.</p>
<img src="https://westleyknight.com/assets/img/articles/new-interactions/form-oneinput.png" width="302" alt="A screenshot of a First Name input field" />
<p>Just by looking at this single input accompanied by its label, we understand that it is asking us to enter our first name.</p>
<p>Now let's add to that first element.</p>
<img src="https://westleyknight.com/assets/img/articles/new-interactions/form-nobutton.png" width="302" alt="A screenshot of a collection of form input including First Name, Last Name, Email and Password" />
<p>We have added 4 elements that are very similar to the first. Based on our learned behaviours, and the context of each element, we know that we have to enter our last name, email address, and a password alongside our first name.</p>
<p>What does this look like to you? Have you seen this collection of elements somewhere before? It may have been slightly different in the way it looked, the way it was worded, but you know what this collection of elements means in terms of context, but it's still missing something.</p>
<img src="https://westleyknight.com/assets/img/articles/new-interactions/form-complete.png" width="302" alt="A screenshot of a complete registration form" />
<p>We add a button to the bottom of the form and the purpose of this collection of elements is now obvious, we have a registration form with all of the common inputs and an action button to submit the form.</p>
<h2>Understanding through learned behaviour</h2>
<p>The reason why we recognise this collection of elements as a registration form is through learned behaviour. We have seen this pattern, and slight variations on it, across so many websites, applications and services, it has become an easily recognised interface.</p>
<p>The same goes for most of the interface patterns we see in the digital world every day; search functions, navigation, video players, image galleries, and so much more.</p>
<p>I learned from <a href="https://twitter.com/mrjoe">Mr Joe Leech</a> that these are referred to as design axioms.</p>
<p>Design axioms are a statement or proposition which is regarded as being established, accepted, or self-evidently true.</p>
<p>If you're looking for a search input, you tend to look to the top right of a page, and the same goes for a shopping cart or the ability to change language (which can also be commonly found at the foot of the page). If you want to go back to the home page of the site, the logo is usually clickable and fulfils the purpose of a home page link.</p>
<p>If we're looking for the navigation on a website, we tend to look to the top or left of the page. However, with the advent of mobile devices and responsive design, we had to look at ways in which we could incorporate larger navigations onto a much smaller screen. There were a number of different approaches taken to solves this problem, but one became far more infamous than the rest; the hamburger menu icon.</p>
<p>When the hamburger menu pattern was introduced, nobody had any idea what it meant. It was steadily implemented across other applications and responsive websites as a solution to reduce the screen real estate that a navigation menu would take up and was the best solution that could be made at the time.</p>
<h2>Interaction design evolves like language</h2>
<p>Collectively user spent a lot of time getting to learn what the hamburger icon represented and what it did when they interacted with it. As this pattern was implemented in more and more interfaces, more and more people would see it, use it, and understand it. As more people understand it, the more it is used, and the more it becomes part of the interaction design lexicon; part of the language we can use as designers to effectively communicate how someone should interact with our interfaces.</p>
<p>As a father with children of school age, I am all too familiar with the rapid evolution of language. I am constantly introduced to new words picked up in the playground, or more likely from their favourite YouTubers or streamers. I am in the same position my parents were decades ago when I was picking up and using new words and phrases.</p>
<p>Just like everyday spoken language, the interfaces we build and create will evolve and will become successful through a Darwinian-like form of collective selection. If a pattern is implemented by a tech giant such as Facebook or Google, and it works, we can quickly see that pattern propagate throughout various interfaces across the broadest of spectrums.</p>
<p>We will also see new patterns that only work in a given context thrive in some environments, and fall flat in others. As with all aspects of interaction design, if something we create does not effectively communicate how a thing should be used, it will fail at its primary purpose; helping the user to solve a problem.</p>
<p>So what happens when you come across a new problem that needs solving, and there is no accepted answer, no design axiom, no pattern that covers what you need a user to be able to do?</p>
<h2>Evolving your interface with context</h2>
<p>In this situation, where a tried and trusted pattern that solved similar problems don't cut the mustard, we have to look to innovate on what exists to more effectively deliver a solution that helps the user to complete their task.</p>
<p>The way we do this is to iterate and evolve existing patterns that are successful in similar contexts to deliver a more effective solution in your specific context. In real terms, these manifest as small interface changes that make more sense for a given context.</p>
<p>An example of this from some of my recent work revolved around the <a href="https://design-system.service.gov.uk/patterns/task-list-pages/">GDS pattern of the task list</a>. At the time, this pattern had not been thoroughly tested, but it was the closest fit to the needs we had on our project. We needed to surface all of the parts of a long and complex application form so that the user could see everything that they would need to complete to submit their application.</p>
<img src="https://westleyknight.com/assets/img/articles/new-interactions/task-list-whole-feb19.png" width="450" alt="An image of the GDS task list pattern from February 2019" />
<p>As per the image above, the task list only had a tag alongside a link to state when a section was completed, and the tag was simply absent where a section still needed attention. For our users' needs on our project, we needed to guide the user through the process more specifically by telling them what was next, and by informing them when some sections were not required.</p>
<p>We based our new pattern on the original task list and began to introduce new elements in the form of these new tags, to convey the relevant information to the user in this particular context. We added a 'NEXT' tag when a user needed to be guided to the next section that needed completing in order, and a 'NOT REQUIRED' tag to show that some sections needed no attention, as you can see from the image below.</p>
<img src="https://westleyknight.com/assets/img/articles/new-interactions/task-list-iteration.png" width="450" alt="An image of the task list with design iterations based on user needs within a specific project" />
<p>Looking at the task list pattern on the <a href="https://design-system.service.gov.uk/">GOV.UK Design System</a> today, you can see how some of these evolutionary steps have now been incorporated into the pattern, with different tags to show the status of different sections in the task list.</p>
<img src="https://westleyknight.com/assets/img/articles/new-interactions/task-list-whole-today.png" width="450" alt="An image of the task list pattern as it exists in August 2020" />
<p>The changes we made to this pattern in our specific context, combined with the changes similarly made by other teams in their specific contexts, have slowly become integrated as part of the pattern on which those iterations were originally based.</p>
<h2>In conclusion</h2>
<p>The evolution of interaction design patterns stems from an iterative approach. By taking those existing patterns that have been proven to work in many circumstances, we can make small changes to fulfil the specific needs of a given context, feed that back into the original pattern and see if that iteration can have a positive effect in other contexts.</p>
<p>The creation of new patterns of interaction is rarely successful with a 'big bang' approach. People are essentially averse to change. How often do Facebook users voice their dissatisfaction of a big interface update? As they continue to use the platform, they will eventually learn how to navigate the updated interface, but this is a case of exception.</p>
<p>The cast majority of long-standing and successful digital products tend to slowly evolve. Small changes are made to interfaces that improve the user experience, if only slightly, on a continuous basis, over a long period. Users are more open to accepting these kinds of changes as improvements as it is not as jarring a transition from the experience they are comfortable with to a more effective interface that helps them complete their tasks.</p>
<p>As the tortoise and the hare demonstrate, slow and steady wins the race.</p>
5 things hiring managers are looking for in your UX portfolio2020-08-18T05:00:00Zhttps://westleyknight.com/blog/five-things-hiring-managers-are-looking-for-in-your-ux-portfolio/<p>Getting noticed by a potential employer is the first hurdle to overcome when you're looking for your next role in User Experience Design, and one of the key ingredients is your portfolio. Whether you have several previous real-world projects to draw upon or are basing your portfolio on existing products or design challenges, you need to convey your ability in a way that will not only grab the attention of those who will decide on whether they want to interview you but will tell them about how you do your work.</p>
<p>Based on my own experience from multiple interviews and feedback from numerous UX leaders, here are the 5 things you need to have in your portfolio to stand a chance of success.</p>
<h2>1. Showcase your ability to tell a story about a project</h2>
<p>There is a lot made about storytelling in design, and for good reason. Writing a case study for your portfolio is a fantastic way to show your ability to tell a story around the project you worked on, which puts that always wanted soft skill of communication on display.</p>
<p>By effectively telling a story around your project, you are showcasing your ability to communicate with people in your team, with the owner of the product, and with stakeholders. It is displaying your ability to be able to interact with people effectively, in a collaborative environment, with multiple people in varying roles.</p>
<p>It is extremely valuable for your future employer to know that you can convince stakeholders on why you made particular decisions, and team members on how you decide upon and implement those decisions.</p>
<h2>2. Present the impact of your work</h2>
<p>Leading on from your ability to communicate by telling a story about a project, you must also be able to show the value that resulted from that work.</p>
