Persuasive Design is Hot

Persuasive design is hot. Especially on the web as designers found out that the internet perfectly lends itself for persuasion. The combination of both interpersonal and mass communication as well as its interactivity creates a perfect environment to apply persuasive techniques like the ones described by Maurits Kaptijn in his article on Persuasion Profiling. These kind of persuasive techniques can be traced back to psychological principles that rely on symbolic strategies to trigger emotions or emotional aspects in order to motivate people towards a preferred behavior. Almost all of these techniques work on the level where users interact with the website. A good example of such a persuasive technique on that interaction level can be found on LinkedIn. Users are persuaded (or motivated) to complete their profile through the completeness bar that is placed next to their LinkedIn profile. The psychological principle that is at work here is the fact that people crave for completion, which is why it works so well.

The completeness bar of LinkedIn.

Interaction, communication, and appearance

But there are more levels at which we can influence users in their behavior on websites other than through interaction. Birkigt and Stadler (1986) describe three levels in their model on brand communication. Besides the interaction level there are the communication level and the appearance level. In more concrete terms these come down to copy and visual design. Many designers and copywriters have found out how to make copy persuasive by focusing on things like motivation and activation. But how about the visual design level? Is it possible to persuade users towards certain behavior visually, besides making things just beautiful?

Not visual but perceptual

BJ Fogg from Stanford University has made a model in which he describes how to influence human behavior through boosting motivation, ability, or both. The main focus of persuasion on both the interaction and communication level is on the motivation part. Purely motivating people visually is hard, but we can boost ability by making certain things easier to achieve on that visual level. By making certain elements attract more attention for instance or desired actions easier to perceive. These kinds of principles are largely constrained by low-level visual properties rather than determined by higher cognitive processes. That is why I like to call these kinds of low-level visual properties to influence users; perceptual persuasion instead of visual persuasion. So what perceptual persuasion basically comes down to is making elements on a website, that are important for conversion, be seen, stand out, or easier to perceive.

“So what perceptual persuasion basically comes down to is making elements on a website, that are important for conversion, be seen, stand out, or easier to perceive.”

This is nothing new, right?

You must think; “We already do make important elements stand out visually”. You are probably right, but what I saw during my research is that most web designers apply these kinds of techniques unconsciously and based on their intuition. Most of the time they stick to something like a contrasting color for their buy button. I think that there are three reasons for that. First, most designers are not very aware of the concept of perceptual persuasion. Second, little is known about its possibilities and effects. And last, there is little guidance available for designers to apply perceptual persuasion. I figured that by making the concept of perceptual persuasion better known and accessible, designers would be able to apply it more deliberately and systematically, resulting in better and more persuasive design.

A fundamental basis

I started gathering and investigating perceptual persuasion mechanisms for which I consulted three resources. The first resource was an extensive literature study. Second were multiple workshops, focused on retrieving the latent and tacit knowledge of the participating designers regarding perceptual persuasion. The last resource was the web itself with all its best practices.

Now lets become a little more concrete. During my investigation I found five main fundamentals that form a conceptual basis of perceptual persuasion. Lets take a look at these first. They are:

• Contrast
• Guiding
• Fluency
• Magnetism
• Proximity

First is Contrast which helps to show the difference between elements on websites or emphasize the importance of a single element. It is one of the easiest and most commonly used fundamentals to create perceptual persuasion.
Guiding helps directing the eyes – and attention accordingly – towards important elements by suggesting a certain visual path or flow.
Fluency has to do with the ease with which a visual web element can be perceived. It refers to the mental effort it takes to process visual elements. Elements that allow fluent perception are easier to pay attention to and therefore more persuasive.
The Magnetism fundamental covers mechanisms that can be traced back to evolutionary or cultural learnings regarding things that (should) grab attention.
Last is Proximity, which makes elements appear closer than others and thereby making such an element increase in importance and become more persuasive.

The inSights design tool

Getting more concrete

These fundamentals do give a good overview of the conceptual basis of perceptual persuasion, but are still very abstract. I found that they are too abstract for designers to work with. If I wanted to make perceptual persuasion better known, accessible, and especially applicable, I needed to make it more concrete. Therefore I concretized the fundamentals with more hands-on principles. Through my investigation I came to a total of 60 principles to design perceptual persuasion. For each principle I tried to find a concrete example on the web. These principles and their examples were the basis of a design tool I created called inSights. Let me highlight 5 principles and their examples, one for each fundamental.

Principle 09 from inSights: Rotation Difference

The human eye is very good in seeing difference between an element that is slightly rotated compared to its neighboring elements. If the rotation is big enough (so it has enough contrast) it will grab attention and stand out. The principle Rotation Difference, based on the Contrast fundamental, describes how you could use this effect near a call-to-action. In the example above the skewed street stands out and draws attention towards the green button.

Principle 23 from inSights: Human Gaze

People tend to look in the same direction as others are doing. The Human Gaze principle explains how you could use this effect on websites by placing important elements in the line of sight of a pictured person. This principle is based on the Guiding fundamental and shows how attention is automatically guided towards the call-to-action, like in the example above.

Principle 20 from inSights: Visual Sequence

The Visual Sequence principle, which is based on Fluency, is about making elements look like a sequence to follow (if relevant of course). It allows people to perceive and understand the necessary steps to take fluently and therefore much easier. Attention is focused along the sequence towards the end. At the end of the sequence there can be a something like a call-to-action, similar to the example above. The other way around, you could also disrupt a visual sequence to turn attention towards the interrupting element.

Principle 34 from inSights: Quotation Marks

People are more likely to read text that is placed in-between quotation marks, as they have learned that quoted text is often regarded as important. The principle Quotation Marks therefore describes how you can use quotation marks to persuade people to read certain text. This principle is based on the Magnetism fundamental as it concerns a cultural learning.

Principle 22 from inSights: Overlap

Elements that are perceived to be closer attract more attention. So through clearly overlapping visual elements it is possible to let certain elements attract more attention. This is described in the principle Overlap based on the Proximity fundamental. In the example above the blue call-to-action is clearly overlapping the red bar and as result more visually persuasive.

Does it actually work?

Now the million-dollar question: does deliberately applying perceptual persuasion make web designs better converting. Through collaboration with the Delft University of Technology and the Middle East Technical University, we were able to empirically test the outcome of using inSights during design projects. These studies showed that web designers not only got a better understanding of perceptual persuasion, they also applied these principles more deliberate and thoroughly. It helped them keeping the project focused on conversion.

In two separate experiments we asked web designers to redesign websites focusing on perceptual persuasion. As none of the website owners liked to participate in an online experiment, we tested the original and redesigned websites in a lab environment. 30 participants were interviewed regarding the persuasiveness of the websites through a questionnaire and a click study. The outcome of these experiments showed a significant increase in persuasiveness of the redesigned websites. Participants especially indicated the redesigns to be more eye-catching.

To conclude

So through perceptual persuasion we can influence users’ unconscious decisions by playing with low-level visual properties on websites. I think that perceptual persuasion has great possibilities and when given the proper attention results in better and more persuasive web design. Therefore I hope that I convinced you of the concept of perceptual persuasion and made you interested in this kind of persuasive web design.

If you want more inSights you should check fabrique.nl/insights.

A recent article on “What 8-Bit Video Games Can Teach Us About Design And UX” got me reminiscing about those early days. There are lessons those digital pioneers can teach us, and they are as applicable to today’s web sites and gadgets as they were to those noisy arcades.

Hadouken!

Pong was one of the earliest coin-operated video games. There was a Zen-like simplicity to the instructions painted on Al Alcorn’s seminal classic: “Avoid missing ball for high score”. However, Alcorn wasn’t convinced that simple game mechanics were enough to keep players coming back, so he added an additional challenge. He divided the famous Pong paddles into eight sections, each reflecting the ball at a different angle. This gave advanced players a new challenge to master, and a feeling of control.

Even the popular fighting games of the 1990s followed this formula. Basic “button mashing” let many new players win their battles through sheer luck. But, if they truly wanted to master the game, strategy guides held the secrets to characters’ “special moves”.

Nobody is going to write a strategy guide for Mobile Safari. But, you might want to try a little “button mashing” in your favorite apps anyway. Did you know that if you hold your finger down on a link in the iOS browser for a few seconds, it offers actions like copying the address or opening it in a new tab? Encourage experimentation and discovery in your own products to engage your advanced users. Make them feel clever and smart every time they stumble across something new.

I Call Next Game!

In those early days, gamers would start a row of quarters along the bottom of games’ screens, a tradition that continued well into the age of tokens. And, if you asked any member of the crowd, they could point out exactly which one was theirs. It stood for their place in line to play the game, and this practice was widely respected.

Nobody designed this into the games. It came from the players themselves, and spread through word-of-mouth; from gamer to gamer, arcade to arcade. If your product has an active community of users, there’s no doubt they’ll start developing their own rules and rituals, and the worst thing you can do is fight it.

In 2008, Facebook angered users of an application that introduced them to complete strangers with similar interests. In an email, the company proclaimed that their site was “a social utility”, not a “social networking site”, and users who friended people they didn’t know in real life weren’t using the site correctly. This was one of many early stumbles in Facebook’s rise to popularity, and contributed to the scrutiny they face even today.

Twitter, on the other hand, embraced community innovations like “retweeting” and “hashtags”, incorporating them as features of the site itself. By encouraging users to shape how the site was used, they built loyalty and a sense of ownership that survived through major outages and other growing pains.

Checkpoint!

