Trading cards of UX luminaries was well under way by day 2 of UXLX. Today, we had topics ranging from site strategy to comics.

Strategic User Experience – Leisa Reichelt

In this workshop Leisa Reichelt takes on a huge challenge: she tries to clarify what strategic UX actually involves and how it can help us as designers create better experiences. One of the first challenges she needs to take on is the explanation of strategy itself. For a lot of people this is a very vague thing, even for those high up in organizations. Too often making a profit is seen as the strategy of a company, while in fact this is only a possible result of it. To know what the strategy of a business is we have to look at its purpose, which should always lie outside of the business itself.

Strategy is often mixed up with tactics, so Leisa gives us a very simple example:

• Strategy: we need to take the hill, men
• Tactics: fat guys go behind rocks, skinny guys behind trees

After this she continues and gives her definition of strategic UX: “UX activities focusing on achieving a significant organizational goal where a digital interface is a significant aspect of the product or service offering.” So when we really want to make a difference as designers and not only want to design the shell we should start getting involved on the correct level and try and talk on a strategic level. But before we all get enthusiastic Leisa warns us that this is very difficult to do, since a lot of managers in high positions only want to talk to people who (in their eyes) understand business and they don’t believe that designers can do that. One tip is to move away from our solution and design based position and move towards becoming facilitators. We are great in listening and translating what others think, want and need and formulate it in a clear way. And if you are able to introduce UX attributes in the process to help clear things up that is a win-win situation, especially when the managers feel that it’s actually a business attribute.

During her talk (the session didn’t really turn into a workshop, but was actually a 3-hour presentation) Leisa showed us the different levels in the process where we as UX designers can get involved. She described three levels:

• Business strategy: value proposition/experience strategy, product description, target audience, business model
• Customer experience strategy: experience map & touchpoints, personas, design principles, KPIs & metrics
• Tactical execution: prioritization, strategy led design, design evaluation, methodology

Leisa took on a challenging subject, but really managed to bring an important message across. At the same time there is still so much we need to learn and understand that you can fill a book with it, and fortunately that is something Leisa is working on at the moment.

Know Thy User: Personas — Steve Mulder

Anyone who’s come near a Cooper book (and a lot who haven’t) will know of those famous yet much debated method known as personas. Steve Mulder’s informative presentation got down to the nuts and bolts of using them, from large scale surveys to life-size cutouts.

Mulder stepped through the foundational reasons that we need personas (business results depend on satisfying users, you are not your user, learning about users requires direct contact, knowledge about users must be actionable, decisions should be based on users) and then suggested that personas are defined by three things

1. goals
2. behaviours
3. attitudes

The session was filled with useful tips for using personas. Some of them included:

• Surveys — aim for 100+ completios per segment, make it less than 15 minutes long, ask about behaviour (not importance), clear, familiar language…. use scales (not y/n), randomise answers when appropriate, don’t avoid open-ended input fields, break up into pages.
• Competitor analysis pages can include how they relate to various personas (i.e alongside all the other checklists have ones for the personas).
• Persona pages should have realistic photos (cheap or free sites for images include http://www.sxc.hu http://morguefile.com http://istockphoto.com). Other interesting ideas include writing the mini-story in first person so the persona is talking to you.
• My favourite tip was about the roll-out of personas. While you can do the standard one page summary, other more creative methods include making cards, life-size cut-outs (not for everyone but interesting), making a persona space where you deck out a cubicle as it would be for a persona, newsletters, and having the persona faces in the top left of all your wireframes to remind you who you’re designing for!

There was also a lot of discussion about how to bring in personas into a workplace not particularly amenable to them — much like Leah Buley’s talk the day before, the answer given was to quietly start using them and then air them if they show success.

Site search analytics – by Louis Rosenfeld

One of the morning workshops was held by the renowned Louis Rosenfeld in his role as “ information therapist” as he put it. The topic was site search analytics: what to make from the stuff people type in the search bar of your website. That ‘stuff’ can be quite interesting, because it indicates what users want, as opposed to what they need from a stakeholders’ point of view. If you bring those two together, you can greatly improve on your content as well as your search.
Search queries, because they are peoples’ own words, are semantically rich data. To get a feel for that he did an exercise and let the audience play around with a query data file in Excel to see what could be extracted from that. One group came up with an impressive correspondence analysis. What this really showed was that with little effort you can start making quite a difference.
After the break he presented an interesting case study from Vanguard which showed how multiple metrics can back up a feeling that something could be wrong with your new search engine. He rounded up with some practical tips on how to make site search better and get others in your company involved as well. All in all a great introduction on this fairly new subject.