<p>This is not only to convey how the work you have previously done was of significance but again shows that you can communicate with business stakeholders in their language, by using metrics and analytics to show a return on investment. The outcomes of your work, when viewed from a business perspective, will give weight to your ability to deliver considered and effective design solutions to the problems the business is looking to solve.</p>
<p>Write about the context of your work from the perspective of the business. What was it trying to help achieve, and did the project fulfil that role and deliver a valuable solution?</p>
<p>If you don't have real-world outcomes for your project, maybe because it wasn't completed or didn't go live, or it was for a hypothetical project, you can still use other measurements to justify the design decisions you made, and you can hypothesise about the possible impact based on comparable statistics from competitor products or generalised research findings. Having something to convey the impact your work would have, even if hypothesised, is better than having nothing as an outcome.</p>
<h2>3. Be clear about your role</h2>
<p>In almost all cases in a professional design environment, you will work as part of a team. Even if you are a UX team of one, you will still work closely with other disciplines in your role. Being specific about the things you worked on will show your input into the eventual outcome of a project, and including what the other members of your team were responsible for, and - much more importantly - how you worked with them will showcase your ability to work as a part of a collaborative effort.</p>
<p>Be sure to give praise to others in your team when they helped set your work in a different direction, acknowledge them for the support they gave you in the work you have done, and do not claim ownership of things that were not a direct result of your work alone.</p>
<p>Remember that you will be joining a team of people when starting a new role, and your ability to integrate and collaborate will be seen as a benefit.</p>
<h2>4. Explain your decision-making process</h2>
<p>This will likely be intertwined with your storytelling, showing the impact of your work, but will contain something else than the aforementioned lack; your ability to make decisions and the reasoning behind them. Your design decisions whilst working on a project will be based on a combination of your findings from research, analytical data of the existing product, and your knowledge and experience.</p>
<p>One of the great things about being a designer is that it's part of your job to be wrong. Using an iterative approach, we have to uncover the best possible paths to take from the knowledge we have, and to then test whether that knowledge – and our decisions based upon it – is the right thing to continue doing.</p>
<p>Sharing the reason why you didn't go down a particular route during your design process is just as valuable as selecting the better path, or perhaps even more so. By spending time investigating whether to take a step along a specific path and finding out it is the wrong way to go is not a waste of time, but a saving of countless hours of design and development for something that we know will likely have failed before it came to be released.</p>
<p>You are again showcasing your ability to not only do the job you will be hired to do, but know the value of your work in the long term, and how that can be of benefit to your future employers.</p>
<h2>5. Show your personality and love for the work</h2>
<p>If you care about the work you do, you need to be sure that this comes through in the way you write.</p>
<p>I have previously found difficulty in conveying my personality, principles, and the other things that build up a picture of who I am as a designer. What I have come to realise is that I need to write in the same way that I talk. I can be passionate, become annoyed and vocal about decisions that don't make sense to me, be understanding when I know all of the facts behind those decisions, and can make compromises and pragmatic decisions when the need arises.</p>
<p>Translating that into written form for it to be (semi-)permanent when uploaded to your website or sent to a possible employer can be quite daunting, but it is the only way to authentically reflect your personality, what you would bring to a collaborative environment, and to showcase your values.</p>
<p>When you are writing up a case study for your portfolio, be sure to write it in the manner that you would speak to people, whether they would be your team, project stakeholders, or your potential employer. Your personality will shine through.</p>
<p>One thing to always remember is that everyone is human, whether a Senior or Lead UX Designer, a Product Owner, Department Head, or CEO. Yes, they have the power to hire you, but you must also recognise what you have in common, and how the work that you do can be of benefit to each of those people in that potentially intimidating list.</p>
<h2>BONUS! Don't show everything you have ever made</h2>
<p>If you have years upon years of experience, and numerous projects on which you can present a case study, I want to stop you right there. Showing a veritable smorgasbord of different projects to a potential employer is simply a barrage of information that they have to struggle through to find valuable information about what you can do for them as a designer.</p>
<p>If you've been around long enough to amass such a repertoire of work, then you need to curate your portfolio in such a way that it advertises the kind of work you want to be doing, and that aligns with the type of work that you will be involved in with the organisation you are looking to join.</p>
<p>All you need are 2 or 3 well-written case studies that detail an end-to-end process, that incorporates the 5 points in this article, and you have everything you need to be able to convince someone that you are the right designer for the job.</p>
How to be a better designer by understanding human perception2020-08-11T05:00:00Zhttps://westleyknight.com/blog/how-to-be-a-better-designer-by-understanding-human-perception/<p>The human brain works in such a way that we try to make sense of everything we see. We unconsciously attempt to organise visual information by inferring meaning. Have you ever seen a cloud in the sky and thought that it resembled an animal, or some other object? This is the perfect example of your brain recognising patterns and creating order from the chaotic.</p>
<p>If we want to design and build things that are easy to understand as well as easy to use, we should have an understanding of how we, as human beings, perceive and organise the world around us.</p>
<p>One of the ways I have gone about doing this is to educate myself about Gestalt Priniciples.</p>
<h2>What are Gestalt Principles?</h2>
<p>In the 1920s, German psychologists Max Wertheimer, Kurt Koffka, and Wolfgang Kohler worked on understanding how the human brain creates meaning through the perception of the stimuli that surrounds us. This work resulted in the creation of the Gestalt Principles; 7 laws or principles by which the brain creates meaning.</p>
<p>Let's take a look at each of them in turn, and see how they can be utilised in the design of your digital products.</p>
<h3>The law of similarity</h3>
<p>Elements that share superficial characteristics tend to be organised into groups.</p>
<p><img src="https://westleyknight.com/assets/img/articles/gestalt/similarity.png" alt="A diagram depicting similarity between a sets of geometric objects" /></p>
<p>We are able to utilise the law of similarity, not only to group those elements that have similar meaning or function, but to enable us to make specific elements stand out from the surrounding interface. In a long form blog post, for example, we may have a great deal of text, but then add in a pull quote with different styling to highlight that piece of content. The perception of the user is able to identify that the pull quote does not belong to the main body of text, and should be regarded as a separate element.</p>
<h3>The law of proximity</h3>
<p>The effect that the visual proximity of a number of objects has in terms of our perception of grouping them together.</p>
<p><img src="https://westleyknight.com/assets/img/articles/gestalt/proximity.png" alt="A diagram depicting different proximities of geometric objects" /></p>
<p>The law of proximity can have one of the larger influences on how we organise information in our brain from what we see on a screen. This will often be implemented in the use of white space, one of the most important features of an easy to use interface. Often white space is considered to be needed to give the elements on the screen "room to breathe", when in fact, what we are doing is giving the brain less work to do in organising the information in front of us, and reducing cognitive load.</p>
<h3>The law of familiarity</h3>
<p>The unconscious process that our brain uses to form mental representations that should have use or relevance to us.</p>
<p><img src="https://westleyknight.com/assets/img/articles/gestalt/familiarity.png" alt="A representation of a cloud resembling the outline of an animal" /></p>
<p>This is the kind of thing that happens when we see animals in the shape of clouds, or a face in the leaves of a tree, but this isn't really directly useful when we're designing digital interfaces. In order to take advantage of the law of familiarity, we should look to use accepted patterns for specific types of interaction. On an e-commerce site we would expect to see the shopping cart in the top right of our screen, and we might expect to find product categories listed in a menu on the left hand side.</p>
<p>These kinds of patterns are common, and the user benefits from them when the same patterns are implemented across the different websites and products that they use. They are already familiar to them, and your product can benefit from that familiarity.</p>
<h3>The law of symmetry</h3>
<p>Our brains unconsciously focuses on the centre point of elements that are recognised to be in a symmetrical arrangement so that it can extract the simplest form.</p>
<p><img src="https://westleyknight.com/assets/img/articles/gestalt/symmetry.png" alt="A diagram of geometric symbols displaying symmetry" /></p>
<p>The most common use of symmetry in digital product is implemented using a grid layout. A simple 3 column grid can be found in a large majority of websites, and this law of symmetry is a psychological reason for it. We are able to easily navigate a structure that has symmetry and order in this manner, hence it's commonality across so many digital products.</p>
<h3>The law of continuity</h3>
<p>The ability to perceive elements as a constant form in a particular direction, despite other possible bisecting, interlinking, or obstructing objects.</p>
<p><img src="https://westleyknight.com/assets/img/articles/gestalt/continuity.png" alt="A diagram depicting a website carousel" /></p>
