Making a positive design impact at the UI layer is only a small part of our story?  We have a much greater responsibility to both learn more about and impact other layers to help us create a positive design impact. We need to learn the personal skills to look for, enable and teach people and cultures about better design organisationally.

This means we need to think about better design during sales, our people relationships, our choice and use of methodology. We need to be aware of sourcing people for optimal collaboration in teams, our choice of technology, our choice of services and products we work on. This is hard work so how can we do that together?

So the question is:

How do we have a positive design impact?

References

• Designing for Change
• Positive Design Impact

We are seeing a shift from technology that simply functions and completes goals towards experiences that delight and perhaps do more. In order to design for these experiences we need to better understand what will engage and move people deeply. Perhaps part of the answer lies in reviewing our research toolkit or to get out of our offices and into the lives of the people we are designing for.

So the question is:

What are the ways we can understand people better to create relationships with objects that matter?

References:

• Real Users Don’t Do Tasks: Rethinking user research for the social Web
• Design Research – thinking through making

Whitney grew up in New York City and was initially interested in Computer Science, loves writing but missed technology and discovered HCI at Carnegie Mellon. Whitney talks about core principles for all of the work we do, underscoring the need for UX practitioners to become better negotiators and persuaders; and to focus on helping the organization become better at identifying areas of opportunity for our customers.

Quotes

“…one of the core tenets of the HCI program at Carnegie Mellon is this mantra… ‘the user is not like me’. As I got to know other practitioners in the broader community, there are some philosophical similarities between us no matter how we approach the work or what our educational backgrounds are… I became fascinated with those principles [about which we all] agree… the core principles for all of the work we do …mobile, web [regardless of] the context…”

“Think about User Experience as the way in which an organization operates and have it being core to its ethos… understanding how to be a great negotiator and great persuader… we often lack confidence in selling those ideas to the higher-ups within our organization as well as to other departments who are not in the trenches with us everyday.”

“We need to have a hand in not only designing the product but in defining what the product is, so that really does make us product strategists in a lot of ways… [we] need to be involved in the process a lot earlier than many of us currently are… understand the business needs and be able to communicate with the product folks as well as executives in the organization.”

Whitney will be talking at UX Hong Kong 17 & 18 February 2012.

Notes

* Follow Whitney Hess on Twitter.
* Learn about others who will be presenting at the second UX Hong Kong conference.
* Learn about Whitney Hess.
* Learn about Design Principles: The Philosophy of UX
* Learn about HCI at Carnegie Mellon

The world is going through some fundamental changes. Governmental, Financial and Social systems that seemed to work before don’t scale too well in an increasingly connected world. People are looking for alternatives and ways to avoid beauracracy. We are beginning to slowly see the birth, re-design and iteration of new approaches to the old ways of doing stuff. Joe Fletcher recently wrote: “We’re not designers of aesthetic … We are critical thinkers who can help provide less disease, better education, better housing, and better solutions.”

So the question is:

What can we all do to continue to position designers as facilitators of positive change?

References:

• If we’re all sort smart, why aren’t we solving any problems?
• Five Lessons from World Changers
• Global UX
• Why aren’t the Apple sites linking to this?

Today on Radio Johnny Daniel Szuc speaks with Bas Raijmakers about his topics at UX Hong Kong 17 & 18 February 2012. Bas has a social science background and studies how people use media and technology from an ethnographic point of view. Bas talks about the importance of telling stories of the people we design for while integrating those experiences into the design processes. Bas believes that by focusing on the stories of those for whom we are designing at the start, we can lead teams to intelligent design choices throughout a project’s lifecycle.

Quotes

“It’s important for our field to learn from [other] projects and [take time to] reflect … and find ways to express what we learn as knowledge.”

“I feel… reflection and making should not be separate. While you are in the field or in the workshop, these thoughts about the value of the work we do, come up. These are reflections and come up because you are engaged in the work. Doing the work brings up great ideas and how important it is to engage with designers to come up with good reflections together.”