Lessons from Bill Hicks — Ian Fenn

Ian Fenn beat the post-lunch slump with his entertaining — and more insightful than you might expect — video-packed ode to great comedian Bill Hicks. Fenn actually had the fortune to inverview many years ago in his then role as a BBC radio reporter and was impressed with ever since, but realised many of the skills that made him a great comedian could be applied to UX. His Lessons from Bill Hicks were:

1. Be honest. “Sometimes you have to tell stakeholders your baby’s ugly.” Hicks’ could be outrageous, but he was always honest.
2. Do your research. Get your facts straight, and above all be clear rather than dumbing down. (Hicks could also do devastating political comedy since he did his research and pulled no punches).
3. Actively listen. Change if the audience isn’t listening to you. Hicks was a master at reading the audience and changing his tack on the fly if need be.
4. Switch perspective. Comedy is about the unexpected, and Hicks could easily make fun of both sides of a particular issue, such as smoking.
5. Refine your work. Comedians work at their act for a long time — Hicks’ “How Tall Are You” skit was refined over 30 years!
6. Tell Stories. Great comedians know how to spin a story, such as Hicks painting a vivid picture about how weed should be legalised!
7. Have a vision. Jared Spool talks a lot about this in UX. Hicks usually finished his show on an inspiring note, with all his ideas about how we might have a better world — having that dream can inspire others too.
8. Leave a legacy. This has also been talked about in UX — what will you leave behind? Hicks died in 1992 age 32, but even now there’s eleven thousand clips of his on Youtube, and he’s mentioned on Twitter every 15 minutes. To top it off, a documentary on him was released last year. His legacy lives on.

Fenn talked about sharing the stage with Hicks, and part of the fun was (usually NSFW!) clips. Check out the Hicks’ movie trailer for a feel for them.

Product Personality — Jeroen van Geel

Our very own Jeroen Van Geel but the lightning in lightning talks as we went through a fast paced presentation about cars, cigarette ads and Craiglist .
Product personality is more than just Henri the vacuum cleaner. Many products have a strong personality — be it an HP laptop and the OLPC or the new VW Beetle — but in all too many cases on the web, all pages in a specific category look the same (be it travel sites or car ones).

Why use product personality? Van Geel recommends reading The Media Equation to understand just how important the connection is, but the key reasons are:

• Humans automatically attribute human behaviour to everything
• People prefer like-minded personalities [and products] (there is a famous computer test where people were asked to use choose between two identical computers, one named Linus and the other Max. People chose the one that was most like them).
• Undiluted product personalities are more trusted than contradictory ones (having a defined personality and sticking to it makes it seem more reliable)
• People judge on first impression

Some good examples come from the branding world. Cigarette brands often had very strong personalities (the Lucky Strike personality is very different from Malboro), and cars have a long history of it as well (take the Alfa Romeo and the VW Beetle). These products have values that are used everywhere.

But there are examples from websites.

• Whitehouse.gov in the Bush era was formal, authoritative, traditional, old fashioned; the new one is still authoritative and traditional, but is now also more caring.
• Ebay’s colourful new site is personal, confident, fun. Craigslist, on the other hand, looks very different and comes across as pragmatic, independent, no-nonsense, unorganised, a friend helping you out. It’s key to realise that though Craigslist site looks cheap, the company has made an active decision to have it that way, and benefits by thus appealing to a different audience.
• Finally this can be applied on a micro-level, Amazon and Woot’s sign up pages are very different — the former uses formal language and red text for required fields, the latter chatty and understated text.

There’s a whole area that this can step off into — a question was asked about the personality of interactions — but it was yet another reminder of the importance of meaning and storytelling in UX.