<p>In digital design, the law of continuity can be found almost everywhere. With touch devices, we are all familiar with swiping to reveal more content, and – on the web as a whole – we are used to scrolling down to reveal more content. It is so prevalent that we probably don't even think about our actions whilst we are interacting with an interface to reveal more content.</p>
<h3>The law of common fate</h3>
<p>The tendency for the brain to group elements together that are perceived as moving in the same direction.</p>
<p><img src="https://westleyknight.com/assets/img/articles/gestalt/commonfate.png" alt="A diagram depicting arrows with the majority facing one direction, and a handful facing in the opposite direction" /></p>
<p>Again, this law is so prevalent in digital interfaces that it is taken for granted. As we scroll down with our finger on a touch device, the page we are viewing will move with it. In the same manner, when we move a pointer on the screen with a mouse or a trackpad, we associate that movement with direct proportionality to our input.</p>
<h3>The law of closure</h3>
<p>The perceptual bias through which we are able to create meaningful, whole objects, despite limited visual information.</p>
<p><img src="https://westleyknight.com/assets/img/articles/gestalt/closure.png" alt="A diagram with a visual resemblance to the land masses of Earth as seen on a globe" /></p>
<p>We can see the use of the law of closure predominantly in the design of logos, or purely visual design to create interesting interfaces that don't make the brain work harder to interpret and understand.</p>
<h2>Using Gestalt Principles in design</h2>
<p>Each of these principles are apparent in what we would regard as good design, and by applying the Gestalt Principles when working on your designs, you are helping your user to more readily process the visual stimulus that they perceive. You are lowering their cognitive load by providing visual information in an easily digestible format, and essentially providing a better user experience to them because of this.</p>
<p>It's always worth keeping these principles in mind as you design, so I've created a one page poster to help you keep these in mind, and you help you create digital products that are specifically designed for the psychological perceptions of the human brain.</p>
<script async="" data-uid="fb5c4b36c5" src="https://westleyknight.ck.page/fb5c4b36c5/index.js"></script>
Why is there no easy way to measure user experience?2020-08-04T10:00:00Zhttps://westleyknight.com/blog/why-is-there-no-easy-way-to-measure-user-experience/<p>Whilst out walking the dog the other day, I was listening to an episode of The Infinite Monkey Cage podcast titled "<a href="https://overcast.fm/+IPPNhDwq8">The Human Brain</a>". The guests on this episode were David Eagleman, Professor of Neuroscience at Stanford, Gina Rippon, Professor of Cognitive Neuroimaging at Aston University in Birmingham, and Conan O'Brien of late-night American TV fame.</p>
<p>You may ask, why am I writing about this when the work I do is centred so heavily around UX and design? It is because the way in which human beings perceive and interact is so intrinsic to how we go about building our products if we want them to be successful.</p>
<p>The part that struck me the most in this episode was the notion that there is no specific location for a given task within the brain. For example, what the brain does when we drive a car or watch a movie is not contained to a single area within the brain; the processes are distributed.</p>
<p>This quote from Professor Gina Rippon in this podcast episode describes how we used to try to organise things within the brain:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Early on with brain imaging, people were still trying to do the Phrenology thing and putting the brain into nice little boxes and saying that's where justice is, or maternal instinct.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>It is now understood that this is not how the brain works when performing any kind of task. Trying to pinpoint a location of happiness, frustration, or other emotion in the brain does not deliver an easily conveyable answer. There is no one specific thing we can measure in all human beings that will give us a definitive answer for this.</p>
<p>Professor David Eagleman likened this way in which the brain functions to the economy of a city:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>If you look at a city and ask 'Where is the economy of the city?', it's not any one place, it's an emergent property of the functioning of everyone interacting there.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>This is where the problem of measuring user experience becomes pertinent.</p>
<p>Businesses run on numbers. Decisions are predominantly based on a return on investment; If X amount is spent on creating a given solution, then Y needs to be the outcome for it to be given the green light.</p>
<p>The problem we have with Design and User Experience is to be able to give solid and actionable numbers. There are a collection of measurements that we can use that businesses are familiar and more comfortable with, such as Net Promoter Score (NPS), Average Order Value, Conversion Rates, Customer Satisfaction Score, System Usability Scale, the list goes on and on.</p>
<p>Just as there is no single way to determine where happiness lives in the brain, there is no single way to determine the experience of a user when using your product.</p>
<p>Many organisations and individuals are always striving to create a single metric that enables us to measure the user experience on a given product, and they all become a distillation of a wide breadth of many inputs down to a single metric.</p>
<p>This begins to create a problem where we are simplifying the complex nature of human experience – not from a single human being, but hundreds, thousands, or even millions of people – down into a single point of data.</p>
<p>I've had many conversations when trying to justify gathering more insights into the behavioural and attitudinal insights of the users, as often the findings don't deliver a specific set of data which can easily inform decisions on what to do next.</p>
<p>User Experience is a messy discipline. It's full of trial and error, full of moments of discovery and new understanding, and is always changing based on what you uncover when researching and testing with the users of your product.</p>
<p>Rather than attempting to distil the vast amount of data that can be collected by an iterative approach to user experience design, we should be looking to find the emergent properties from our research and use those as our guide to creating a better product.</p>
<p>Back to the podcast episode and Professor David Eagleman for a great explanation of emergent properties of the brain:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>The notion of emergent properties [...] is a well-accepted notion because, if you look at a neuron, you don't have anything about your identity or consciousness in a neuron, it's something that you have to put together 86 billion neurons to get out of it.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>That is how our brains work. It is how our own experiences are pieced together; not through a single area of our brain that deals with a specific thing, but a huge collection of neurons firing that creates an emergent experience.</p>
<p>Essentially, the experience of someone using our product is not measurable only by statistics; it is a sum that is greater than its parts. It is millions of things coming together to form something unique within an individual. It is something that only they can recall, and can only share with others in the ways in which they have learned to communicate.</p>
<p>I doubt that we will ever gain a complete understanding of how user experience can be properly measured in one single person, let alone everybody who would use something we have designed for them.</p>
<p>So how do we go about convincing stakeholders in a business that the work we do is of value?</p>
<h2>Treat user experience as an emergent property</h2>
<p>Use all of the data and research you can to form a larger picture of the experiences your users have in a more collective fashion. A higher level of understanding is not the equivalent to a homogenised conclusion. Use things like user personas, the jobs to be done framework, and other similar tools to build a better picture and a wider understanding of the user experience.</p>
<h2>Denounce silver bullet metrics</h2>
<p>There is not one single way in which to measure a users experience effectively. Many of the metrics we use in an attempt to do this are often argued as misguided when used to inform stakeholders on the performance of user experience. Champion the fact that there is no one way to measure something that is as inherently complex as the human experience.</p>
<h2>Convey multiple measurements as conclusions</h2>
<p>Take all of the metrics, research, and data you can gather from your iterative design phases, launches, and ongoing use, and pull them together to make informed conclusions. These conclusions are what need to be communicated to stakeholders, and if you need to dive into the details of how and why you came to these conclusions, you'll be able to justify everything with the data from your findings.</p>
<h2>Continuous communication</h2>
<p>Things change. Constantly. You will not likely be able to conduct research and gather insight from every single one of your users for every change you make in your offering. The only way to be certain that you are moving in the right direction, and that you have the backing of your stakeholders is to be in constant communication with them. When things don't go as expected, communication of the facts is key to prevent continuing down the wrong path and providing the information that decision-makers need to make the right choice.</p>
<p>There is no easy way to measure the user experience as the human brain and its associated perception and experiences are so complex. After all, that's what we're trying to understand to build a better product; how individuals experience the things we design and build for them so we can aim to provide them with a better experience in future.</p>
How to build relationships for your future in UX2020-07-28T16:00:00Zhttps://westleyknight.com/blog/how-to-build-relationships-for-your-future-in-UX/<p>Recently I reached out on LinkedIn to several people who are looking for or have just landed, their first role in UX. The intentionally ambiguous question I asked was based around what help they feel they need to be more effective in reaching their goals and to progress their career.</p>
<p>I was essentially carrying out market research to understand what I could do or make that would help people in a similar situation to move forward. Honestly, I was pleasantly surprised by how many people were willing to have an open conversation with me around this subject.</p>
<p>The vast majority of respondents would talk about their need to pull together a portfolio to put them in a good position to land their first or next UX role, which is something I believe is always something that can be worked on and improved throughout your career, but is paramount to breaking into the industry.</p>
