Don’t Ask Leading Questions

A leading question guides the respondent to a desired answer by implying that there is a correct answer. People tend to provide socially desirable answers, so if you ask a question that guides them, they will likely provide one that they believe you want to hear. Leading questions can be used by people to persuade someone. They should not be used when trying to uncover new information or understand an audience. They reduce the objectivity of the session, and therefore, reduce the reliability of the results.

Example:
Leading: ‘Why would you prefer to use our product?’
Better: ‘What are your thoughts about using our product?

In the leading example, it implies that the respondent prefers the product and is enquiring as to why. The respondent may list a bunch of reasons that they like the product but may leave out crucial information where they believe the product could improve. Asking about their opinions and thoughts will provide them with a platform to discuss the product freely.

Example:
Leading: Would you prefer to use the product to improve efficiencies or to gain an overview?
Better: Why might you use this product?

In this example, the interviewer provides two reasons why someone might use a product. The interviewer may have only considered the two reasons why someone may use the product. Simply asking why they may use the product achieves the same goal, but also allows the respondent to consider other options.

To avoid leading questions, act as if you know nothing of the topic. Note down what you would ask if you have no information at all. Keep the questions simple, neutral and free from any words with connotations or emotions. It is also best to have an independent observer assess the topic, as it is easier for them to have an unbiased opinion on the matter.

Behavioural, Attitudinal

People often hold a belief that does not match with their behaviours. Using a mixture of attitudinal and behavioural questions uncovers what a person does, but also their thoughts about their actions. Attitudinal questions are used to understand their opinions and motivations. Behavioural questions are used to find out how a participant does something. It is best to utilise a mixture.

Example:
Attitudinal: How often should you brush your teeth?
Behavioural: How many times did you brush your teeth last week?

Try to keep all behavioural questions about the user’s past, as future behaviours are influenced by opinions and attitudes. It is best practice to repeat questions from a different angle. Don’t be afraid of users repeating themselves or going over a topic multiple times.

Ask Open-Ended Questions Instead of Closed Questions

Open-ended questions are ones that require more than one word to answer. Closed questions result in either a yes/no situation. Open-ended questions are used to find out people’s goals, motivations and pain points. They provide an opportunity for the participant to speak freely on the topic.

Example:
Yes/No: Do you like coffee?
Open: What are your thoughts on coffee?

Closed questions should be avoided unless you want to either clarify to gain more context to the user’s situation. Yes/No questions close down conversations and can be considered as quantitative. The following examples are both fine to use in an interview, as they will put other details into perspective.

Context: Do you drink coffee?
Clarify: You mentioned you drink coffee, correct?

When creating your questionnaire, try and stick with ‘how’, ‘why’, ‘what’, ‘when’ and ‘where’ questions.

Don’t Use Double-Barreled Questions

Sometimes interviewers get excited and want to ask multiple things at once. Double-barreled questions touch on more than one topic. This can be overwhelming to answer, and respondents may either try to answer both at once or answer only one part of the question. If you want to ask something on multiple topics, it is best to split them into two different questions.

Example:
Double-barreled: What do you like about coffee and new coffee products?
Better: What do you like about coffee products?

It is normal in casual conversation to ask questions in such a manner. Interviewing is best when the questions are short and to the point, focusing on one topic.

Differentiate Between Quantitative and Qualitative Questions

Quantitative and qualitative questions both have their own strengths and weaknesses. Quantitative questions are typically reserved for surveys but can be used in interviewing to add some context and allow the interviewer to ask more follow-up questions. They mostly uncover ‘who’ and ‘what’. Qualitative questions will provide detailed information on the topic of interest, uncovering the ‘why’ and ‘how’.

Examples of quantitative questions:

• Numerical answers: How many coffees do you drink a day?
• Preferences: What type of coffee drink do you prefer?
• Single word answers: What brand of coffee do you drink?

It is not immediately obvious and clear-cut the quantitative nature of these questions. You can tell through the low complexity of data gathered. If you ask these questions to participants, you will get a straightforward answer. However, the issue is that the responses are not statistically valid, and require further investigation. You can better use your time in an in-depth one on one session asking qualitative questions such as:

Examples of qualitative questions:

• Recount your morning routine.
• Why do you prefer one brand over another?
• Why do you drink coffee everyday?

Shifting to why and how people do things, outlining goals, motivations, pain points and delights gives a much more in-depth perspective. These insights can be validated later through other techniques, but interviewing is the quickest and easiest way to gather them.