“… techniques, methods, and processes that are related to co-creation and participatory techniques are a way of getting beyond the borders of your own discipline and allow you to collaborate with people in other disciplines… it is here [where] I include the participants because they are experts of their own everyday life …”

Bas is from STBY and talks about the importance of telling stories of the people we design for everyday. He discusses how integrating those stories into the design processes allows us to stay focused on the experiences our users want; allowing the design team to create an experience that follows the stories shared.

Notes

* Follow Bas Raijmakers on Twitter @hellobas
* Learn about others who will be presenting at the second UX Hong Kong conference
* Learn about Bas Raijmakers
* Learn about the Global Design Research Network (Reach) -
* Learn about the Service Design Network
* Learn about This is Service Design Thinking: Basics – Tools – Cases
* Learn about the Design Adcademy Eindhoven

Today on Radio Johnny Daniel Szuc speaks with Geke van Dijk about her topics at UX Hong Kong 17 & 18 February 2012. Geke specializes, at STBY, in design research for service innovation. She talks about the move from lab based testing to up front research, the service economy, consistent customer journeys as well as the importance of focusing on empathy when designing for other people.

Quotes

“… we needed to go out and visit people in their places … where they were actually making use of the web sites and mobile apps … we noticed the stories we got … were much broader than just online usage … from the stories and tests we could help our clients much more in the early stages with the concept development by moving it earlier in development the process … but how does it fit in the wider customer journey? Working with design teams, we found the consumer insights we created in the research were very interesting… they always said if we would have known this earlier in the process we could have used it in the concept development … it was quite a deliberate move to do the research earlier on in the design process and go out of the lab into the field and have a wider and strategic view with the client teams as well.”

“Co-production at the moment of truth … when the customer meets that organisation … and in service design one of the key constructs is when that moment is co-created … your customers are constructing the service delivery themselves … you can’t really predict how people are using the services … you need to have an integrated network of services … you need [to understand] the way people are using [your products / services] is [not a fixed process].”

“People are in the service economy and they are using multiple channels to get into touch with organisations … but on the inside of the companies (the service providers) that’s still a big struggle … many organisations are still organised as silos … you have the internet dept, call centre, marketing dept … sometimes they are even competitive with the KPI’s between each other… customers want to move seamlessly from one channel to another and have a consistent customer journey.”

Geke specializes in design research for service innovation. She talks about the move from lab based testing to up front research, the service economy, consistent customer journeys as well as the importance of focusing on empathy when designing for other people.

Notes

* Follow Geke on Twitter @hellogeke
* Learn about others who will be presenting at the second UX Hong Kong conference
* Learn about Geke van Dijk
* Learn about the Global Design Research Network (Reach) –
* Learn about the Service Design Network
* Learn about This is Service Design Thinking: Basics – Tools – Cases

In 2012 we will be continuing with the ‘Discussion’ series as started in 2010. It’s an opportunity to ask a question to you, get an expert opinion from an invited expert and open it up for community discussion. We hope this will provide the opportunity for you to share thoughts, project experiences, references, introduce experts on a topic, how a topic plays out locally and globally, what differences/similarities you see in your markets and what it means to our practice to push us all to think more deeply about the world we live in.

So the question is: What topics would you like to see discussed in 2012?

Past discussions

• Discussion: What are the ingredients to become a great leader?
• Discussion: How do you communicate a UX vision?

Today on Radio Johnny Daniel Szuc speaks with Whitney Quesenbery about her topics at UX Hong Kong 17 & 18 February 2012. Whitney talks about the importance of storytelling, choosing the right UX method towards finding answers, and as we look forward, practitioner knowledge about both design and technology is critical. Whitney also talks about the trend of creating for the “social good” and how appreciating this movement can strengthen our approach to design.

Quotes

“Storytelling is a direct line from my work in theatre … understanding how we are all telling each other stories, when we try to understand someone who uses the products we make, we are trying to envision the story that they are telling themselves, what is the scenario that they are in, why are they interacting with us at all, and how can we create products that make that story a wonderful, easy, good story … as opposed to a bad, awful, difficulty, barrier filled story.