Many primitive video games made a simple offer: three or four lives for one quarter. Novice players could face a “Game Over” screen in under a minute, while advanced players could park their Pac-Man in the “safe spot” for hours (or until the arcade staff showed them the door). But as attendance dwindled, arcade owners raised prices to get more value from their square footage.

At first, the price for a game went up to fifty cents, then a dollar or even two. To get that kind of money out of customers, though, they needed to offer much more in return. They weren’t going to get much repeat business by killing off new players right away. Game developers traded the concept of “lives” for more timer-based play, guaranteeing beginners could play for a minimum amount of time. “Checkpoints” rewarded skilled players with extra time.

When prices crossed the one dollar mark, game companies also enticed customers with bigger screens and more interactive hardware. “Ride-on” games simulated the experience of downhill skiing or motorcycle racing, and “Bemani” games traded traditional game controls for simulated musical instruments and dance floors.

I don’t need to tell you the importance of providing value to your paying customers. But with today’s fickle buyers turning up their nose at “expensive” $1.99 purchases, it’s vital to convey your product’s true value. One popular way to do this is with a “freemium” business model, where users sample most of a product’s functionality for free, with an option to buy more advanced features when they’re ready.

But it’s much simpler to humanize your product and the people behind it. Marco Arment, creator of Instapaper, does an amazing job as the public face of his application through an active Twitter account, blog, and podcast appearances. He’s so good at this that he got people to pay a monthly fee to use Instapaper without offering a single benefit above the free version’s features. They did it to support him.

A Waste of Time

Controversy surrounded arcade games going back to when pinball machines had actual metal pins. Pinball’s iconic flippers were added to turn them from games of chance to ones of skill, but that wasn’t enough to stop major US cities from banning them. New York City didn’t officially lift their pinball ban until 1976. In the video game frenzy that followed, concerned people spoke out against the evils of unsupervised teens and the debilitating effects of Pac-Man elbow.

Arcades may not have deserved their poor reputation, but they do provide some lessons in what we can avoid.

It Ate My Quarter!

I worked in an arcade for two summers while I was in college, and I soon came to loathe the coin accepter. Whether a game takes quarters or tokens, chances are it uses a standard, replaceable device that filters out incorrect coins and slugs by thickness and diameter. They’re completely mechanical, but these cheap mechanisms still malfunction all the time.

I’d barely have my coat off before some kid would tell me “the machine ate my token”. Chances are, it really did, and we could trigger a free game to make up for it. But players also knew they just needed to say those magic words to get as many free games as they could before we kicked them out.

In an arcade game, the coin slot is the first place a player interacts with the machine, and a bad first impression can ruin their whole visit. The same applies to your interaction designs. A flawed registration form, app install process, or shopping cart will reflect poorly on the quality of your product. It also might make you look desperate for business, and a target for fraud.

New and Improved!

In 1999, Williams recognized that pinball wasn’t as popular as it once was. To revitalize their flagship product and make it more appealing to young video gamers, they created the Pinball 2000 platform, which used the famous “Pepper’s Ghost” illusion to project a video screen above a traditional playfield. The technology was impressive, but the product was a flop. Purists were disgusted, and youngsters just didn’t get it. Williams closed their pinball division in October, 1999.

Stern Pinball, located in Chicago, is the last pinball manufacturer in the world. Their Melrose Park factory hand-assembled a scant 10,000 machines in 2008. But by sticking to a formula of traditional pinball mechanics and popular licenses like Transformers and Avatar, Stern is still open thirteen years after Williams threw in the towel.

Don’t follow trends. Your competitors may have flashy slideshows, social features, and even walk-on videos. But, you should resist using the latest features in your designs unless they create a solid improvement in user experience. Even then, don’t trust your gut. Use A/B split testing to make sure these new features perform before forcing them on all of your customers.

Benjamin Jackson argues that we’re disturbingly close to being Pavlov’s gamers, and that there’s a huge grey area of unethical gaming that we can’t ignore.

In his article printed in the Atlantic:

The primary characteristic of unethical games is that they are manipulative, misleading, or both. From a user-experience standpoint, these games display dark patterns, which I define as common design decisions that trick users into doing something against their will. Dark patterns are usually employed to maximize some metric of success, such as email signups, checkouts, or upgrades; they generally test well when they’re released to users.

For example, FarmVille, Tap Fish, and Club Penguin play on deep-rooted psychological impulses to make money from their audiences. They take advantage of gamers’ completion urge by prominently displaying progress bars that encourage leveling up. They randomly time rewards, much like slot machines time payouts to keep players coming back, even when their net gain is negative. And they spread virally by compelling players to constantly post requests to their friends’ walls.

This trend is not just limited to social games, though: many combat games, like America’s Army, are funded by the U.S. military and serve as thinly-veiled recruitment tools. Some brands have launched Facebook games like Cheez-It’s Swap-It!, and they serve as tools to sell more products. These techniques can be used in any sort of game, in any context.

We’ve also looked at various elements of social gaming. Still, this article reminded me of one blogger’s serious concerns with the gaming utopia people such as Jane McGonigal proposes.

Or, how it’s brilliantly parodied on the IT Crowd:

Still, what’s so interesting about this space is how it’s developing. ZD Net suggests that instead of putting badges on everything, we should be looking at the latest gamification darling, Pinterest.

I’ve been watching two trends recently in the realm of digital product development. First is the incorporation of gaming concepts into products that seemingly have nothing to do with gaming. Second, the importance of designing products that are not only easy to use but a pleasure to use.

To be sure, these trends aren’t new. My point is not to shed yet more light on what we already know. Rather, the potential impact of these trends as they go mainstream is significant for UX designers– our skills are becoming strategic rather than tactical.

Let me explain. A wireframe is a tactical output that (hopefully) partially fulfills a strategic direction for a system. But working with a product manager to figure out how to incorporate gaming concepts into a product moves us, the UX designers, in a strategic direction. This changes the opportunities in front of us as designers. The term I use to encapsulate these opportunities is “digital product strategy.”

What is digital product strategy?

Product strategy binds business strategy to product management. Marty Cagan put it nicely in a April 2009 blog post: “Think of it this way. The business strategy and business portfolio planning provides a budget and a set of business metrics. The product organization then lives within that budget to pursue as aggressively as possible the best ways to hit those business metrics.”

Product strategy (let alone digital product strategy) is a relatively unused term – no Wikipedia article exists as of yet, and it ranks fairly low as a competitive keyword (at least as I write this). As such, there’s not a lot of consensus as to what it encompasses. So, I’ll provide my thoughts with an emphasis on products that are digital by design – they make heavy use of software as part of their interaction model or delivery mechanism.

To me, a good digital product strategy brings together seven areas of expertise:

1. Market/industry expertise: A deep understanding of the domain you are engaged with;
2. User expertise: Engagement with actual or potential users of the product;
3. Competitive expertise: Commitment to finding “sustainable differentiation” – the “secret sauce” that cannot be easily copied;
4. Related-Industry expertise: Engagement with other industries or markets that you can learn from to create a better product for your industry
5. Design expertise: knowing how to make a product easy and fun to use with the latest design techniques for many different devices
6. Technology expertise: Knowing what is technically possible today and in the future and the devices that make sense
7. Business expertise: Knowing how the product will fit into the operational realities and capabilities of the business

Here’s an example, I have been working with a customer over the last few years to help them introduce a direct business-to-business channel alongside their traditional distributor-based model. The main channel became an e-commerce website, and our “product strategy” was about achieving parity with two main competitors. From a digital product strategy perspective, the website became the primary delivery mechanism for a tangible product, and thus a huge part of the product UX.

As we emerged from the parity phase, we consciously moved to an innovation phase. What once appeared as “solutions” in the first phase – an e-commerce website – looked like a limitation when we focused on the market and the users from this new perspective. Customers were using the website during lunch hours, and we knew that they were walking from the storage cabinet to the PC with written notes about what they need to restock. These two things pointed to a fundamental inconvenience in usability. This inconvenience couldn’t be fixed by a more usable website, however. It was a great opportunity for a mobile application with a bar code reader for replenishing inventory.

Had our product strategy remained focused on the website, we would have run repeated usability tests to fine tune the features, and we would have continued to focus on competitors to keep up with new features. The idea of a mobile app that really addresses that fundamental inconvenience wasn’t possible until we shifted our perspective. By combining our knowledge of the market, the users, existing technology capabilities, and design expertise, an innovation became imaginable. A new product is conceived that can move into the more traditional product management processes.

Product Strategy and User Experience Design

The example above points out how UX design is a strategic skill. As the realization of business strategies become more dependent on the development of digital products (or products that make heavy use of digital technologies), the UX designer offers the unique combination of:

1. How to understand the real life of users;
2. The capabilities of technologies and devices;
3. How to make something easy and fun (or at least really convenient) to use—three of the seven areas of expertise I described above.

This moves us closer to business strategy and simultaneously requires a change in our deliverables. In an earlier article, I discussed how the requirement is a “somewhat strange and antiquated way to capture what a software system is supposed to do.” We have to develop new deliverables to replace the requirement as the first and best way to express the system we want to design. Conceptual wireframes, sketches, storyboards, and user models (like the famous Flickr model) are more appropriate deliverables for product strategy work. Companies that consciously do product strategy as a discipline know this, but there’s plenty of opportunity left in the mainstream projects many of us work on each day.

As such, we supplement the work of the CTO, whose job is to set a technical direction. Martha Heller describes this role well: “… the digital product groups hire a CTO, who designs and executes against the digital product roadmap.” In other words, the CTO is the technical expertise part of digital product strategy, while UX design is the easy-and-fun-to-use part and the knowledge-of-real-users part.