Wrap Up

For qualitative interviewing, there are few clear best practices. Each interviewer has their own way of gathering information and forming questions. The tips above are there to guide you but are not definitive rules that one cannot break. I hope these help to elevate your interviewing process and gather better insights.

The post How to Write Effective Qualitative Interview Questions appeared first on UX Mastery.

In the quiet of a crisp Minneapolis morning in November 2017, Zack Naylor stared at his laptop screen. An email had just blinked into his inbox, in reply to some routine customer research he was doing for his product strategy software, Aurelius. The sender line showed it was from one of their earliest customers, but it was the message itself that sent tingles down his spine.

“We’re actually exclusively using the beta now”.

At that time, Aurelius was product strategy software, just entering its third year. It had recently launched a beta version that reimagined the tool with a focus on research and insights. What made this email special was its confirmation that Aurelius customers were now using the beta—the optional beta—more than the product they were actually paying for. 

“It was an interesting, but also a very proud moment… It became very clear to us we should sunset the older product and focus everything on research and insights,” Zack told us.

It was the point where they pivoted direction, changing tack to become the popular research and insights platform we now know as Aurelius.

Planting the Seed: Zack’s Early Career

Zack describes himself in his early career as a “pretty good front-end developer, and an okay visual designer”. He was dabbling with an approach to design that didn’t really have a name or clear definition yet. He was working in start-ups, and through practical experience taught himself the principles of user research. Utterly fascinated, he read everything he could about what would later become popularly known as ‘UX’, working further back in the human-centered design process, starting with his design and development view until he was at the early stages of discovery and product strategy. As many UX professionals can relate, he got bitten by the UX bug and didn’t look back. 

Zack had UX experience working in both Fortune 500 and startup contexts, but it was with his move to Minnesota for a job at The Nerdery that many pieces fell into place for him. The Nerdery is a strategy, design and technology consultancy, and his role as the Principal UX Designer there gave him responsibility for up to 50 active projects across his team at any given time. What this meant, practically, was his ten thousand hours in teaching people and building a research practice.

“I realized that while I could teach anybody how to design, it’s much more difficult to teach people the right things to design.” 

He also realized that the best way to do this is by creating a design culture with a foundation of customer empathy backed by solid insights gathered from user research. 

The Nerdery gave him experience in helping people make the right decisions on designs, products, and features, and as a result, he discovered for himself the constants within this type of effort. “There are a number of patterns for how you ought to approach this work. It doesn’t matter where you are, what the industry is, what your team looks like… There are some pretty basic universal truths”. He wanted to help people make these decisions at scale, rather than have to hire someone every time. It was in this environment and way of thinking that he met his future business partner, Joseph Szczesniak, and Aurelius was born. 

Genesis of Aurelius

It was just before November 2015 that they were in Zack’s basement (surely a place where great ideas are born) discussing product strategy. “There’s got to be a way we can help people make these decisions better—like we did when we were actually hired to help them”. After an inevitable round of brainstorming, they emerged with some exciting concepts for building the software to help. 

Aurelius thus began as a product strategy platform that valued research and insights. A lot of hard work went into developing the idea and its execution, and things grew rapidly.

Juggling time while building Aurelius

Aurelius is 100% bootstrapped and self-funded – which means all the design mapping, UI creation, development, startup admin, problem solving, and everything else, happened on their own personal time. Zack would wake up at 4:00am to clock in on Aurelius for several hours, do a morning workout, and then go on to his day job. At night he’d get home to spend more time with his family, then make some more progress on Aurelius.

With two young kids—a one-year-old daughter and a six-year-old son—plus full-time work, commitments as the president of the UXPA, and all of the Aurelius workload, there isn’t much time leftover. 

“Any of my time and attention that does not go towards my family, Aurelius, or my full-time job; I basically don’t do”. 

Both co-founders are in Minneapolis, but much of Zack and Joseph’s connecting is done remotely. Despite being only 20 minutes away from each other, meeting online is much easier for simply getting things done.

Zack laughed when we asked where he got his energy and persistence from. He says it’s a matter of dedication; it’s because he loves what Aurelius does, and they really want to solve this problem with research, to help people and teams make sense of what they learn. 

This motivation is uncommon amongst a startup culture often driven by dreams of corporate takeovers and buyouts. Aurelius intends to remain self-funded. “We don’t want to take funding because both of us have worked in startups and seen how various levels of funding influence direction and priority and, quite frankly, mess up the direction of your product. That’s important to people like us because we are the people who do that work. We want to stay very true to solving that problem.”