… all of a sudden we are really thinking about people situated in their lives and how the things we make fit into that life rather than how the person gets jammed into the software.

Over the years we have a pretty rich set of tools, how we move through the process … each of those techniques is really an answer … the answer needs to be modified to fit that new question … so it’s about understanding what question you are answering and then being able to think really hard about the right way to get that answer.

Summary

Whitney Quesenbery discusses the importance of storytelling in making products, how to choose the right UX method in projects, how practitioner knowledge about design and technology (a hybrid) is becoming important and how we should all continue to focus on people when designing products & services.

Notes

* Follow Whitney Quesenberry @whitneyq on Twitter
* Learn more about Whitney Quesenberry
* Learn about

Today on Radio Johnny Daniel Szuc speaks with Tomer Sharon from Google, who grew up in Tel Aviv Israel, studied at Bentley in the USA, has been in UX for about 12-13 years and focuses on research including past work at Checkpoint software technologies in Israel and now based in New York working as a Design Researcher at Google. Tomer will be speaking about one of the biggest challenges for UX practitioners which is how to persuade stakeholders to do and act on research.

Quotes

“Getting stakeholder buy in for UX research projects … people learn how to do research, but the soft skills are something that are hard, dealing with stakeholders who will not listen or won’t co-operate is hard”

Important to develop empathy towards your stakeholders as you do for your users. Learn as much as you can about the people you are dealing with, what bothers them, what is important for them, you will be surprised that UX is not the centre of the world … there are other things that are important and if they ignore you, there is probably a good reason for that … not always … empathy is one thing, humility is another thing … you are not always right, I learn that everyday.

one topic I see is called product personality and seen recent example of this with Apple’s Siri … use Siri not for completing tasks but asking it sill questions and just for fun … they like its personality, having a product personality means that a product communicates some human personality attributes that I as a user fit within the right context … its hard to do right.

Summary

Tomer will be speaking about one of the biggest challenges for UX practitioners which is how to persuade stakeholders to do and act on research. How to get them involved from the moment you start thinking about a research project, knowing your stakeholders and involving planting seeds. He is looking forward to the good food in Hong Kong and meeting the local UX community to understand the different angles and aspects of what is important for people in other parts of the world.

Notes

* Follow Tomer Sharon @tsharon on Twitter
* Follow UX Hong Kong @uxhk on Twitter
* Learn about others who will be presenting at the second UX Hong Kong conference.
* UX in Asia
* Learn about Tomer Sharon’s new book “It’s our research”

Today on Radio Johnny Daniel Szuc speaks with Lou Rosenfeld about his upcoming talk and workshop at UX Hong Kong 17 & 18 February 2012. Lou talks about how he entered UXD, his focus today around topics like the silos of user research, site search analytics and how to look at experiences holistically.

Listen to the Show

Show Time: 20 minutes 55 seconds

Quotes

so may silos of user research going on … put the data together … to achieve true insight … companies over spending and under delivering with their research budgets today … look at how they can put it together in new ways rather than spending more money on more siloed research …

site search analytics, what people search on your local site search engine … it bridges a bunch of different research methods … its data, analytics data on one hand … lots of it … its behavioural, but its also highly semantic and descriptive, its people asking you in their own words what they want from you and your site, its a great opportunity to study if you are delivering.

people are studying Apple more seriously … rising awareness of Service Design, its been happening anyway … more and more people are trying to figure out how to plug things together in a holistic integrated way across channels and lines of business.

Summary

Lou discusses getting more value from organisational research, site search analytics and what this means for business, holistic understanding and important skills he is seeing in younger practitioners and what he is looking forward to in Hong Kong including the famous 962 bus and his enjoyment and search of “wontons”.

Notes

* Follow Lou Rosenfeld @louisrosenfeld on Twitter.
* Learn about others who will be presenting at the second UX Hong Kong conference.
* Learn about Lou Rosenfeld and Rosenfeld Media
* Also … Daniel Szuc and Jo Wong write about the importance of designing for change