Sell yourself better – by Jason Masut

This really was a lightning talk as no second got wasted as Jason ran us through his UX Portfolio tips. Drawing from 10 years of experience and seeing lots of bad portfolios (80% of recent ones) he sparked the discussion about improvement at IA London and came up with some tips.
His tips in short:

• a proper introduction of yourself, at least descriptive and well structured, if possible enhanced with things like a visual design touch, quotes from others or an infographic about yourself
• demonstrate how you work, which means the process and not only end results. To do so photograph your workshops, keep some of your sketches and outputs and edit some video, e.g. on paper prototyping.
• share your project experience, with attention to all phases of the design process. Don’t do an exhaustive summary and show deliverables as well.

A good portfolio is always useful, not only if you want to look for a new job. It can help you to remember and improve on what you’ve done before and can be helpful for others as an example.

To get you started: Jason’s tips are available on www.betteruxportfolios.com

See What I Mean: Communicating with Comics — Kevin Cheng

Comics are a great tool to communicate concepts, visions and other complicated stories. They are easily understood by people and can depict a lot of detail in just a few tiles. Drawing comics forces a designer to really think about the message that he wants to bring across. They force you to think about what’s the essence of the message you want to convey and at the same time it’s possible to leave a lot of details out and still get a clear image. This last part is because people automatically fill in the blanks. During the workshop Kevin showed us several examples where these techniques were applied and he had us draw stick figures, facial expressions and in the end an entire comic.

But the main message of Kevin’s presentation is not aimed on drawing techniques, but at the message that comics can bring across. In a series of slides he shows us examples of comics that are focused on product features, introduced entirely new products and attempted to explain very complicate technical issues to a non-techy audience. One of the more interesting examples here is the Chrome comic which was used to explain the benefits of the Chrome browser to a broad audience.

Chrome

Depending on the role in the company that you have there can be different reasons to use comics:

• CEO, decision maker: distill a vision and share it across the organisation;
• Marketer, sales, business development: get the attention of potential clients and customers;
• Engineer, design: crystallise problem and solutions and get team feedback;
• Product manager: compact reminder to keep focus on vision.

Over the last few years I’ve become more and more sceptical on the value of personas. I know they’ve always been a popular part in the user centred design methodology, which kind of means that they are holy. But I also believe that from the moment they were introduced they were also misused or based upon the wrong data. For me this was the moment to call in the help of a few experienced UX friends. Why should I still use personas?

For the discussion I e-mailed Steve Baty, Adrian Chan, Will Evans and Dennis Koks. This resulted in a four-day long mail discussion. Below is my translation and interpretation of that discussion, which proved to be of great value for me. Note: right before I finished this article there was an interesting discussion on the IxDA discussion list.

The way personas should be used

Before we dive into the discussion it’s important to look at personas from an encyclopedic perspective. What are they and what are they supposed to do? According to Alan Cooper, the grand creator himself, personas are and were originally intended as a heuristic. They are for client communication and orientation. As Adrian Chan states it “they encapsulate and personalize use cases.” To be able to do this you need to have quantitative and qualitative research data, which can be analyzed thoroughly and translated in worthy archetypes.

How are they often used?

Unfortunately the textbook description of personas is too often a myth. Everywhere I look they are NOT based upon thorough research and mainly a tool to please the client. Will Evans says “that a great many advocates of personas simply don’t get to do them – or do them right – because no money is allocated for design ethnography – and even if there is money dedicated to research, practitioners don’t know how to take that research and turn it into personas which are actionable in the actual design process.” I think his remark hits the spot. Maybe big companies such as Microsoft, Philips and Nike have huge budgets to do proper research, smaller companies and design companies often don’t have this luxurious position. But this doesn’t take away the need for proper data. We need to look for possible solutions here, which isn’t coming up with personas based upon assumptions and ‘experience’.

Adrian Chan, in my opinion a pioneer on the field of social interaction design, states “I’m all for a move among social interaction designers to replace cardboard user peronas and instead use psychologically-grounded personality types.” This could prove an interesting improvement. According to Adrian these personality types should not become archetypes, since these are usually not interaction oriented and not specific to social media. It’s an interesting thing to try and understand the personality types, expecially when they are based upon actual psychological research.