UX Design, Product Strategy and Gaming

A new opportunity exists for the UX designer as gaming concepts become part of product strategy. Who else is better equipped than the UX designer to bring this discipline to the table?
To decide that a product is going to be structured as a game rather than, for instance, a document sharing system is a strategic product decision, not a tactical one. When we start thinking about incorporating gaming concepts into our products to increase engagement, we’re making fundamental decisions about our products.

A lot of people are talking about gamification of digital systems. I could choose any number of people to quote about the fundamental structures of good games and how they can be applied to digital products. I like the succinctness that Jane McGonigal provides, so I’ll use her definition: “When you strip away the genre differences and the technological complexities, all games share four defining traits: a goal, rules, a feedback system, and voluntary participation.”

There are two conclusions to draw from this for UX design:

1. These are not simply features we add into our digital products; they invite us to think about our products in a fundamentally new way;
2. The UX designer is the best equipped discipline to bring the full force of these concepts to the product strategy conversation.

Blending these traits into an engaging and compelling UX – that is fundamental to the product itself – is really what the UX designer is equipped to do. That companies are now getting on board with the engaging power of gamification in formerly utilitarian software systems yields lots of opportunities for our once tactical discipline to become strategic.

How does one end up in UX after counseling delinquent girls and brain injured individuals? This question is one I am asked frequently once people find out the somewhat unorthodox route I took towards my career in UX. With some explanation, the connection between the two areas becomes much clearer and there is greater understanding for how my background in psychology has laid the groundwork for a career in UX.

Others Who Have Followed A Similar Path

It is difficult to think of the connection between psychology and UX without thinking of Donald Norman, as he is the person who set the stage for incorporating aspects of Cognitive Psychology within Interaction Design, one area of User Experience.

Certain basic principles of cognitive psychology provide grounding for interaction design. These include mental models, mapping, interface metaphors, and affordances. Many of these are laid out in Donald Norman’s influential book The Design of Everyday Things.

from Wikipedia

Susan Weischenk, “The Brain Lady” also comes from a background in psychology. She has written books, including Neuro Web Design: What Makes Them Click?, online articles such as “The Psychologist’s View of UX Design” and has her own blog “What Makes Them Click” where she applies psychology to understanding people for better design.

What I Did

So, how exactly does Psychology relate to User Experience in the practical sense and why did I make the transition from helping people in one context to designing for them in the other? After earning my Masters Degree from Columbia University, Teachers College, I left New York City and moved back to Philadelphia where I worked briefly with juvenile delinquent girls, between the ages of 9 and 13 years old, living in a group home.  With a great mentor and supervisor, I learned how to provide the specific kind of counseling that these girls needed. Lurking beneath the “tough” girls who often threatened others with violence were artists, poets, and overall creative souls. The tough girl behavior was a defense mechanism and how they survived in their world. The girls learned to trust me and share their more tender side. Skills that I learned and started becoming comfortable with during my training in graduate school such as active listening, observation, empathy, and collaboration, I focused on and improved in this setting as well as in my next job. (For more on what dealing with delinquents can teach you about UX, see Brett Lutchman’s post on that very experience). My other job, and one I held for many years, was as an outpatient case manager and clinician in the Drucker Brain Injury Center’s Community Re-Entry Program at MossRehab Hospital. I managed care, therapies and provided counseling. These clients had transitioned from an inpatient stay and were ready to return to career, school, or activity pattern based on their prognosis and level of injury. Frequent collaborative meetings were held to discuss treatment plans and make changes as necessary. On a daily basis, I observed people in various settings, including their own natural home and work environments, to better understand what they were experiencing and their specific difficulties to develop a plan that would help improve their lives. These are the same approaches I bring to my work as a UX designer.

How I Moved Into UX

After the birth of my first child, I needed to find a career that offered more flexibility; one that did not take as much emotional energy and allowed me to work part-time. Working with a brain injured population was one of the most rewarding, yet difficult experiences I have ever had in my life, so the decision to leave did not come easily. I worked with incredibly smart, talented people from different disciplines, within a collaborative environment, much like the team I currently work with as a UX Designer. As I searched options, I decided that web design could be a fun and flexible career. I began taking classes at Penn State Abington for website design.I learned C++, Javascript, Flash, HTML, User Interface design, and usability (among other classes). Once I finished that program, I began to design and develop websites for small businesses. I learned more about user experience, an area related to what I was doing with web design, but involving what I had learned and practiced in the field of psychology. I realized that the skills I had used in my “other life” in Psychology were so aligned with what is practiced in UX that it was a very natural fit.

What I Brought With Me to UX

Ability to understand people’s motivations

Psychology is the study of people’s behavior. Behind that behavior are motivations why someone is doing what they are doing. UX is very similar. We need to understand the “why’s” to design for the behaviors we are trying to elicit, all while making the user feel good about their experience so that they repeat these behaviors.

Research

To understand behaviors that help make our product useful to our clients and their users, we need to conduct research. My background conducting research almost daily in graduate school helped me ease into this part of user experience.

Problem Solving

There is never just one way to solve a problem. Every problem has multiple solutions. Being able to think quickly and offer useful solutions to accommodate multiple variations and desires of the client while satisfying their users is a skill overlapping psychology and  UX. I had a brain injured client who revealed that following her brain injury, her partner began to abuse her. Helping her to develop a variety of options, quickly was important. While the solutions I am expected to come up with in UX are not life-threatening, they can help improve the interactions with a client’s product.

Listening

This skill is one of the most important to learn in life, and oh, so hard for many of us. To make a proper psychological assessment, use of active listening skills helps gain insight into someone’s motivations. Graduate programs in psychology provide a great deal of training and practice in the use of active listening, indicating the level of importance it brings to assessments and therapy. So too, in UX, listening and assessing what our users are saying (or not saying) is one of the most important skills used to assess their behaviors and motivations for performing certain actions.

Observation

As with listening, being able to observe behavior provides such important clues into what a person’s motivations are. Staying out of the users’ way and allowing them to figure things out is a very difficult thing to do, but necessary to see if our design is doing what it was intended to. The only way to do this is to observe and allow the natural process to occur without our influence confounding the results. Evaluations of incoming brain injured clients allowed me to practice this, as it was solely based on observation. The plan of action that needed to be taken became clear, just by watching someone engage in daily activities, such as trying (and often failing) to cook from a written recipe.

Staying out of the users’ way and allowing them to figure things out is a very difficult thing to do, but necessary to see if our design is doing what it was intended to.

Written and oral communication skills

The ability to communicate clearly and effectively is another skill where there is overlap between Psychology and User Experience. This enables an atmosphere of trust and respect to be created which helps get approval from clients concerning design recommendations that are made. The main difference between the two is in the mode of communication. Where I mostly wrote daily notes and reports in Psychology, I now design wireframes with annotations, prototypes, sketches, personas, and storyboarding to explain my process and thinking.

Empathy

Whether in a therapy session or designing for our users, identifying with them through empathy only makes us better at what we do by stepping outside our mindset and into that of another. Whenever I sincerely empathized with my clients and their particular situation, whether a teen girl trying to protect what she believed to rightfully belong to her or a brain injured person who could not remember a conversation he had the night before, it became evident that I cared about them and wanted to help. By demonstrating empathy, I gained a wealth of information that improved the therapeutic process. This naturally translates to UX as showing we care about how the user interacts with our products helps to improve how they interact with our products.

Whenever I sincerely empathized with my clients and their particular situation, whether a teen girl trying to protect what she believed to rightfully belong to her or a brain injured person who could not remember a conversation he had the night before, it became evident that I cared about them and wanted to help.

Collaboration

Probably one of the most enjoyable aspects has been the collaborative process, both on a transdisciplinary team of therapists and working as the user experience designer on a team with designers, developers, product managers and marketers. There is nothing like many individuals expressing themselves (much like a really large, loud family) in the design process to make it fun while coming up with the best solutions for the users.

Iteration

Any time there is a plan of action, there needs to be the ability to change course when things are not working as planned. This is true both in a therapeutic setting as well as when designing. Life is ever changing, as should our work.

Looking to Make the Move?

With an open mind and a great deal of willingness to learn new skills and improve existing ones, transitioning from Psychology to UX can be smooth. My best advice is to network, find a mentor, participate in local groups, attend conferences and read. No matter what discipline you may be coming from, think about the tasks you performed in a generalized way and how they may transition to the field of UX. —- Brain image CC-by-NC from labguest

Research plays a vital role in UX, as we need to understand our users and their motivations in order to design products which meet their needs. Market research is all about finding out what people do and why. But how many companies have combined market research and UX teams? I’m going to outline what it’s like to work in this kind of team and share how my background in market research led to a passion for UX.

UX and Market Research: Why Can’t We All Be Friends?

There are a lot of similarities between UX and market research. David Kozatch noted many of them in an article he wrote in 2008 about breaking down the barriers between UX practitioners and market researchers. Earlier this year Richard Anderson wrote about the labels applied to user research and gave the example of Yahoo combining their UX research and market research teams. He argues that ‘it is important to understand that great benefit can be achieved when the two work together’.

I’m not aware of any well known UXers who started out in market research (or at least, who openly admit it!) but I’ve seen many talk or blog about techniques frequently used in market research such as Whitney Hess on user interviews. At the recent dConstruct conference, Kelly Goto’s talk was about the importance of understanding the emotional context in which people are using products through ethnography and other research techniques.

Doing Market Research

Few people actively plan to work in market research and my career planning was, in retrospect, a bit haphazard! I went to a talk at university which described market research as being a suitable profession for those who were nosy interested in people. There may also have been a prize draw involving champagne, and with that I was sold.  More seriously I had always had an interest in psychology, communication and analysis so I thought this might be the right path to follow.