<p>But that is not what I want to talk about today. I want to talk about one of the more interesting responses that I received asking about how to break into the industry...</p>
<blockquote>
<p>"What kind of things I should be prioritising, and what kind of people I should be speaking to?"</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Whilst a portfolio is one of the key assets you'll need to prove to your potential employers that you can do the job that they are recruiting for, there are a number of things you'll need to do before anyone even gets to lay eyes on your portfolio.</p>
<p>In my experience, the one thing that can have the most impact on your career in UX is the relationships you forge in and around the industry. With social media as it is and platforms such as LinkedIn being devoted to the professional networking space, it's easier now than it ever has been to reach out to those that you find interesting or hold in high regard. If you don't know the names of people who work on the UX of a platform or service you admire, you can do your research and discover the people who are the driving force behind those experiences.</p>
<p>When you find those people that are worth connecting to, you need to start a conversation.</p>
<p>This was something I have found difficult in the past until I realised one thing; they are all people.<br />
No matter who it is that you're looking to connect to, whether it's the head of a design team, a world-famous designer, or a someone with a huge following on social media, they are still a person, and you should treat them as such.</p>
<p>The moment of truth is that first time you reach out to someone who you've never interacted with before. Always keep in mind that they are another human being with feelings, emotions, and perhaps a different perspective on things. You may get an answer from them, or you may never get anything back. One thing you must realise that either of these outcomes is fine.</p>
<p>To reiterate, you're looking to build relationships within the industry, and not receiving a response does not mean that you haven't been noticed. The fact that you have reached out in the first place means that they will be aware of you.</p>
<p>As an example, one of the people I reached out to replied asking me if I knew of any open positions that he could apply for. At the time I had nothing, but just a couple of days later, something popped up in my feed and I immediately thought of them and pointed them in the direction of the opportunity.</p>
<p>This is how networking works when you aim to build relationships and you aren't in it just for the short term benefit to yourself. Relationships are reciprocal, and it is possible to cultivate and maintain them in a purely online manner, especially whilst we are experiencing a global pandemic that restricts the possibilities that existed at events such as industry conferences and meet-ups.</p>
<p>The key things you need to remember when building new relationships for your career are:</p>
<h2>Be respectful</h2>
<p>If you are dropping a message to someone you've never spoken to before, be sure to convey your reasons for getting in touch, that you respect their time and focus may be elsewhere, and that you are appreciative of any guidance.</p>
<h2>Ask for insight</h2>
<p>Why are you making contact with an individual? What is it that they might know so that they can impart that knowledge unto you? You're not asking for trade secrets here, just helpful advice on what it is you should be doing or working towards in order to reach your own goals.</p>
<h2>Don't go begging</h2>
<p>Straight-up asking for handouts is not the way to go. If you come across as needy, desperate, or simply out for yourself, what is there in the relationship for the other person? If they engage with you if you're only asking for things, they know that this will happen over and over again, and so will avoid making that kind of connection.</p>
<h2>Don't expect anything in return</h2>
<p>Whatever it is you ask for, from the smallest piece of advice to something larger like a recommendation or a review of your work, do not expect anything to come back. There are so many reasons why people don't get back in touch with you after you ask something of them, and you should not take offence. Everyone is dealing with things in their own life, and you may have no idea at all what is happening, so lower your expectations for your first attempt at engaging with someone to start that relationship.</p>
<h2>Be thankful</h2>
<p>Whatever a new connection may come back with from your initial contact, be thankful that they took the time to personally reply to you. Not only that but make sure that they know that you are also available if they should require any insight from you. Yes, even successful and well-known people will ask for advice and help from people in their networks, and that could easily include you.</p>
<p>The relationships that you forge through your online connections – through all types of platform – will be a fount that can provide endless career and learning opportunities throughout your career.</p>
<p>Be sure to plant the seeds effectively, and nurture those relationships to benefit from them when they flourish.</p>
The inherent exclusion of edge cases2020-07-21T10:15:00Zhttps://westleyknight.com/blog/the-inherent-exclusion-of-edge-cases/<p>Anyone familiar with the development of a digital product will likely have heard the term 'edge case'. It is often used to determine whether or not a specific bug, feature, or other issue will have a big enough impact that would result in a larger negative effect than the team or business are willing to risk.</p>
<p>This often happens when deadlines are tight and minor bugs are found, or something big has flown under the radar and rears its ugly head late in the game and will result in the team pulling together and doing more work in order to address it.</p>
<p>In the latter scenario, the team will come together to discuss how much of an impact they think the issue will have on the product. In order to measure this, we think in a way which allows us to grade the impact; quite simply we use numbers. Admittedly hypothetical numbers in most cases, especially before a product or feature is launched, but it is the only way in which we can make our best guess in order to inform the business so that they are able to make the best decision possible, with a basis in some form of data.</p>
<p>This conversation within a team is usually held in the context of how much more time we can buy ourselves in order to fix the problem before it is released into the world. This tends to be because the issue will have such an impact that it is immediately assumed that it will affect the vast majority of its users should it be released without a fix of some kind.</p>
<p>Difficult conversations will be held with senior stakeholders, explanations as to why we are where we are at this stage, and a decision will be made about how to proceed and in what timeframe.</p>
<p>Because of the scale of the impact that such an issue would have, the decision will generally go in favour of doing everything you can to fix it in the shortest time possible, and we can still release without falling too far behind schedule, even if not everything is in the best possible shape. The result of this in the eyes of the business is that the vast majority of users will be able to use the product effectively at the cost of having to wait a little longer (unless a small miracle occurs involving a lot of overtime) for it to be available to them.</p>
<p>These big issues in delivering a digital product to market can raise problems in terms of edge cases, but the timeframes are usually so tight, we are unable to ascertain what edge cases there may be in such a scenario, and they tend to go unnoticed until they create a problem following release. This is part of an acceptable risk for the business, and there are bigger things on their plate in a situation like this.</p>
<p>This does not provide an excuse for any unconsidered edge cases, it simply provides the reason that they can come in to existence. In an ideal world, requirements don't change, and big things like this wouldn't be missed, but design and development is an imperfect process, and these situations will sometimes occur.</p>
<p>Then, there are the smaller things.</p>
<p>These are the slight changes that may take more work than is deemed necessary for what is seen as a minor benefit. A change that will affect a relatively tiny number of people who will use the product.</p>
<p>It is these smaller things where edge cases become a longer topic of conversation during design and development phases, and usually result in more work for both design and development if any of the smaller issues are overlooked.</p>
<p>What I am referring to as the 'smaller issues' here is actually perpetuating part of the problem. Seeing these issues as smaller assigns a connotation that they are somewhat less significant than the bigger issues, such as how a feature will function. These issues are thought of as smaller as they may not affect as many users, and therefore will have less impact on the bottom line of the product. The problem is, these smaller issues are often fundamental to building an accessible digital product. More often than not, these smaller issues will be made up of problems with accessibility, reliance on a single point of failure, non-semantic code and inefficient implementation.</p>
<p>It is too easy for us as part of a team leave the smaller things to each other, without specifically communicating what should be done. Leaving someone else to keep an eye on accessibility, or just assuming that it will be taken care of, is a lapse in judgement and fundamentally lazy. What's worse is that we can use the same method of evaluating impact as we do for the larger problems, and because of the fact that these issues are intrinsically 'smaller' in size, and will have less of an impact, they are more easily swept under the rug. They are considered an edge case. A problem so insignificant that it will only occur for a relatively tiny number of the users.</p>
<p>You might be beginning to understand that I am not a happy bunny when situations like this occur, and here's why. I am a great believer in the words of Sir Tim Berners-Lee; "This is for everyone". The internet, and the World Wide Web that sits upon it, is there to benefit everyone.</p>
<p>Every time I enter into a conversation about an edge case, I am internally weighing up my ethical stance trying to ensure that we do our utmost to avoid discriminating against our users and the thing we make is usable by everyone, against the needs and stance of the business.</p>
<p>The most challenging conversations I've had around this involve accessibility (hence my previous mention of this specific aspect), and the amount of 'additional' work that is required to benefit a small percentage pop the user base. And it is in this middle ground where I become frustrated.</p>