So at this point the scepsis was still in my head. Fortunately the discussion gave me three useful reasons why I should continue with personas. Let’s check them out:

1. Great for design decisions

One of the biggest advantages of having personas, based upon good research, is that you can use them for design decisions. As Will Evans puts it “Someone is going to make decisions – often a vocal stakeholder who thinks they know a lot more than they actually do – the VP of Marketing that wants to prioritize a certain feature or piece of functionality because “My daughter is our target audience – I know my daughter – so we should do X” and if a designer has no data, no research, and no personas derived from that – no matter how bad the idea – there is no way to argue against it. User research and resulting personas helps in making prioritization decisions about initiatives and features based on actual users as opposed to the whims of:
1. The designer with their own prejudices
2. The powerful stakeholder
3. The developer
4. Anyone who is not the intended audience”

2. Great as a debrief / briefing

When working for a client it’s really important to dive into their world and prove you really understand it. Personas can help you with this. They form a good summary of the target audience and are a great debrief for your customer. After presenting them I always start a discussion, trying to see how their world matches with the personas. Being truly interested in their audience, but also in how the client perceives it is worth so much. It brings you on the same level as the client, making them feel you really care about their message/product/service.

Another great thing, besides debriefing, is actual briefing. When fresh team members join the design team personas form a perfect guide into the project. They are a nice summary of the data, which gets the fresh people up to your knowledge level faster. This is the real goal of personas: being a means to translate and transfer research and knowledge to others. As Steve puts it “The persona provides us a way to transfer some of the value we derived from the research & analysis process to other members of the team. It isn’t a perfectly efficient transfer – some of the value is lost. That’s what we’re doing when we communicate *through* the artifact: transferring that knowledge/insight/learning out to people who couldn’t be involved in the process of producing it.”

Remember to approach personas from this perspective and it will help you make them more communicative. They should tell a story for themselves, dipping you into their mental and physical world.

The end result and the data is far LESS important than the immersion in the experience of the target audience – Will Evans

3. It’s about the process

I always learned to save the best for last. So this third reason was the one that made me a believer again. It was a quote from Steve Baty that made me see the light: “Personas are an outcome; not the process.” Everybody is staring at the outcome all the time, using the personas as if they are treasures… but that’s not it. It’s the process itself that’s priceless. Personas are only a tool that force us (designers) to do actual research. It’s a means to make us submerge in the world of our target audience and truly, deeply understand them. It helps Dennis Koks “to create a better understanding, and it helps [him] interpret the outcomes better during the rest of the design process.“ Steve Baty states that “only some of the value of personas is encapsulated in the end result; much of it comes from the exploration of the data itself.”

Personas are an outcome; not the process – Steve Baty

In the IxDA discussion Dave Malouf said that “if you are selling Personas then it seems that that is your first mistake. Sell research and don’t even tell people how you are going to model it. Maybe the research itself will tell you the appropriate way to model your analysis.”

So immersion is the key. In my mind it has even become one of the few user centred design approaches each designer must undergo. Will even wants to go so far “as a designer the whole goal is a violent sense of empathy for the user in their own context – the data in this case and the persona are completely useless if there is no bond with the end user. Design insights that were not directly experienced by the designer are worthless.”

“This raises an interesting question: do we need to carry out our own research? Is it enough to analyze the data? If we get a series of ‘design insights’, how bad is that?”  – Steve Baty

As a closure (in other words: I’m starting to repeat myself)

A thing about personas which, in my opinion, is still overrated… Is the value throughout the project. It is often believed that after personas are created they will live on and should come back in all discussions. Even when I’m typing this I want to believe it. I want to put their portraits on my desk and always use their names in discussions, but it almost never works out like this. For me they are important because they make me do research. When I create personas I have to force myself to trully understand the user and context. It makes me want to collect all the data and the translation into personas is more important than the end result. And after that the presentation of the personas to the client also helps to show and test if you really understand their customers. It’s a great starting point for trust with the client and forms a good discussion. After this I think they are less important for the people who actually created them, since they already submerged… they can use them as a reference, reminding themselves sometimes. But they are a great tool for new members of the design team.

I wish to thank Steve Baty, Adrian Chan, Will Evans and Dennis Koks for a great discussion. And Dave Malouf for stealing his quote. In my opinion this discussion is what Johnny is all about.

Images by moonsoleil & randy son of robert