Having graduated with a degree in English, I started my career working for a large market research agency in the continuous consumer panel division. This involved analysing a large set of data about people’s purchasing habits in order to provide insights for clients. Many hours were spent trying to be creative in PowerPoint! I then moved to another agency which focused on ad hoc consumer research. My role there involved managing the whole research process from taking a brief, working out how the sample should be structured, designing a questionnaire, analysing results and presenting them to clients. The purpose of much of the research we conducted was new product development; clients wanted to gain a deep understanding of customer behaviour and attitudes in order to develop appropriate products and test them out with real prospective customers before launch. Often we tested different mock ups of concepts and packaging to see which resonated best with the target audience. Although I didn’t know it at the time, there were some similarities with UX research.

As is common in large research companies, the interviewing was done by a specialised fieldwork division so I wasn’t actually speaking to users very often.  I began looking for a new challenge.

How I moved into UX

I started in my current role as a member of the research team for a b2b media company 4 years ago. We conduct surveys and interviews with professionals in different sectors in order to provide insights to shape the development and marketing strategy for a range of magazines and websites. As the delivery of information digitally has become increasingly important to the company, the focus of our team expanded to include UX. We’d been conducting usability testing for several years, seeing it as a natural extension of qualitative research like depth interviews, but it was the emergence of User-Centred design that really struck a chord. It just made sense and seemed to sum up things we’d been trying to communicate in all our work. Now we build personas, conduct UX reviews and user testing on wireframes, prototypes and live sites, alongside more traditional market research activities. I became so interested in UX that I’ve been completing a part time MSc in User Interaction Design over the past 2 years to really get up to speed with the theory.

What I Bring to UX From It

During my research agency days I learnt how to distil large amounts of data about people’s attitudes and behaviour down to the most relevant insights, which I think is very important in UX roles. I’ve also had a lot of experience giving presentations to different stakeholders and fully understand the value of simple and clear communication, which has also helped me in my current role.

A thorough grounding in research methods is really useful for UXers too, as you need to know when to use a survey compared to a depth interview, and how not to ask leading questions. Representing the voice of the user also comes naturally as I feel I’ve spent my career aiming to do that.

What I’ve Had to Work On

As you might guess from my background, I’m not naturally a very technical person. Since I’ve been working in UX I’ve become much more interested in technology which has resulted in significant investment in Apple products. But I recognise a better knowledge of how websites work would help me communicate with developers. I have very little knowledge of coding, so this is something I’m working on. I’m also not trained in graphic design so at the moment my recommendations go as far as basic wireframes and sketches using tools like Balsamiq. I have picked up some best practice design guidelines but I’m still learning.

Tips for Those Making the Move

I’d advise anyone working in market research who is considering making the move to UX to go for it! You have a lot of transferable skills and if you’re interested in how people interact with technology, it could be for you. Try to immerse yourself and read as many of the books and blogs as you can. There are a lot of great free and useful events you can go to such as UX book club and UPA meetings. These are excellent ways of meeting other UXers and learning about the field. There are also training courses and conferences (for example, UX London) if you can find the funding to go. One of the best things about UX is that its practitioners are from a wide variety of backgrounds and are generally very willing to share their knowledge and experiences.

One of the best things about UX is that its practitioners are from a wide variety of backgrounds and are generally very willing to share their knowledge and experiences.

What I’ve Found About Moving Into UX

I’m happy to have found my way into UX as it has opened up a new set of opportunities. People’s behaviour and needs change as technology moves forward, so the challenge of designing products to offer great experiences is always fresh. It is a growing field and there is a vibrant UX community to learn from. I hope that sharing how I made the move helps others to join us.

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Image CC by bixentro

Day 2 of UXI Live 2011 was a day of talks in Tel Aviv’s Kfar Maccabiah. Four morning keynotes and one closing keynote were the wholesome bread around the tasty meat of the four-track afternoon talks.

Design Principles: The Philosophy of UX—Whitney Hess

Whitney started out her talk by explaining that UX is establishing a philosophy about how you treat people (just as visual design is establishing a philosophy about making an impact). And just as visual design has principles (contrast, emphasis, variety, balance, and so on), so user experience design has principles.

She went on to lay out her ten principles of UX design. They are in the slides below, so I won’t waste space by repeating them here.

Are these enough? Probably not—each organization and each project needs its own principles to supplement these. She gave some interesting examples, ranging from Charles and Ray Eames to Starbucks, and gave some guidelines for creating your own design principles:

• Look at what your competitors are doing.
• Gather business goals, user needs, and brand attributes.
• Brainstorm across functions/capabilities.
• Limit your list to ten tops, preferably no more than seven.
• Make sure they do not conflict or overlap.
• Make them pithy and memorable.

She recommends using Jared Spool’s checklist to evaluate your design principles.

OK then. Now you’ve got a set of design principles. When should you use them? According to Whitney, always. But they are especially useful in project kickoff meetings, for prioritizing features, for brainstorming, for stakeholder presentations, and for resolving conflicts.

User Experience for Websites Designed for Smartphones—Barak Danin

Barak gave an insightful and entertaining talk about designing websites for smartphones. He started out by giving some statistics about the changing landscape of Internet use, and in particular the place of smartphones in this landscape. They are getting cheaper all the time (you can get a Chinese Android phone for $80) and the number of people using them is rising commensurately.

He talked about the stereotyped “mobile context” and how it is a mistake to make assumptions about context. (There are usually multiple contexts of use.) He advised looking at what smartphone users are doing right now on your regular site before thinking about building a site for smartphones.

When designing for smartphones, you have to prioritize carefully because of limited screen real estate, and bear in mind the many limitations (for example, no hover, finger size, availability of gestures, platform-specific expectations, etc.).

He finished by showing us Old Navy’s regular and mobile sites, pointing out the mobile site’s flatter hierarchy, lack of ads, store locator prominence, search box location, and link to the full site. There are a number of things here that are becoming conventions and we need to be aware of them when designing such sites.

How to Make Them Click—Amir Hardoof

How do we get people to do what we want them to do? How do we persuade them to part with their money in return for the product or service that we are offering?

According to Amir Hardoof, it is a process. And there are things we can do to to make it smoother. First off, a confused user will not buy. So we must not offer too many choices. People buy want they want, not what they need. He spoke about AIDA: Attention, Interest, Desire, Action. He referred to a three-stage process:

1. We need to catch their attention. To do this, we first need to figure out what they want.
2. We need to decide what the one action is that we want them to take (and only offer this one option).
3. We need to figure out how to lead them emotionally from desire to action.

People act emotionally, not rationally. Amir explained that the most important motivating emotions are love, pride, fear, guilt, and greed. And that we need to be asking questions like:

• What is the user afraid of that will disappear when they click that button?
• What guilt can they assuage by clicking?
• What can they get for free or save by clicking?
• What are others saying? (Success stories)
• How many other people are doing it? (Herd effect)

People will pay good money if they believe that clicking that “buy” button will eliminate a negative emotion or increase a positive one.

He finished by contrasting two forex sites, FxPro, which appeals to the rational, and Etoro, which appeals to the emotional.

The Psychology of Decision-making—Dr. Chaim Shapira

Dr. Shapira is a brilliant man, a senior lecturer at Tel Aviv University, and an expert on game theory. But above and beyond all this, he is a comedian. As one person put it, he is “a stand up comedian for the intelligentsia”. For a full hour, he regaled us with hilarious stories and anecdotes from the worlds of economics, psychology, and current affairs. The only problem with his talk was that we were too busy laughing to pick out the serious points that he was making. Here are just a few:

• People tend to trust those that they consider to be “above” them (though this trust is rarely justified).
• We ignore events that do not support our existing beliefs and find proof that confirms them in insignificant, unrelated events.
• The less people know about an issue, the clearer and more obvious the solutions seems to them.
• People are very bad at thinking long term. Ditto for organizations and states (because they are run by, you got it, people).
• People are under the illusion that they are in control, even when they are not.
• People lack vision.
• In negotiation, to be rational when your opponent is not rational is not rational.
• People are prone to giving quick answers from intuition without actually thinking.
• People often mistake correlation for causality.
• The media are as guilty of these as anyone else, and they exacerbate them. They also concentrate on the negative and ignore the positive.

What can we take away from this as UXers? Apart from the need to be aware of these traits in ourselves, it’s the importance of keeping an open mind and to be willing to seek and accept advice.

UX Design for News Sites: Behind the Scenes at the BBC—Tammy Gur

Tammy Gur is a senior creative director at the BBC and is responsible for UX for the BBC World Service website, which has 127 million users across the globe, with content in 27 languages and 8 different scripts. The website is predominantly a news site. The challenge is to generate UX for a constantly-changing environment in a generic way that will fit each day’s news. The content is not separate—it is and must be an integral part of the design.

She took us through the recent major redesign of BBC Mundo, BBC World’s Spanish language site, serving the whole of Latin America (except Brazil), and which has fierce local competition in various different countries. This started with an “understanding phase”, where they gathered new business requirements, performed a deep competitive analysis, interviewed both journalists and users, and established a vision that was consistent with the BBC’s existing goals and values.

From their research, they concluded that the site must be up-to-date, include video, have clear navigation that exposes additional and related content, incorporate improved picture navigation, have an improved layout that allows for easier scanning, and reinforce the brand.

They also carried out a content hierarchy workshop with journalists, which resulted in the site’s structure hierarchy.