As you’d find with many successful startups; it’s also about passion, “We work really hard learning from customers and folks in the industry to help Aurelius support successful products and successful companies. That’s what drives me.”

Motivation to solve the ResearchOps problem

You get another insight about what motivates Zack in the way he describes Aurelius as a vitamin;

“You may not feel like you need to take a vitamin today, but four or five years down the road, if you weren’t getting an essential vitamin, you’d really regret it.”

Aurelius helps you build a research repository so that you can come back and get even more out of the research you’ve already done. “When it comes to ResearchOps, InsightOps, and DataOps, there are great, sophisticated tools for doing the design. But we don’t have good, sophisticated tools for making sure we’re designing the right things. And that’s arguably much more important.” 

Zack suggests that most products fall on one side of the fence or the other: they are either a painkiller or a vitamin. Painkillers might suppress the problem for the time being, but vitamins keep the practice healthy for years to come. “Aurelius is very much a vitamin. It helps you grow your research practice into a healthy asset for the business.”

The Pivot: Moving from Product Strategy Tool to ResearchOps Engine

The original version of Aurelius was targetted to product strategy, and Zack estimates ten percent of signups wanted it just as it was. But it was the other 90% that often said things like ‘I love this. I wish we were mature enough to work this way. But tell me more about this research and insights piece that you’ve got’. Once they’d heard that more than a few times, Zack and Joseph got curious. There was a pattern of people struggling with organizing, applying, and getting more out of the research they had already done.

 “As you mature in research practice, the broader product strategy problem will actually start to become apparent.”

People were interested in the research and insights potential of Aurelius — but what was the solution? The decision was made to take it out and make it it’s own product: the beta version of Aurelius version 2 was a dedicated research and insights platform. While this was emerging they still had paying customers using the original version 1, but then came the moment that Zack will never forget. “It was one of those early mornings where I got an email from one of our first, early customers on Version 1. I was doing some regular customer research with them… and I remember them saying, ‘We’re actually exclusively using the beta right now’. They had paid upfront for a year’s license of Version 1, but were basically neglecting it for the beta of the new product.”

Their customers were using the new beta more than their paid product, justifying it by describing the purpose and supporting functionality as a better fit. It was a very proud moment for Zack. He followed it up with other existing customers “If we killed v1 tomorrow and just continued building this, would you even blink an eye?” The answer? No, they wouldn’t.

“It became very clear to us we should sunset the older product and focus everything on research and insights. And we’ve been far more successful as a result.”

The Shift: How Aurelius Changed

Aurelius reinvented itself as a research and insights platform with some novel approaches to solve traditional problems of user research analysis and synthesis.

In short, it helps you tag, analyze, organize, search, and share everything you learn from a qualitative research dataset. Notes, connections and patterns learned from customers, Aurelius helps speed up the process of discovery. 

By collating research in Aurelius, you automatically start building a research library. This holds some powerful potential. When asked what was learnt from a particular research project there are two common outcomes:

1. You weren’t the person who did the research, and maybe they’re gone, so a lot of the native fluency with the findings are lost. You may need to redo the research. Or,
2. What was learnt wasn’t captured in enough detail by the original report—so it’s only a snapshot in time.

With Aurelius, this isn’t a problem as it’s already been recorded and tagged, possibly even while still in the research session itself. The platform is flexible in how it can work, where you can add and connect key insights. You can take a bottom-up approach where notes can be used to create insights. It was intentionally built flexible enough for customers to do that.

It could also be described as a multi-functional note collation tool. Whether you’re recording research as transcripts, notes—or a mix of both—you can use Aurelius to tag as you record, and then theme and group thoughts you want to focus on and think about more deeply. It helps you see what you have and what you’re still missing, so you have more time to focus and work on your insights.

It also means more flexibility across design teams. You don’t need to just hand over a report; teams can explore and dig deeper into the original data, discovering new things of their own via tags and key insights in the project space. When teams have access to the entire, raw collection of evidence, organized in a way that’s easy to see, new opportunities for discovery can open up.

Zack recounts a story shared by a paying customer in the Version 1 days, who told him it was often ‘faster and easier’ for them to do a whole new research project than to put together learnings they had collected in past research.

“I mean, that just hit me like a ton of bricks because that should just never be true… As an industry we can do a better job than that. I got very passionate about tackling it, and today it’s one of the biggest reasons why people come to Aurelius.”

Aurelius supports user experience designers in the way they out to think.

“No single tool will make anybody good at UX design. I very, very strongly believe that. Simply put, Aurelius helps researchers do the work that they are doing today, but makes it faster and easier.”