<p>To arrive at such a situation must mean that we have already been ignoring our duty to build something that is for everyone. We have not raised the questions early enough in the process around accessibility and performance.</p>
<p>Correctly implementing the fundamentals of HTML make what you build completely accessible. Over time, we have layered on JavaScript, CSS, and now a multitude of front-end frameworks which increase page weight, decrease performance and introduce dependencies that the technology that some of our users may not be able to fulfil.</p>
<p>This is not going to turn into a rant about how evil JavaScript is – sorry to disappoint – but it is going to be about where we should be focussing our efforts when we are deciding on how we go about building our products to be used by real people.</p>
<p>When we are in a meeting room, and something along the lines of "it will only affect 1% of our users" is said, it can be taken as something that is too small to be worried about spending the disproportionate amount of time to fix. But what if you a user base of 5 million people? That's 50,000 people who will have a negative experience – or worse, have no experience at all – when using the product.</p>
<p>As you may have guessed from the running theme in this article, I'm not a fan of using numbers to outline the problems, despite the fact that this kind of argument will carry more weight with senior stakeholders in a business.</p>
<p>I prefer to think fo the person at the other end. The individual who is trying to get something done using your product, only to find that you didn't place enough consideration on their needs and how they would be negatively impacted by that experience.</p>
<p>If you feel that you are sufficiently distanced to think that this is not your problem when you're part of the team delivering such a product, I want you to conduct an exercise.</p>
<p>Imagine that you are the product. Everything that the product will do, you can do. Now, think of your user who will not be able to use your product because of an edge case. They are standing in front of you, asking you to do the thing that you just did for hundreds of people before them, and your answer is "No". How does that make them feel? How does that make you feel?</p>
<p>The internet is a tool for communication, but by not considering everyone as our users, we are immediately discriminating against those who may actually need what we are building the most. The World Wide Web exists to bring people closer together, closer to knowledge, closer to the things they need. It is our job as designers, developers, product owners, researchers, and anyone else involved in the process to prevent it from becoming a wall between people and their needs, from something that we can hide behind and dehumanise the work that we do.</p>
<p>Always think of the individual having the experience with your product.</p>
<p>How would they be impacted if this didn't work for them?</p>
<p>How would they feel?</p>
<p>How would you feel if you were responsible?</p>
5 reasons why you should make a career in UX2020-07-14T05:00:00Zhttps://westleyknight.com/blog/five-reasons-why-you-should-make-a-career-in-ux/<p>If you're thinking of starting or switching up your career to get into the field of User Experience, you should think about the reasons why you're looking to do so. Before we start, this is not an article about how many job opportunities there are in the field, or how you can become insanely wealthy because of how much you'll be paid, simply because these are not the reasons you should make a career for yourself in User Experience.</p>
<p>Here are the real reasons why you should build a career in UX...</p>
<h2>1. You love solving problems</h2>
<p>This is the biggest reason that should work in UX. Whatever role you may take up in this space, whether its research, content, interaction or anything else, your focus will be on solving a problem for the people who will be using what you create, more of which we'll come to later.</p>
<p>Solving a problem with design thinking requires not just the problem itself, but also a set of constraints that you have to work within. This can vary from the wishes of a senior stakeholder to the researched needs of the user, or from the existing technology which you have to build upon to incorporating the bleeding-edge of technology.</p>
<p>My one piece of advice around these constraints that will serve you well comes from Kaaren Hanson, then VP of Design Innovation at Intuit:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Fall in love with the problem, not the solution</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Uncovering the root cause of a problem is one of the biggest challenges in user experience design, and yet it is the one thing that will truly create change for the user. By falling in love with the problem, and pushing the boundaries of the constraints, are you then able to discover the best possible solution, rather than something predefined or otherwise assumed.</p>
<p>One of the most prevalent examples of falling in love with the solution in my career was the "there's an app for that" approach. Everyone had to have an app following the explosion of popularity in the iPhone, regardless of what the user needed. In these cases, organisation were so focused on a solution, that there was barely any consideration for what was needed by their users.</p>
<p>But falling in love with the problem means that you have to experiment. You have to try multiple things in a variety of ways until you find something that sticks, something that resonates, something that works for those people who will use your solution to their problem.</p>
<p>This leads us to the second reason you should make a career in UX...</p>
<h2>2. You don't mind being wrong</h2>
<p>With the modern approach to iterative design, finding the right solution for the user involves research, understanding of the users, and multiple attempts at a solution combined with testing to refine the result into something that will ultimately solve the problem. This will involve a lot of creating the wrong answers by using this process.</p>
<p>In fact, not only should you have no problem in being wrong, you should be actively searching to find a better solution than the one you've already come up with. If you have a drive to constantly try to produce better work every day you turn up, there is no better job in my opinion.</p>
<p>Although I don't agree with the Facebook mantra of "Move fast and break things", I can appreciate the sentiment of continuous iteration on ideas to make a better solution for the users, just not at the expenses of breaking something for those people who may already be using a workable - if not the best - solution to their problem. But the undercurrent to that approach is that they don't mind being wrong, and with good reason.</p>
<p>Whenever we design something that fails, we learn far more from that failure than we do from something successful. When something is a success, we have no driving need to go back over the factors as to why it was successful, but when something doesn't work, we have piles of data and research to analyse and inform what we do next to make our solution better.</p>
<h2>3. You want to learn</h2>
<p>It's no use having a huge amount of data that can inform and guide you in your next steps in the design process if you're not willing to take it on board and learn from them. If you love to solve problems, then this willingness to learn goes hand in hand with that quality.</p>
<p>I've worked in the web industry for over 20 years, and if one thing is true about an industry that is so intrinsically linked to a world of technology that never stops moving forward, it's that we must always be learning.</p>
<p>When I transitioned from developer to designer, the type of learning changed. It was no longer about the technical aspects of code and databases but was more focused on human beings and their needs. Regardless of the subject matter, it became more natural for me over time to be able to focus my learning on the most valuable subjects concerning the context of the problem you're trying to solve.</p>
<p>Whilst it may feel like the knowledge you gain from one project can be simply transferred into the next, you must always bear in mind that every problem will have differences - even if only the slightest nuance - and very rarely will the same solution be the right thing for two different audiences.</p>
<p>This is also compounded by changes in the target audience of users itself over time. A solution that may have been great a few years ago may now be completely outdated with the relentless advances in technology and how we deliver our solutions to our users.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Strong opinions, loosely held</p>
</blockquote>
<p>That willingness to learn is something that you will always need to keep with you, and you must be willing to accept new learnings and change your opinions as you gather more insight and understanding.</p>
<h2>4. You're interested in helping people</h2>
<p>I don't want this to sound like <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B8C5sjjhsso" target="_blank">that clip from the Silicon Valley TV show</a>, but it is true that you will be able to reach a large number of people through the work that you do in the user experience field, and aim to affect their lives for the better.</p>
<p>There is great variance in how much of an impact you can have, but the value of your work you do doesn't increase directly proportional to the number of people it benefits. You could be working on a multi-million user platform such as Facebook, and your work may be seen and used by most of the planet, or you could be building something that helps a small group of vulnerable people in your local area. These extreme examples - and everything in between - create value for those using what you make and, regardless of the numbers.</p>
<p>Becoming a UX professional means that you will be in a position to help make peoples lives a little easier with small changes on a large scale, or with huge changes on a small scale.</p>
<h2>5. You want to develop a wide range of skills</h2>
<p>Regardless of the role you decide to take up in the sphere of User Experience – if you're employed in a specific aspect or required to be more of a jack-of-all-trades – you can safely assume that you will learn a lot about the disciplines that surround you, both within UX and within your organisation.</p>
<p>The diagram below is adapted from “The Disciplines of UX” by Dan Saffer (2008) and goes some way to show the different and overlapping nature of the disciplines commonly thought of as part of User Experience Design.</p>
<p><img src="https://westleyknight.com/assets/img/articles/UX-Disciplines-Dan-Saffer.png" alt="A diagram depicting the overlapping disciplines within the field of User Experience Design" title="Based on “The Disciplines of UX” by Dan Saffer (2008)" /></p>