The site design had to fit into the same universal grid that all BBC sites use (part of the organizations’ Global Experience Language (GEL), which also includes things like typography). The final homepage consists of a main title, the current top story, rolling news with time stamps, video, in-depth articles (if any), popular articles, and topics. Exactly the same content is available via mobile (mostly not on smartphones in Latin America)—the content areas are ranked by importance, and the mobile rendering is based on this. The design and flows were validated against the needs of research-based personas.

The most important conclusion from this whole process? You must know how the content is written and published. For more, see Tammy’s recent Johnny article, User Experience and the design of news at BBC World Service.

Being John Malkovitch: Getting Inside the User’s Head—Ami Rotter

We don’t have a magic tunnel for getting into John Malkovitch’s head. But according to Ami Rotter, we do have tools like GotoMeeting that let us get into our user’s head, at least to some extent.

He showed us how at MediaMind they have used remote usability testing to test various new features and proposed interface changes. Most UX practitioners will already be familiar with this stuff, but it provided a good primer for the many attendees from other disciplines.

One interesting point that Ami made was that in addition to finding problems that you can then fix, usability testing sometimes generates positive feedback, which is great for team morale.

Future UX Trends that Will Affect the IT Space—Adina Hagege

Adina is director of information experience for Windows Server at Microsoft. She distinguished trends from enablers. Enablers are the technology behind the trend. A trend itself is an area where specific growth is taking place that is attracting sustained attention from our target audience. The trends she highlighted are:

• Gamification—using traditional aspects of gaming to make routine tasks more fun and engaging. (Principles: achievements and goals, competition, ongoing feedback.)
• Better together—the power of many people to share and co-create content. (Principles: shared content, simultaneous work, instant answers.)
• Power to the person—dynamically adapting a design to the user and not the other way round. (Principles: natural user interfaces, context is king, fun and productivity, identity.)
• Anywhere—do anything from any device, anywhere. (Thanks to cloud computing, powerful personal devices, and universal connectivity.)
• Insight not information—increasing quantities of information create a need to reduce cognitive load by providing processed and visualized data that can actually be taken in. (Principles: visualizations, decision engines, relevancy sorting.)
• Experience economy—people have learned to expect more from their purchases. (Principles: beyond point of sale, genuine interaction, customer care (people, not machines).)

How to Design for Facebook—Oren Shamir

Oren Shamir of McCann Erickson Israel talked about the research they have been doing about user behavior on Facebook. He started by giving us some statistics about Facebook usage patterns. For example, the average user has 130 friends and spends more time looking at pictures than anything else. They only create content once or twice a week. (But beware of averages! They can be misleading.)

Less than 28% of users have liked a brand page. But a small segment of users like lots of brands. Users who do like a brand usually do so to get discounts and coupons and to give feedback.

He went on to explain what companies can do in terms of fan pages and applications. In a fan page, more of the page is taken up by Facebook itself, but you get the wall and five tabs (which, unfortunately, are easy to miss). In an application, you get more screen real estate, but the user needs to authorize it, which is a barrier. And the longer the list of actions that the application needs to be able to do, the fewer people authorize it.

Their research was based on eye-tracking followed by immediate debriefing interviews. Some of the findings:

• In their feed, people mainly look at the feed itself. For an individual item, they read the text and only glanced briefly at the avatar.
• In brand pages, people are very content-driven. People looked at the tabs a lot, but usually because they didn’t understand them. apart from that, they focused mostly on the wall.
• Facebook search is terrible. People found the search box just fine, but often ended up on fake brand pages. It is hard to find a brand page and just as difficult to re-find it.
• There is a lot of inconsistency between different brand pages.
• There are lots of distractions, which makes it hard to complete tasks.
• Lots of people ignore the notifications.

There are several strategic questions that you need to be asking:

• Should you have a Facebook fan page, a regular site, or a mini-site?
• A tab or an application?
• A new page or a tab on the main page?
• How are people reaching us?
• How does it look on mobile?

He finished by giving some specific advice and recommendations:

• Keep flows short and focused.
• Use pictures wisely.
• Keep the order of your tabs consistent.
• It’s better to have a number of sub-pages than one brand page with lots of tabs.
• Give people content that they can share (short content, pictures, videos, etc.).
• Be social—respond immediately, look for friends.
• Put the value that you provide to the user front and center.

Oren finished up by showing us some examples of brands that are doing a good job on Facebook: Coca-Cola, Asos, Starbucks, and Samsung Mobile IL.

For more, see our recent interview with Oren.

The Right Way to Wireframe—Russ Unger

Russ’s started out by stating that unlike visual designers, we don’t usually show our work (specifically wireframes) to each other, at least not in public. And that this is a bad thing. We all have a lot to learn from each other, even if it’s just “Hey, that looks just like what I make. I guess I don’t suck after all.”

He went on to talk about a challenge that he took on with three other designers: Fred Beecher, Todd Zaki Warfel, and Will Evans. They took a good-cause site, Lend4health.com, which helps people lend money to people who need it for autism-related medical expenses, and which was being run with no budget and no design help, and designed the flow for making a loan. Each designer based his design on the same personas (researched and created by Gabby Hon) and found a visual designer to help him.

Each one selected a different tool to work with, and got to work figuring out the IA, creating a sitemap, sketching, wireframing, and then handing over to the visual designer to work their magic. They were not allowed to talk about the challenge until they were finished. Three of the videos that the designers created to show their process are available here.

Russ ended with some important principles:

• Sketching is thinking.
• Critique is essential.
• The best tool is the one you know.

See you next year!

Day 1 of UXI Live 2011 was a day of workshops in Tel Aviv’s Kfar Maccabiah. Russ Unger and Whitney Hess from the US were joined by a raft of local experts for a packed day.

Guerrilla User Research—Russ Unger

Russ led an extremely fast-paced workshop that really took us out of our comfort zones. He started out with a brief presentation in which he outlined the benefits of guerrilla research:

• It’s faster, less rigorous, and LESS EXPENSIVE than regular research.
• It provides sufficient insight to make informed decisions.
• You can fit it into just about any project.
• Some research is always better than none.
• It is a gateway drug to “proper” research.

He went on to give some examples of the kinds of testing you can do guerrilla-style, like man on the street, Rapid Iterative ProtoSketching, user/browser role-playing, A/B testing, unmoderated testing, mobile testing, and more. Then the fun really started. Russ had us (in groups) do a pitch and critique exercise, where each group had to come up with an email interface for grandma. Then he picked one group and its leader had to pitch their idea to the room, who then critiqued it. The next exercise went much deeper. Each person was tasked with sketching out ideas for a system for a hotel that would let guests check in, check out, order room service, etc. Then we pitched and critiqued in pairs. Each group then pooled its ideas and came up with a design, which we then went out and tested. With real people. We had to go out and accost people on the street and ask them to look at our designs (in return for chocolate). We also recorded what happened using our smartphones. (In this case, the whole group was there and saw the problems that the users had, but in real life, this would be invaluable for showing to stakeholders.) It was simply astounding how much this simple activity revealed. With just a couple of real people, we found several problems with our design that we never would have discovered without this research. Thanks, Russ!

Landing Page Design—Tamir Cohen

Tamir started out by asking the audience to define landing pages—what are they? We concluded that a landing page has a single goal, gives one answer to one clear question, and is usually part of a marketing campaign. Users reach them via search results, banners, or email marketing campaigns. In the first exercise, we had to define the audience for an imaginary site by creating ad-hoc personas. Knowing our audience is crucial if we are to meet their practical and emotional needs. Tamir stressed that it is very important to establish good communication with the marketing person who is responsible for the campaign—they have the information that we need (product information, audience, competitors, page objectives, etc.) The goal of a landing page is conversion, whether that is the user making a purchase, subscribing to a newsletter, downloading something, or whatever. And we need to have a good idea of the number of conversions we will get for the money we have invested. We were tasked with designing the skeleton of a landing page in just ten minutes, keeping in mind that you only have a few seconds to capture the user’s attention and get your message across before they decide whether to stay or leave. To do this, the page must be relevant, clear, inoffensive, and not confusing. You shouldn’t:

• Try to be too clever, with teasers or plays on words.
• Use flash intros—you will lose the user’s attention.

But you definitely should:

• Keep it simple.
• Focus, focus, focus—minimize distractions.
• Provide just enough information.
• Keep it clear and clean.
• Focus on the user’s needs and the value you can provide them. (Don’t focus on your offering.)
• Talk about the results that your offering will provide for the user.

Tamir concluded by explaining what a landing page is made of:

• The main area of the page should be dedicated to addressing the user’s feelings. It should arouse curiosity. If it asks a question, the answer should be “yes”. Use positive language.
• Secondary text should include more detailed information.
• If the page requires information from the user, the form should be as short as possible and make it hard (or impossible) for the user to make mistakes.
• Testimonials should be short and real. They should include the name of the person and some details.
• The text of the call to action button should be phrased as a clear action, and if possible it should incorporate the benefits to the user. It must be emphasized visually and look clickable.
• Use known marks as trust builders (e.g., ISO9000 mark, padlock icon, PayPal icon)
• Video has a huge impact, but not always in a good way. Unless used wisely, it is not recommended.
• Stick to no more than two or three colors. Use it for emphasis only where needed.
• Use only one font, and minimize the number of different sizes. Avoid decorative fonts—they reduce readability and are not always found by search engines.
• Be sure to say thank you if the user converts, and do it on a separate page. This page will help you accurately measure the number of conversions, and can be used to offer additional products/services.

Web Analytics—Assaf Trafikant

In the world of old-fashioned advertising, measurement was hard. But on the Internet, you can measure everything. And analytics tools allow to us not just measure and collect, but to analyze, report, and hopefully understand and then to use this understanding to achieve our goals, whatever they may be. But as Assaf explained, the available analytics tools give us our analytics data so nicely pre-packaged and presented that it is all too easy to just use the dashboard that we are given and look at it regularly, but no more than that. He advises taking a different approach—first to figure out who your (internal) audience is, find out the questions that they want answers to, and only then to start thinking about how analytics can help answer them. He stressed the difference between passive analytics (the ones that you can’t do anything about, like users’ screen resolutions and the percentage of people using smartphones to access your site) and active analytics (where you actively match the analytics to your questions). For UX specifically, the questions are usually concerned with user behavior: what do users click on? Does this feature work or not? How much time do they spend on different things? Do they scroll down this far? Analytics can answer all of these questions and many more besides.

Creating a Culture of UX—Whitney Hess

If an organization doesn’t have a culture of UX, your methods and professionalism don’t matter—it will be very difficult to push UX there. So we need to be business strategists, to broaden our focus beyond just our part of the outcome. We need to plan our moves carefully and work on convincing the right people. Negotiation and persuasion are core skills. Whitney presented five case studies that represent the different roles that UX practitioners typically have (sole UI designer at a small tech company, UX VP at a large marketing company, independent UX consultant, and so on). We organized ourselves into groups according to which of these roles we most closely identified with. Then Whitney had us do an exercise where one group member tried to convince the others of their case.

Whitney talked about a number of negotiation techniques from two books that she recommends: Getting to Yes and The Psychology of Persuasion. There are a number of different negotiating techniques that people can use, and it’s important to identify which they are using with you. She suggested several advantageous approaches:

• Work alongside the other person to attack the problem together.
• Don’t make assumptions about their opinions.
• Act differently from what they expect.
• Show them that you are able to shift your position.
• See things from their point of view and adapt.
• Focus on interests that are shared by both sides, not positions.
• Generate many possibilities before making a decision—creating solutions is a different process from making decisions.
• Make it easy for them to make the decision.
• Decide the criteria together in advance.

Then she gave us an exercise in which each group was given a real-life challenge tailored to the group’s persona. Each group was tasked with preparing a pitch to give to management in an attempt to improve our position and promote what is important to us, making use of the negotiation and persuasion techniques we had just learned. When we were done, Whitney told us how each situation had actually played out in real life. She concluded by revealing one last weapon that we have in our arsenal—if all else fails, we have the ability to say “no”. Stay tuned for our report from day two.

The final — and main conference day — for UXLX saw 450 people from 32 different countries flock to the the Lisbon FIL centre to hear Don Norman, Christian Crumlish, Kristina Halvorson and more.

Beyond User Research: Building an organisational brain — Louis Rosenfeld

The first talk of the day really put a mark on the presentations that would follow. It was a talk about the elephant in the room in practically every design case I currently work on; big companies are usually chopped up in little departments and those departments do NOT communicate with each other. Lou held a strong plea that those departments should start working together in order to create a better user experience and outweigh your competition.

• Silos —Lou is a consultant in information architecture and visits lots of companies who need his help with getting their act together. Whenever he asks about search analytics, the voice of the user via the callcenter or usability research reports, most busineses have to ask three different departments about these things. There is nobody who connects theses “silos”, as Lou likes to call them. So if there is a Usability Research Silo and a Customer Support Silo, do you think they should be talking to each other? Or at least connect their findings in some way? Hell yes. And this is not only the case with research and analytics departments. Most of the time, the “brand strategy” is created in Silo A and the persona’s for the screen designs are written in Silo B. And these Silos also do not communicate with each other.
  These silos are missing out on the combinatorial effect: together they are better than the sum of both when viewed apart.
  So do we do with these silos? Well, let’s blow them up.
• Getting there — So how do we blow up these silos? First off, Lou tells us, you have to get out of yours. Visit some other Silos and find out what they know. Work together.

Lou concludes his talk with a few pointers you need to keep in mind when establishing a decision making organ. First off: blue sky it. Ask yourself, if you’re going to build a dicision making apparatus, what would it look like?

Next: Ban loaded terms and crutches from the discussion, like “omniture”, “user testing”, “market research” and so forth, because these words tend to take the discussion on roads your company has been walking on for too long.

And the bottom line: blow up the silos and put people together.
“Companies that integrate their silos of insight will outpace their competitors.

Playful Design/Design for Play  — Christian Crumlish

Play, like design, is both wonderful and available for multiple interpretations – something Christian Crumlish took full advantage of in his wide-ranging talk.

Starting off with the analogy of how print designers bemoaned the web’s lack of control, Crumlish suggests that we should be using the concept of play — its original meaning is ‘to dance’, which is apt as we should be thinking about allowing space. Play gives us masks, the chance to have an assumed identity, and the change to carry out re-imaginings (one entomologist is a dedicated participant in Civil War re-enactments to the point that he brings in era appropriate bugs to attack the troops!).

He gave a quick overview of what makes games work.

1. Starts with an invitation to begin
2. Boundaries [magic circle], what will happen
3. Rules are key — what is fair and what is not?
4. Goals — what is the end point you’re reaching out for? (Gamification is based largely on this)
5. Competition — we naturally compete, so that type of environment can help with play. But  it’s not only option — collaboration is also a important alternative (the board game Pandemic is a great example of this). The leaderboard can draw people to that and neglect experience — people also like to work together!

Moving on to playing in the musical design —he believes we  can turn our users into maestros, as an expert Illustrator user is much like a musician! — Crumlish provided a range of analogies (frameworks set up the rules, you need a bit of chaos for creativity, as in jazz). However, for me, his utterly inspired point was that of creating tunable experiences:

You don’t need to create a perfect experience, but instead one that’s tuneable.

A great example of it is Twitter—you keep tuning it to get what you want (more/less). Extending the metaphor that musical ensembles are about “getting in tune” (choosing what key), he suggested that we choose to “ensemble play” in the key of a certain hashtag.

And for those who know anything about Crumlish — he’s known as an avid amateur ukulele player — yes, he finished up the talk with a tune.

Critical Thinking for UX Designers – Stephen Anderson

After sun- and T-shaped thinkers Stephen Anderson decided that it was time to introduce a new type: Z-shaped thinkers. According to him these are people who think beyond the obvious, people that dare to turn the challenge around and take it a step further. “When everyone zigs, zag.” The point that Stephen wants to bring across is that it’s not about the tools, it’s about the thinking process itself.

When looking at existing examples Stephen mentions people like Negroponte who dared to embrace the limitations of creating a laptop for children that would at max cost $100. Instead of being blocked by the constraints he managed to turn it around and create a really interesting laptop. Another hero of Stephen is George Lucas. When he started with the Star Wars movies nobody knew how they had to make it, but George Lucas simply said that they had to aim for the result they wanted to have and would find a way to reach it. This way of thinking makes it possible for us as UX designers to really take challenges on and make a difference. But what’s the way to do this?

As an example Stephen gave the audience a simple task. First he asked everybody to “Design a vase.” When people did this he turned the challenge around and showed everybody how you should look at the challenge: “Design a better way for people to enjoy flowers in their home.” This simple task really showed everyone what the right approach is. The question that follows this is whether or not a lot of designers ever get the room to rephrase a challenge like this… often the business has a clear description of what they want and it’s difficult to change things around. But that doesn’t mean we must avoid it. It means we need to understand the importance of it and should try and talk to the right people in the right language. And this is where Leisa Reichelt’s workshop on Strategic UX fits in perfectly.

Z-shaped thinkers…

• reframe the problem;
• explore many perspectives
• synthesize information
• embrace constraints
• challenge assumptions
• appreciate details

… in order to envision unseen opportunities.

Content Strategy — Kristina Halvorson

You know that world of junk that WAL-E lives in, picking up the odd interesting trinket? That’s the way content is these days on the web. Halvorson says that those odd trinkets are the occasional piece of good content she finds in her travels as a content strategist.

With that sobering metaphor in mind, she talked us through the realities of content and content strategy these days:

• The elephant in the room of any conversation is where the content for a site will come from and how it will be maintained. To make matters worse, web writers are normally brought in far too late into the picture.
• Content is not copywriting, The content goes into a messy ecosystem, and has a lifecycle.

So what is content strategy? He colleague Melissa Rach has the following definition:

Content strategy helps figure out how content will help you meet your business objectives

Halvorson sums Content strategy  up as plans for the creation, delivery, and governance of content. (Note, it’s a verb, not a noun). Or the below diagram:

She points out that while the field has been around for fifteen years, it’s only been recently that UX has started to pay attention to it, perhaps because it never seemed relevant. Even now she points out that UXers may think they don’t have do deal with workflow and governance. However, they do have to ask the right questions.

• Demonstrate — hold a mirror up to their pain. She showed an example of  history.com showing Valentines Day content on the 16th of February, and a paralysing data-dump of all categories.
• Recognize the life cycle of content — there are a whole lot of models as to the hoops content has to jump through, but it’s most important to understand which must be changed regularly, and by who.
• You need strategy and tactics. As Sun Tzu says in The Art of War “Strategy without tactics is the slowest route to victory. Tactics without strategy is the noise before defeat”
• Quoting  some well known professionals goes a long way to supporting your arguments.
• Draw — pictures are good.
• Envision. Decide the picture you want to aim towards.

Discussing the conundrum of CMS’s (and their somewhat failed promise), she recommends the blog CMS Myth.