<p>I consider myself to be an experienced UX Designer, and yet I have barely scratched the surface of Sound Design, Architecture and Industrial Design. Most of my experience is in Interaction Design, Content, and Visual Design. But that does not mean that these are the areas in which I will work for the rest of my career. Depending on the project or the organisation, my focus will shift around different disciplines, and I will learn more and grow as a professional.</p>
<p>One thing that this diagram does not show is the importance of communication as a skill. Whether this is within your product or feature team, with other members of the UX community, with your users, or with business stakeholders, communication is one of the core elements of a job in User Experience.</p>
<p>Even if your communication skills aren't great to begin with – mine definitely were not – you will develop an understanding of how to speak with the different area of the business you engage with, you'll learn UX fits within your organisation, how members of your team interact with each other, and how to communicate the value of the work you do.</p>
<h2>In conclusion</h2>
<p>If you are a problem solver, can apply a process to solve a given problem, and can communicate the value of your work to the people around you, you already have all of the skills you need to make a start to your career in User Experience.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>If you want to learn how you can put together a professional portfolio that showcases these skills to land you that job in User Experience, sign up now for my "<a href="https://landing.westleyknight.com/build-your-ux-portfolio" :target="_blank">Build Your UX Portfolio</a>" course.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>You'll learn how to document a project in a way that effectively communicates your design process, how you came to make your design decisions, and why the work you did was of value. Join others in taking the first steps into a new UX career, or level up your portfolio with detailed and valuable case studies.</p>
The creation of my 'new normal' career in UX design2020-07-07T13:08:00Zhttps://westleyknight.com/blog/the-creation-of-my-new-normal-career-in-UX-design/<p>At the beginning of this year, I made a plan to take a month off work in April to take a break and return with a greater focus. For those of you who don't know, I'm a user experience designer. For me, this means that I do user research, user journey flows, design interfaces, make prototypes and test them, in order to create whole (or parts of) digital products.</p>
<p>The end of March came, and I put myself into isolation as I presented with symptoms of COVID-19 one morning. I moved my entire working setup from my study into my bedroom to stay away from my wife and children as much as possible. Thankfully, through social distancing and so much hand washing that my skin resembled and arid mud flat, it ran its course and nobody in the house seemed to have caught it from me.</p>
<p>It was now early April, my work had come to an end, and now, for the foreseeable future, I wouldn't be looking for a job in an office environment. Businesses were looking to save on costs by furloughing employees, and not looking to bring in more people that they would have to pay, regardless of their expertise at this particular time.</p>
<p>So my planned time away from work was extended. I have now been out of work for 3 months, and yet I have been particularly busy. Aside from homeschooling our 4 children in 4 different school years and from 2 different schools, I have helped my wife produce a <a href="https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/positive-changes-a-self-kick-podcast/id1499710422">podcast about positive changes</a>, and I have edited a manuscript for her new book which will be coming out next year. I had a go at <a href="https://www.twitch.tv/kwest_games">streaming video games on Twitch</a>, which was fun for a while but could get considerably lonely when speaking into the void of an empty chat window. But it was still fun in short bursts and might be something that I pick up again for fun in the evenings.</p>
<h2>I'm now at a crossroads</h2>
<p>What do I take on next? Do I go back into a user experience design position in an organisation that could utilise my expertise and experience? Or do I look to take on something more challenging? Something out of my comfort zone?</p>
<p>As I write this, I don't think I've made my mind up about what I'm going to do, but it occurs to me that this could be the point at which I commit to something that could change the direction of my life and career.</p>
<p>I've always tried to educate others in the work that I've done, regardless of where I have been working. I have pushed for better design practices and more inclusive ways of working for over 15 years, and yet I've only technically been called a designer for the last 5 of those. I've delivered talks on design and related subjects at multiple conferences and local meet-ups since 2013. In 2019 I even wrote <a href="http://uxfordevelopers.com/">a book on UX</a> aimed at bringing developers closer into the design fold.</p>
<p>I've always enjoyed sharing what I have learned over my career. I find it rewarding to help others in their career journeys, and it provides others with the chance to question the way I do things. In turn, this helps me to become better at what I do, creating a cycle which means I can pass everything I learn onto those that are open and willing to listen.</p>
<h2>Time to make a decision</h2>
<p>So here I am. Just a few short paragraphs ago, I was wondering which path to take, and now, having written those words in between here and there, I think it has become fairly clear what I need to do next.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>I will be working on a platform to help others learn practical skills in the field of user experience design, and it starts now.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>I don't know which form this new direction will take, but I'm hoping that you'll join me in helping shape what it may become, and help to reach others who will be interested in learning about user experience design from a seasoned professional in the field.</p>
<p>I'll be starting by publishing written content on my blog and across different platforms, but if you want to get in early, and help to shape the future of this endeavour of teaching and learning about UX, it's time to <a href="https://westleyknight.com/blog/the-creation-of-my-new-normal-career-in-UX-design/#subscribe">sign up</a>!</p>
<p>Collectively we have no idea what the future will be like, or if we will return to what we called 'normal' just a few months ago. What I can do is provide a place for people like you to learn from my unique experience, and how you can apply it to your career, whether you are a seasoned design practitioner, looking to transition your career into user experience design, or if you're starting out from scratch.</p>
<p>I hope that you'll join me on this journey, and together we can learn how to become better designers in a world that is very much in need of them.</p>
Measuring the little wins2019-07-07T11:13:00Zhttps://westleyknight.com/blog/measuring-the-little-wins/<p>It's been almost 6 months since I've written anything with the intention of publishing it as an article or blog. It took the long-awaited return of my favourite web design conference to kick-start me into writing something last time out, and there was a two and a half year gap between that post and the previous.</p>
<p>Surely I should be able to write more, to share more, to help other people learn from my experiences, my mistakes, my successes? I would have thought so, but my ability (or perhaps concentration, maybe even just the spare time) to sit down and write just doesn't seem to arise very often.</p>
<p>There's a lot that goes on in life without me having to pressure myself into some kind of regular schedule where I should be publishing things. This doesn't make me special, it just makes me normal.</p>
<p>There are so many pieces written about the entrepreneurs that live on 4 hours of sleep, are up at 4am, and have done all of the things that I really don't want to drag myself out of bed to do at that hour, before my alarm has gone off.</p>
<p>And that's fine.</p>
<p>That's <em>their</em> definition of success.</p>
<p><em>My</em> definition of success is vastly different.</p>
<p>My goals (whether short or long-term) are not lofty, aspirational goals that myself and others may never have any hopes of achieving. They're much simpler. Much more run-of-the-mill. I want to get up and do yoga with my wife every morning for 5 or 10 minutes. I want to quickly catch up on news and social stuff for 10 minutes. I want to leave and get to work on time. I want to do the best possible job I can whilst I'm at work. I want to get home on time. I want to take the dog for a walk. I want to have dinner with my family. I want to hear about what they did that day. I want to spend time doing the things that they like with them. And I want to get more sleep.</p>
<p>Every one of those things seems simple enough, but I don't think a day goes by where I don't fail at one of those things. I don't think I may ever hit 100% of those daily goals. Especially getting more sleep! But just having those aims, to try to do these things every day, gives me something to aim for.</p>
<p>As for my longer term goals? Well, this is where I'm kinda weird. I don't really see myself as having them. With my career, I've always tried to find the type of work that interests me, without having an ultimate career goal to aim for. I have slowly evolved from an all-round webmaster, through web developer, front-end developer, user experience architect, user experience design, digital product designer, and now the more specific role of interaction designer. This wasn't my plan, it just happened as I moved on in my career.</p>
<p>I have a mortgage that I would like to pay off sooner rather than later, but that's just a financial concern more than something akin to a goal to attain. I want to be able to provide for my family so that they have the opportunities to do the same as I have, to be able to do the things they find interesting, and hopefully have others find value in that work.</p>
<p>There is nothing in here about me wanting to "make the world a better place" like in that <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J-GVd_HLlps">TechCrunch Disrupt parody in the TV show Silicon Valley</a>; more that I want to make my own world a bit better. That seems a bit selfish reading it back to myself, but I'm hoping that taking care of things that are nearer and dearer to me will spill over and have a positive effect in the larger scale of things. There is no way for me to measure this, and for me to attempt to do so would just result in me applying more pressure on myself to 'achieve'.</p>
<p>With that said, I feel there is something that I could do a little better, and that is to keep track of what I have done, and what I would like to do. Many are far more organised than me at this, but I'm going to try to make a change on this front.</p>
<p>I'm going to start bullet journalling.</p>
<p>But I'm not talking about all of the superbly coloured, exuberant, visually appealing, sketch note style journals you might find under a <a href="https://www.instagram.com/explore/tags/bulletjournal/">hashtag on Instagram</a>. That's far too much effort and commitment for what I need. I just want to make a record of what I've done, have to do, along with important events and notes.</p>
<p>I'm starting out with the basics of "The Bullet Journal Method" created by Ryder Carroll, as found on <a href="https://bulletjournal.com/pages/learn">bulletjournal.com</a>. This is the start for me, and it'll be difficult for me to turn this in to something of a habit, but I can see what benefits it will have on the organisation of my life, as well as work.</p>
<p>Let's see if I can begin to measure my successes on the level that suits me, in my life, and not on a level for the internet to judge how successful I am based on a skewed and unrealistic view of what 'real achievements' are supposedly meant to look like.</p>
<p>Here's to the little wins, every day.</p>
The Return of New Adventures2019-01-27T10:52:00Zhttps://westleyknight.com/blog/the-return-of-new-adventures/<p>It's the Saturday morning following the New Adventures conference in Nottingham. I'm sat in a local community centre, in an open area between the library and the café, whilst one of my boys is upstairs taking part in a wonderful yoga class for children.</p>
<p>But my mind is still racing. I could perhaps do with a bit of meditative yoga myself. I feel inspired, refreshed, and full of ideas and drive. But this isn't the usual lip service I may pay to the conferences I attend. New Adventures is something special to me. The inaugural event, held in 2011, was the first fully-fledged conference I had ever attended. I honestly don't think I could have chosen a better event to introduce me to this world of connections and knowledge that comes about in the form of a conference, and the fringe events that surround it. I have attended every one of them, and intend to be at everyone that may occur in the future (fingers crossed).</p>
<p>From the opening talk titled "The New Language of Web Design: by <a href="https://twitter.com/danrubin">Dan Rubin</a> in 2011, right through to the wonderful <a href="https://twitter.com/jessicahische">Jessica Hische</a> and her introduction to "Procrastiworking" as the closing talk in 2013, I was provoked in thought, inspired by actions, and enthralled by the stories told.</p>
<p>Although I was sad that 2013 was to be the last of the New Adventures events (for the time being), in hindsight, I'm rather glad that it opened the opportunity for <a href="https://twitter.com/colly">Simon</a> and <a href="https://twitter.com/hellogeri">Geri</a> to bring it back this year, coincidentally or not, at a time that – I believe – it was needed; kind of like the Sword of Gryffindor, but for the web design community.</p>
<h2>The time travelling workshop</h2>
<p>I was truly excited in the days building up to the start of New Adventures in 2019, which for me would start with a full-day workshop with <a href="https://twitter.com/adactio">Jeremy Keith</a> on "The Progressive Web: Building for Resilience". Although I'm no longer a full-time developer, having officially switched disciplines around 5 years ago to more User Experience focused work (there was a decent amount of developer/designer crossover around this time for me), I still feel that learning about the capabilities of new technologies as they feed into the ecosystem of the web is an important part of the design process; knowing what is becoming technically possible, and thinking about how we can responsibly incorporate those technologies into the things we build for the people that use them.</p>
<p>But the journey that Jeremy took us through was very thought provoking. Within groups, we considered all of the web-enabled applications that we use on a daily basis, ranked those on their perceived complexity, and arrived at a consensus within the group. Our choice was Facebook. Although I rarely use the platform myself, everyone has an appreciation of how complex it has become; folding in the functionality of acquired companies, building their own frameworks, and the sheer number of users that it caters for. Then came the fun part; the time-travelling.</p>
<p>It is now 1995, and we now have to build Facebook on the available technology at the time. Essentially, we had to create the core functionality of Facebook utilising form inputs to submit status updates, mailing lists instead of notifications, and the like button with a form submission that would do a hard refresh on the page. No instant updates, no notifications of people liking your post, no image or video uploads. But we could still build the core functionality. We could still utilise the base building blocks of the early web to create a basic version of Facebook.</p>
<p>I have long been a proponent of progressive enhancement on the web, perhaps before I knew the true value of it to the people that use the things we build for the web, but Jeremy has always been able to expand my understanding of its importance in the wider scope of things, how it inherently builds resilience into your products, and how it makes it more widely available to people across the world, in vastly different scenarios. The workshop itself was fluid enough to cater to the topics that the attendees were interested in; from over-arching philosophy to technical detail around service workers and new APIs. It has helped me to understand that learning in this kind of environment doesn't have to be rigorously structured, and can be shaped as the day progresses.</p>
<h2>Time for the fringe</h2>
<p>Then it was on to the first of the fringe events for me, <a href="https://wearejh.com/">JH</a> Bowling. This was rather surreal, meeting up with old faces the place where I had most likely met them face to face in the first instance. The whole thing was just as friendly as can be expected, hugs abound, online conversations picked up and carried on in person as if there were no difference in the medium of communication, and meeting those who you have only met online before. All of it magical, enjoyable, and just so bloomin' lovely. It also helps when <a href="https://twitter.com/hereinthehive">Dan Donald</a> casually chalks up the highest score of the night whilst you're on his team!</p>
<h2>The main event</h2>
<p>Then Thursday came, the day of the conference itself. Again, so many familiar faces, and so many enthusiastic new ones.</p>
<p>What. A. Day.</p>
<p>I could sit and write in depth about each and every talk, but, in all honesty, I don't think I would do them justice. At least not in a blog post. Maybe you could watch them back yourself <a href="https://twitter.com/naconf/status/1088826081140969472">once the videos are released</a> 😉🤞. Instead, I'll just talk about the ones that I could relate to a little more than the others...</p>
<p>"The Future is Cross-Functional" was the title of the talk from <a href="https://twitter.com/JessPWhite">Jessica White</a>, who touched on a lot of things I'm currently experiencing and working through in my current role. Changing your process, and going from something as "waterfall as hell" to something more collaborative, and dare I say it, more agile. Jessica also spoke about bringing your team closer together, working in a more collaborative manner, and trying to understand the viewpoints of other members in your team, as well as understanding your users. All of these are things I've written about in my book, <a href="https://westleyknight.com/blog/the-return-of-new-adventures/amzn.eu/d/9DY1mUg">UX for Developers</a>, but were brought to life through another's real life experience.</p>
<p><a href="https://twitter.com/iamashley">Ashley Baxter</a> spoke to us about "Idea to Execution and Beyond", focusing around her experiences of being a solo founder of a company in one of the most heavily regulated industries there is; insurance. I could relate to the subject matter having worked on the digital side of an insurance company in the past, but from Ashley's perspective as a solo founder, the obstacles and hurdles she has made her way through and over in the creation of <a href="https://withjack.co.uk/">With Jack</a> was truly inspiring, especially in the face of stiff competition from the big players in the market, affectionately referred to as "arseholes"! 😂</p>
<p>The other talk to really strike a chord with me was <a href="https://twitter.com/littlehelli">Helen Joy</a>'s "Whose Design is it Anyway?". A snippet from the talk synopsis covers why this was so up my street:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>"We know what we want people to do; what actions we want them to take. But do we really know who these people are? Do we really know what they need? Do we take the time to find out, or are we building products and services based on our own assumptions and biases?"</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Helen hit so many of the points that need addressing in the teams I work with, my neck was almost sore with all of the nodding long I was doing. Without actually seeing our users, talking to them, discovering what they need from us, then we are too far from delivering a design for the people that will use it.</p>
<p>And finally, <a href="https://twitter.com/beep">Ethan Marcotte</a> took the stage with possibly the most well constructed talk I have ever seen, "The World-Wide Work". I don't think I've ever reacted as emotionally to a talk that didn't involve footage or live examples of users struggling with an inaccessible website or application. I have also never been witness to a talk where spontaneous applause has erupted before the end of the talk. A room full with hundreds of designers, developers, and other web-centric professions, instantly breaking out into a rapturous applause to what was being presented is something I don't think I'll ever forget.</p>
<p>It felt like a call to arms; for us to come together to make use of the power that we hold in the work that we do, and not to be optimistic, but to hope.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>"Hope is not the same thing as optimism. Never confuse or conflate hope with optimism. Hope cuts against the grain. <strong>Hope is participatory – it's an agent in the world.</strong> Optimism looks at the evidence, to see whether it allows us to infer whether we can do X or Y.</p>
<p>Hope says, "I don't give a damn, I'm gonna do it anyway."</p>
<footer>– Cornell West, "Race Matters", 27 April 2001</footer>
</blockquote>
<p>A fitting end to a spectacular conference.</p>
<h2>The after party</h2>
<p>The after party was held at the Nottingham Contemporary, a fascinating space, and a perfect venue for us designer-types! For me, it turned out to be a mix of meeting some wonderful people for the first time, and catching up with those wonderful people who I had met through previous New Adventures, and a few other conferences I've attended since that first one in 2011. So many amazing, friendly people, so little time.</p>