The Cross Channel Experience – Nick Finck

Ninety percent of businesses say the cross-channel experience is critical to their business success. Nick Fink talked to us about definitions, methods, tools and examples to help us create a seamless customer/user experience (he believes the names don’t matter as the goal is the same). We need to answer the question: “What is it that we need to do to (sell a bike/let people enjoy a conference)?” and create a seamless experience for our products and services.

Businesses and also UXers tend to think in channels, but customers don’t. They don’t think in the silos that businesses create and perceive one business through different channels or touchpoints. So it’s important to craft a coherent cross-channel experience.

But how can we do this? Of course we need to gather insights on how people use our products and services. We have to pay attention to detail and look for hacks: e.g. what do people add to a product to enhance the experience. And we need to follow the experience through to the last point and learn the business process behind it. Once you’ve gathered the insights you can create a customer journey map, an experience map or a service blueprint, all of which help you to visualize the cross channel experience.

Finck takes Netflix as a good example, because they have matched the different touch points in such a way that the system is pro-active: It knows when you’ve had a problem with its service and proactively compensates you for it. It informs you when it sends a movie or received one back from you and will allow you to engage with its services on any device (iPhone, iPad, TV, laptop, …) This is a sign that Netflix has aligned its stage and backend to serve their audience a seamless experience.

The question of businesses is: ” How do we do this?” We need a strategy.

• Break down silos;
• Different disciplines need to work together and co-create the experience;
• We need to have a unified vision of what we’re trying to do.

It’s great that Nick Finck talks about the experience beyond the screen, and the theme of breaking down silos is definitely a recurring theme at UXLX (see also Louis Rosenfeld’s talk). As UX’ers we have the skills and tools to help break down the walls, so let’s go out and do it.

Cage Match: Mobile web vs Native Apps — Josh Clark

Let’s get rrrrready to rrrrrrrumbleeeeee!

I was getting really excited when I heard the title of this talk (rescheduled from Jeff Veen because of illness).Josh’s presentation was really set up as a match— from the premise, right through to the imagery of each slide (each with some old skool wrestler, boxer or luchadore in a position that reflects the context). I always like guys who put something “extra”, some delighters, in their presentation.

The presentation is not backed up by statistics or real life examples, but consists of observations and temporary technical restraints that both contenders inhabit.

Josh shows the audience two different commercials. One for the iPhone 4 app “Facetime” in which we see smiling people sharing emotions with each other:

Then he shows us the commercial for the DroidX phone, in which astronauts find a strange device in space. Within this device they find a phone that kinda integrates with the astronauts arm and forms itself into an Android phone. Did I hear a nerdgasm?

The different cultures couldn’t be clearer —  iPhone is about emotion, Android features and technology. So making an app for iPhone or Android can be based on your marketing strategy or the way people would want to use the app.
Then there is the mobile web. “It’s webtastic. Everybody loves her”. That is because you only need to make one app and your done. You have an instant reach of everyone who owns an iPhone or Android phone (Josh briefly addresses Blackberry, Windows Mobile and Windows Phone 7, but they are irrelevant to the point).
So, if everything is a match, there has to be a winner, right? No.
There is no winner. Both contenders have their strengths and weaknesses, so it’s comparing apples to oranges.
But Josh has a very strong point of view that in order to be something in the world of mobile devices, you should at least have a mobile website. And on top of a mobile website you could, for example, create an app for your most precious customers; an app that provides them with something handy and unique.
Josh declares a winner that, in my opinion, is no contender in this match, but plays a whole different sport: the API. True, when you have a good API, building a mobile site and native apps is a breeze, but for me, this outcome was a bit disappointing, given the premise of the talk.

• Apps need an appstore, websites do not.
• Apps can make money pretty quickly, websites not so.
• Apps have great UX, websites not so.
• Apps have to be downloaded, websites work right away.
• Apps need to be updated manually, websites can be updates as much as you want without having to bug the user.
• Apps are about doing things, websites are about reference.
• Apps have great word-of-mouth, websites not so.
• Apps can speak with each other, websites not.
• Developing an app is a pain, building a website is not; in fact, prototyping a mobile website is a breeze.

So both have their advantages and weaknesses, no shocker there. But why not make an app that hold a frame which hold a mobile website? These Hybrid apps can work and you would have best of both world… right? Not exactly. The problem with an app is that is has to feel like an app. And an iPhone app feels differently from an Android app. So your mobile website must behave accordingly. Ofcourse this can be resolved by creating two mobile websites.

Ding ding ding! But we want a winner!

The Manual of Detection — Dario Buzzini

For his talk, Dario Buzzini used the detective novel “The Manual of Detection” as a guide to UX practice, backed up with examples from his work at IDEO.

Starting with the poetic (and somewhat provocative) statement: “We designers, we write stories not manuals, we design experiences not procedures, strive for beauty not truth”, he picked 11 quotes from the book that had relevance to UX.

1. On Shadowing — it’s not about being unremarkable but appearing as if you’re meant to be there (like a shadow)
   In relation to skills needed in a job — you need to have more than one in order to seem as if you should be there!
2. On Language — As an investigator, you need to know how to talk the right languages, objects have memory, too.
   Surgery situation — the nurse is touching the patient’s hand not only to comfort them, but also to measure anaesthetic. realised in surgery situation that the gadget for the nurse with stylus would eventually be used just with thumb!
3. On Leads — follow them, to let them go.
   Often your first idea may be the best, but it can’t be your only one. IDEO has a parking lot for ideas on their whiteboards, so that designers get their ideas out and move on.
4. On Documentation — most is for the wishing well, not a file .
   Buzzini stressed that should be actionable (echoing Dan Brown’s talk on documentation the day before).
5. On Nemeses — important to find your opposites.
   IDEO create partner teams for projects (apps etc) where both sit and work together. Can be difficult but helpful.
6. On Bluffing — If you’re caught in a lie, lie again.
   “Designers Lie. [laughter] Designers *sometimes* lie”. Sometimes your clients don’t need to know the truth so much as get a feel for an approximation. IDEO made a physical obstacle course for phone provider to show the hurdles customers had to go through to get a contract. The client got it. [Don Norman later commented that marketers lie and thus are successful. Designers are too honest for their own good!]
7. On interrogation—the process begins long before you are alone in a room together. By then, you should already know your answers.
   User research starts before talking — what people say is very different from what they do. Buzzini once interviewed a woman with limited dexterity who said that she had no problem opening pill jars. How she opened them? “I cut it open, how else would you do it?”
8. Cryptology — be careful what you dig up, it’s yours.
   Designers haven’t helped people with banking, making it hard for them to understand what happens with their money. Banksimple is using diagrams to help with that.
9. On Solutions — a good detective tries to know everything, a great one knows just enough to see him through to the end.
   In UX, this is about prototyping — you just have to choose and work smart. A good example for prototyping is Liveview App that lets you send a screencast to an iOS device
10. On Dream Detection — be careful to check whether what you’ve seen is real or a fallacy.
    Check exactly who it is you’re designing for.

Living With Complexity — Don Norman

In his keynote speech “Living With Complexity” (based on the book of the same name), Don Norman urged the audience to understand the difference between the complicated and complex, think about where the complexity is in any system, and to think signifiers, not affordances. Some of his findings were:

Another interesting tip he provided was to think about where the complexity occurs in a product system (aka Tesler’s Law of the Conservation of Complexity). For example, with coffee machines, in a manual it occurs with the user (making the coffee), a semi-automatic in the machine, a pod model in the packaging.

He finally echoed other speakers such as Halvorson with his reminder that it doesn’t matter if a design is bad unless it starts to affect sales.

——–

By the end of the day, most people had managed to collect most (if not all) of their UX Trump Cards (apparently Bill Buxton and Robert Hockman Jnr were particularly hard to find) and Mental Notes mini-sets. While the fabulous location was a given, UXLX excelled in running a tight ship — speakers were kept to time so the four rooms never got out of sync, a common problem with conferences — and a line up of quality speakers. It’d be great to see some more local/European speakers (a prime example was how Netflix — a service that isn’t available in Europe— was used as a case study several times), but given the diverse crowd, hopefully some will cross the line from participant to speaker next year.

With sun, sea, and a tropical 30 degrees C outside, no wonder people kept  saying that UXLX felt like a vacation. You might think it a pity to be indoors. Luckily day one of the conference kicked off with some cracker material that justified staying inside.

Storytelling for User Experience – Whitney Quesenbery

One of the first workshops of the day was kicked of by Whitney Quesenbery. In her workshop she tried to teach the audience the importance of telling stories during the design process, both to clients and team members. One of her main messages is that stories aren’t a broadcast transmission, but always create a connection between the audience and the storyteller:

• the storyteller shapes the story;
• the audience form an image;
• the storyteller and the audience affect each other;
• the most important relationship is between the audience and the story.

When a UX designer did research and shares his knowledge with the team stories can be a great way of doing this. When done right the storyteller retells the important parts of the stories the users told him, thus creating a connection between the design team and the user.

In order to become good storytellers we first must learn to become active listeners. We need to really be willing to hear the story people (users) are telling us and understand what’s it all about. Being an active listener means we have to encourage the story to be told further, by asking open questions and giving non-verbal feedback.

During the workshop Whitney actively involved the audience by giving several tasks. She focused on the following subjects:

• Story structure: structures give the story a shape and help the listeners/readers to understand it better. Is it a me-they-me structure, do you want to turn it into an adventure structure or should it be a contextual interlude? The way you set the story up can help engage people in the right way and lay focus on the right part of the story (like the product, the user or the process);
• Story context: context grounds the story in a specific place and time. You may want to emphasize (or change) the location, time, history or something else to help the listeners to understand it better.
• Purpose in UX: stories help drive UX work in several different ways. Do you want to share a success story and share what made this product so great or is the focus of your story to facilitate a brainstorm and do you want people to think in a different context?;
• Format of the story: there are many ways to tell a story, you can decide how. Is it written or drawn like a comic? Should it be a formal presentation or a light conversation starter?
• Imagery: imagery gives the story emotional resonance. By adding details about the sounds, smell or motion of the environment or a specific person you can pull the listeners into the world you are creating.