<p>I hope that I see you all again, but with much less time passing between.</p>
<h2>The biggest of thank yous</h2>
<p>I don't know how to express my thanks to Simon and Geri, for bringing back the most influential conference in my career. So, I will just say thank you.</p>
<p>A big thank you to all of the volunteers, and everyone else behind the scenes who made it happen. I hope you can all recover from your efforts to make all of this happen again, sooner rather than later.</p>
<p>😉</p>
On Creating Design Principles2016-07-08T10:40:00Zhttps://westleyknight.com/blog/on-creating-design-principles/<p>First up, we should get one thing straight.</p>
<p>There are vast numbers of people far more well-versed in design principles and practise than I, a web developer who fell into design just because he began to care a little more about the things he made.</p>
<p>If you care about what you make, you will likely follow a set of rules when you go about your day-to-day work.</p>
<p>I know that I have these rules, but no-one else knows what they are. They’re tucked away in the corners of my mind.</p>
<p>Occasionally they have surfaced. I have conveyed many, if not all of them to multiple people across multiple projects, here and there, when needed, and occasionally to an audience. I have no doubt that I have repeated at least one of them multiple times to the same people (which is just one of the reasons that I know I’m annoying).</p>
<p>The simple fact that this has happened, and continues to happen, is evidence enough that there is a problem. One that should have been obvious to me quite some time ago.</p>
<p>We are all working to our own principles. Some of these may be shared, but how do we know if we’re not bringing them into the open and discussing them?</p>
<p>Without this communication, each individual within a team working on a given project will likely be singing from a different hymn sheet, creating a shocking cacophony of clashing opinions and driving forces.</p>
<p>Without a common set of guiding principles, we, as a whole, are directionless.</p>
<p>And that is only in consideration of the present. Extend your thoughts into the future. A project changes hands, new employees come aboard, the original crew have slowly ebbed away over time, what remains to keep the ship on course?</p>
<p>Nothing.</p>
<p>There are no instructions, no guidelines, no stone tablets of commandments.</p>
<p>If you now realise that these don’t yet exist for you, now is the time to create them.</p>
<p>The events that occurred for me to arrive at this epiphany were far from enjoyable to endure, and make no mistake, this next part was (for me, at least) far more difficult.</p>
<p>I realised that I had to translate the knowledge and opinions on how things should be done into actual words. Not only that, but other people need to be able to read <em>and</em> understand those words if they were form a set of fundamental guidelines which were to be abided from this point onwards.</p>
<p>I began typing out what would eventually result in 6 core principles of web design.</p>
<p>As the message I was trying to communicate from the shadowy depths of my cerebrum filled up the screen in front of me, I felt like a pretentious arsehole.</p>
<p>It felt like what I was writing was communicating far greater importance than was actually possessed in its meaning, which is the very definition of pretentious.</p>
<p>I went over and over the wording, trying to reduce the level of perceived pomposity, but every change devalued the message that was being communicated.</p>
<p>This process lasted days.</p>
<p>Eventually admitting to partial defeat, I shared an early draft of the principles on Twitter. What came back were useful pointers on what could be added and amended, but nothing negative. Which is when I realised…</p>
<p>It is not possible for the principles themselves to be pretentious.</p>
<p>They are meant to be grand ideals against which the quality of your future work — and that of others — is measured.</p>
<p>And so, here are the principles that will drive my work, and that of others in the business, for the foreseeable future:</p>
<blockquote>
<h2>Be inclusive</h2>
<p>Everything that is built for the web should be accessible to anyone by any available means.</p>
</blockquote>
<blockquote>
<h2>Be progressive</h2>
<p>Start with solid foundations, then build upon this with enhanced interactions and features for those who can utilise them.</p>
</blockquote>
<blockquote>
<h2>Be flexible</h2>
<p>Utilise responsive and mobile first methodologies to deliver a coherent experience across any conceivable device.</p>
</blockquote>
<blockquote>
<h2>Be consistent</h2>
<p>Create a cohesive visual language to facilitate clear communication that compliments our tone of voice.</p>
</blockquote>
<blockquote>
<h2>Be efficient</h2>
<p>Create tried and tested components that can be reused, augmented, and updated, with the consideration of performance being paramount.</p>
</blockquote>
<blockquote>
<h2>Be concise</h2>
<p>Clarity and simplicity is core to creating interfaces – digital or otherwise – to enable interactions between people and our products and services.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>So there we have it. A set of guiding web design principles, now shared with a team of people, to ensure that we are all creating something that adheres to these core concepts.</p>
<p>If reading this has made you realise that you’re lacking a set of guiding principles to keep those in your organisation or team pulling in the same direction, feel free to unashamedly plagiarise these, amend and update where needed, and get everyone you work with on the same page.</p>
<p>Believe me, it’s worthwhile.</p>
Compromise: Balancing Project Needs with Internal Ideals2016-02-26T15:58:00Zhttps://westleyknight.com/blog/compromise-balancing-project-needs-with-internal-ideals/<p>There are certain ideals that, as a designer, you strive for. For me, working with my focus firmly on the field of User Experience, it is to put the user at the heart of our design and decision making processes.</p>
<p>As a User Experience Team of One - which is also <a href="http://rosenfeldmedia.com/books/the-user-experience-team-of-one/">a fantastic book by Leah Buley</a> - the responsibility falls to me to bring the user’s voice into the projects I work on.</p>
<p>Now, this doesn’t equate to me flinging both doors open to the meeting room, striding in declaring how this ship is going to be run (although I reckon I may be able to pull that off… I said ‘may’). No, this involves me taking my seat, sitting back, soaking up the new information as it presents itself, what stakes the other areas of the business have in this project that you may not have been aware of, and picking the right moments to interject in order to tease out more useful information that would otherwise go unnoticed.</p>
<p>It’s no good going in all guns blazing with the demands of the user, simply because that approach refuses to acknowledge the business.</p>
<p>Every project needs to have a business case that proves to the decision makers that the project should be undertaken, and that its successful implementation means that the company will make money. It is a business after all.</p>
<p>As the title of this piece would suggest, this is where compromise enters.</p>
<p>However, I have a problem with the phrase “compromise” in this type of situation.</p>
<p>When did the interests of the business and the interest of the user (or potential customer) become mutually exclusive?</p>
<p>If you don’t mind, I’ll answer that for you; They didn’t.</p>
<p>In the vast majority of cases - well, all cases in my experience, but everyone has their own unique experiences, so I can only talk for myself — not once has the introduction of user research resulted in a compromise of the business needs.</p>
<p>If anything, it has either backed up the case that was already being presented, or has altered the course of action that increase the benefit to the business.</p>
<p>Let me be clear, this is not a certifiable outcome just because the person who “does UX” is in the room, it is grounded in preparation.</p>
<p>The hours of research, testing, more research, and more testing. The compilation of results from that work into documents that can be easily distributed to, and easily understood by all involved.</p>
<p>And the key thing?</p>
<p>Do it early.</p>
<p>Do it before that kick-off meeting I was talking about at the beginning, you know, where I flung those double doors open and strode in to the room.</p>
<p>There’s no need for compromise when your ideals are in place at the inception of any project.</p>
<hr />
<p><em>~ A contribution to <a href="https://twitter.com/search?q=%23startYourShift">#StartYourShift</a></em></p>
How to Make the Web Better2016-01-29T13:00:00Zhttps://westleyknight.com/blog/how-to-make-the-web-better/<p>Thinking back to the opening ceremony of the 2012 London Olympics, the one moment that really stood out for me was 70,500 members of the audience holding up pixel tablets that displayed a live tweet from Sir Tim Berners Lee:</p>
<blockquote>
<p><a href="https://twitter.com/timberners_lee/status/228960085672599552">This is for everyone</a></p>
</blockquote>
<p>The web made this possible. It has the power to connect human beings regardless of distance, race, gender, ability, language; I could go on. In this case, those 70,500 people were literally connected via the pixel tablets, and participating in displaying a message from the creator of the World Wide Web.</p>
<p>The message itself is profound, the web is indeed for everyone.</p>
<p>And so, to the point.</p>
<p>How do we make the web better?</p>
<p>As I’m sure you’ve gathered from my preamble, the only way to make the web better is to consider those who use it.</p>
<p>Consideration is something easily missed when we have our heads down as designers and developers, pushing pixels, refactoring code, or building things with a deadline looming overhead.</p>
<p>But all it takes is a moment.</p>
<p>If you can lift your head up from the detail of your work for just a moment, you can use it to consider the larger picture.</p>
<p>Who is going to be using this?<br />
What will they be using it for?<br />
How are they going to use it?<br />
Why will they be using it?</p>
<p>Put yourself in other people’s shoes, whether that is by full-scale usability testing, or simply by taking a moment to reflect.</p>
<p>The more time you take, the more you will begin to discover those hurdles, barriers, and restrictions that could be easily removed; those problems that are preventing people from getting what they need, or doing what they need to do.</p>
<p>If we can make easy for anyone to use, everyone will benefit.</p>
<p>Whatever amount of time or effort you put in to thinking about those people who will use what you are creating, it will be worth it.</p>
<p>It <em>will</em> make a difference.</p>
<p>It <em>will</em> make the web better.</p>
<hr />
<p><em>~ A contribution to <a href="https://twitter.com/search?q=%23startYourShift">#StartYourShift</a></em></p>