These tasks were closely linked to the book she wrote with Kevin Brooks called Storytelling the User Experience., so if you want to know more I would definitely check it out (also check out our excerpt). All in all it was a very interesting workshop with loads of stories. And as Whitney said: “what is design but a story?”

Become a UX Team of One – Leah Buley

UXers may know about being asked if you’re an innie or an outie, but if Leah Buley’s research catches on, you might also be a giraffe, bee, beaver, or penguin. Confused? They sum up the types of people that might be described as a UX Team of One. In her interactive and workshop with a lot of new material (such as I can’t find pictures of the gorgeous icons she used for each animal), she took the group through planning their futures, and thinking about ways to combat issues as the lone UXer.

However, her outstanding and memorable takeaway (including beautiful icons sadly not caught on camera but bound to end up on badges) was that of the four types of UX Teams of One. She sees them as a spectrum (most of us start at number one and move down), and classifies them as the following:

1. The Crossover (giraffe) has recently come over from another field. (Their long neck is from foresight).
   As their challenge relate to focus, access and skills, the strategies are to do with collaborating and DIY research. A key point to remember is that clients won’t allow for research do it should just be built in or ‘done on the sly’ (our podcast with Sam Lader on design research also talks about this).
   Some methods include using MAYAs Heuristic Markup, The Five Second Test, and competitor images (even getting the clients to collect them as homework!)
2. The Doer (a bee) is a knowledgeable person in a company without a UX department — they usually have to do things beside UX or move departments a lot. As they are held back by being brought on too late, or not valued, they need strategies to focus on professional relationships, visibility, and ROI.
   Some relevant methods included Liva Labate’s UX Health Checkup, product definition workshops (stakeholders repeatedly draw and disucss their product vision, as after a couple of rounds they’ll be far more aligned) and “Lunchtime UX” listening dates with other key team members.
3. The Builder (beaver) has been in UX for while on point of starting UX team.
   As their issues relate to relationship management and politics, the strategies are to align with business and build out a team. Methods included ongoing internal surveys, case studies and pre-meetings (1-to-1 reviews of docs with each key stakeholder before a key design review)
4. The Independent (lonely penguin): those that are freelance etc. Literal team of one
   They need to promote themselves, be legally savvy, and set their own terms (e.g. using a project brief). What’s more, they need to be known for something (as Leisa Reicht has blogged about).

Buley has been evangelising the UX Team of one for a few years now, but those who saw her talk a while ago (or looked at the slides) should definitely see it again as there is a whole lot of new information in preparation for her book-in-progress of the same name.

Skeuomorphs: The Good, The Bad, and the Silly – Andrew Watterson

Skeuomorphism is the act of using cues from the old to make new things feel more familiar. It has been applied for a very long time and can in our practice be a great way to introduce people to new technology and interactions. Some of the better known examples of skeuomorphs are the sound of digital cameras when you take a photo and the fake engine sound electrical cars make so that you can hear them approach.

When launching a product with a totally new way of interacting, like the iPad, you see that skeuomorphism can be an easy way to let people get used to the device. Watterson gives examples like the bookshelf in iBook and the old fashioned look of the contacts page. But at the same time he points out that there is still a lot of debate whether this approach is really the best way to go. There are a lot of people who have strong opinions for or againts, like our writer Rahul Sen is the recent article ‘The IxD Bauhaus: What Happens Next?’  I believe that there is a balance and that skeuomorphism can definitely be a good thing, but that we should always try to keep challenging ourself to also look at different ways of approaching the interactions. It’s just one way to reach what we want, but surely not always the only and best one.

Watterson’s conclusions regarding to this topic:

• Use skeuomorphs to add a satisfying and nostalgic emotional effect;
• Bridge gaps between what people are used to and a new method with skeuomorphs;
• Question whether you’re skipping the opportunity for innovation by using a skeuomorph;
• Don’t mismatch your functionality with a skeuomorph.

Picking your Neurosurgeon’s Brain— Susan Dybbs

For most of us, the closest we get to seeing what happens in an OR is through TV shows. However Susan Dybbs showed us not only what a surgeon sees when they’re carrying out telesurgery, but how we can use participatory design methods to understand highly expert and tacit processes.

Starting with Terry Winograd’s observation that designers have limited time to process things like how something feels like is in the tacit domain, Dybbs pointed out the issues that designers have when trying to create interfaces for highly expert systems such as telesurgery interfaces — the designer can’t get anywhere near the understanding that the users have of what happens and what is working. She resolved this by reating a toolkit of a mockup process with clipping (words, chunks of information, pictures of xrays etc) and then got surgeons to talk/make through their experience of surgery.

One of the most interesting insights from this method was being able to show the difference between what users say they need and what they actually use. In the case of surgeons, this might be documentation that is for legal reasons but never used in actual surgery, information they didn’t actually need (surgeons thought they needed to see the room view but actually didn’t) and vice versa (e.g. sideness — which side of the body you’re operating on, is a minor but key piece of information in helping a surgeon orient themselves with telesurgery).

Her tips for best practices:

• Create a toolkit (nothing is more scary than a blank piece of paper)!
• Do your research (sort original themes)
• Precondition your participants (e.g. photojournal, or just storytelling/pre-interviews)
• Keep it rough + impermanent
• Think aloud (helps show mental models)
• Be flexible (e.g. meet people at their comfort zone — help them make collage if they don’t want to do it).

Creating the Ultimate Experience: UX + CX + CRM — Stuart Cruickshank

Can you have a relationship with your oven? Stuart Cruickshank argued that you could. How? Through a combination of acronyms: UX, CX (customer experience) and CRM (customer resource management).

CRM has traditionally looked at strategy, business, and technology, but thanks to social media, a new branch of this known as Social CRM has emerged that also looks at engagement and conversation through empathy, emotion, authenticity, transparency. A great example of a company using social CRM is Zappos — their model means that their customers have a great experience and feel empowered, while the company gains advocates and profit (they have no marketing budget!)

On that oven? The Art Home Electrolux project attempts to do this (an exciting restaurant in Paris uses all Electrolux products, and the cook provides tips about cooking, meaning the customer could go home and cook what they got at the restaurant, as well as continuing the conversation through social media.

After a lot of conferences talking about service design, it was refreshing to have an alternate take on service systems UX could get involved with. As Cruickshank pointed out that the end of the talk, while CX and CRM have more visibility at the corporate level, at the end “experience is the goal”.

For those interested in the topic, he highly recommends Paul  Greenberg’s CRM at the Speed of Light (4th Edition).

Effective Design Documentation Without a Fuss — Dan Brown

Despite the growing interest in living prototypes for UX, it looks as if design deliverables won’t be going away any time soon. Dan Brown (who we interviewed earlier this year) tried to trick the attendees into saying it might be or otherwise, but most UXers know to always say “it depends”!

What is design documentation? Brown defines them as “an artefact, defined by a team, to create a project, whose purpose is to move a project forward.”

He suggests that many designers forget to think about purpose and progress (at worst making some projects stand still), as above all, documentation should inspire action.

Brown breaks down design documents into different types: clarifying approach, justifying decisions, comparing multiple approaches. Each of these should be handled differently, just as your structure should change if you’re writing for a different audience (e.g. developers vs C-level).

He finished up with a look through the Eight Shapes Unify system he took part in creating. His rationale for the system is that most existing templates in Word etc are a waste of time as they force you to fill in blanks.

The best takeaway in regards to writing was to “be a journalist not a comedian” — in other words summarise first rather than having it at then end (common in comedy but in journalism known as burying the lead).

Designing by Doing: Bringing Agile Thinking to UX Practice – Anders Ramsay

Agile development is one of the hot topics in todays UX scene, so several talks at the conference today focused on this topic. In Anders Ramsay’s workshop he didn’t jump into the agile process itself, but used the approach of agile thinking and showed how we as designers can use it in our day to day practice. He did this by giving several tasks:

• Paired interviews: this method comes from paired programming, where two programmers sit behind one screen and together write the code. In paired interviews you let two users interview each other instead of you interviewing them one by one. According to Ramsay this is a great way of getting insights you would normally be unable to collect, since the users themselves know what to talk about and what is interesting to know. By letting them conduct the interviews and write down the interesting material you can collect great amounts of raw data in a short time;
• Agile personas: in agile development you don’t design all the details at once and you try to minimize the amount of documentation. The idea behind agile personas is to create very light-weight artifacts out of research data (like you collected through paired programming). By letting the entire team check the raw data and detect trends you are able to share with them important insights. When you after that write the agile personas (real name, main characteristics and quotes) you have a great starting point for your future discussions;
• Story flows: use some of the user stories you collected in your user research and prioritize them. After this you can start adding tasks to each story and prioritize these as well. Even when you are not doing scrum you can still use story flows to get a good overview of what you want to create and especially what’s the most important thing to do first.

Ramsay’s workshop was very engaging, although a bit chaotic. He was well able to show everybody the power of agile thinking, although there are still so many other things to agile thinking that would have been worth sharing… one of the aspects I find most interesting is the daily standup with the entire team, to get a good feeling of what the current progress is. You don’t need to scrum to have the benefits of this way of working together as a team.