The Meta of using Aurelius to build Aurelius

Zack and Joseph use their own platform daily, to understand future improvements for the Aurelius platform. “Everything I learned from customers, everything I learn even from prospects of the market, I use Aurelius projects to do that”

“We want research to actually inform the direction of where a company goes because these are the most successful products and companies in my opinion”.

Once teams have the ability to organize and do more things with the research and insights they have stored in a respository, then they’re able to consider the bigger picture, and ask for more of what they need from the platform. Ultimately, as part of Aurelius, Zack wants to support these people as genuinely as possible. And 99% of the time Zack is the one doing that; answering support questions, responding to feature requests, fixing bugs. “I take a lot of pride in the fact that people really appreciate it, despite how small we are. We care about what we’re doing and the people we’re trying to serve”. 

Both co-founders are clear about the problem to be solved: to help people make sense of what they learn. “User research is going to help you make better products, better features, better designs, better decisions. We’re just trying to help you do that faster”.

Mention UX Mastery to get 10% off any Aurelius plan, just email Aurelius after you sign up to claim the offer.

The post Living the change from Product Strategy to Research Ops: The Journey of Aurelius Labs appeared first on UX Mastery.

After many user research interviews, tests and pilot runs – the team at PeakXD in Australia has developed a program, in collaboration with the British Computing Society (BCS), that upon completion gives you a UX certification valid in over 200 countries. 

We sat down (or, video called, technically) with Tania Lang – one of the few instructors and writers of PeakXD’s 12-week Accelerator Program – to talk about the exciting new course.

What were the motivations to create a certified course?

It was just something that a lot of our customers were crying out for. It benchmarks professional’s skills to an international standard, and makes them stand out from other graduates. It’ll help their career progression – either by side-stepping or moving up, it attracts better-paying roles and future proofs them by staying current. 

We’d often hear, “Do I get a piece of paper at the end? Should I go back to university and do a three- year, two-year masters, or should I do some course? What piece of paper do I get at the end?” So, it’s largely around customer demand really wanting that piece of paper.

I actually interviewed some employers recently, and pretty much all of them said the piece of paper is nice to have, but the experience is more important. If someone comes to them with 10 years of experience but no piece of paper, that’s probably better than a piece of paper and no experience – but if you have a degree or a certification, that’s a nice extra. I wouldn’t say it compensates for lack of experience, but it brings them extra points, if you like. It’s not critical, but it’s nice.

How is it certified with the BCS?

For many years – 20 even – we’ve been talking about certification in the industry – but no one could ever agree on what that was or what that looked like.  What ended up happening was a lot of vendor certification. You’d do a course and get certified for that specific course – but that doesn’t really mean anything.

To me, I think it’s really important to try to build a certain standard and quality within the industry. The challenge in certification with UX has always been that the answer is not always just black and white – “Do you know this or not?” – The answer to something depends on so many things. It’s a little more challenging trying to do certification when the answer’s often “It depends.”

The British Computer Society have sat down with a team, including David Travis*, in the UK and worked out a syllabus that covers a lot of the basics. It’s foundational. So, this is not an advanced course, but it goes through all the foundations that we would expect a UX person to know. It’s focused more on approach and methodology rather than design principles, which are always changing.

Who is this course best for?

Our main target audience, our personas that we’ve created, are primarily people who have some experience in digital or IT, or marketing or psychology or research who want to sidestep their career into UX. They often have a lot of transferrable skills, but they don’t always have the confidence and realize the value of those skills. For example, if they’re a Business Analyst, they might be good at interviewing or stakeholder management – skills we highly value as UX people. The course is giving these people the tools and frameworks that they need to sidestep.

It’s also for people who may have just sidestepped or are starting out in UX roles, and they get that impostor syndrome. They really just don’t have the confidence, or the knowledge, and they’re making bad design decisions and bad research approaches because they don’t have that good, strong grounding. This course gives them those vital foundations to improve.

The PeakXD online UX Accelerator course is great. I love the artefacts and templates, and the step by step guidance throughout… It has practical examples and advice and working on a real business…
I feel like I am gaining practical knowledge which will help gain a career in UX.

– Tamsen M, Melbourne

How is the course structured?

You’re working on a real project, for a real client, in the program. So, it’s set up with 10 modules over 12 weeks, which includes 74 video tutorials – that’s approximately 60 hours to complete it. One of the things that I do in my face to face training is I tell a lot of stories… because you learn through storytelling. People have said “Oh, online won’t work because we’ve got so much value from the stories that you tell in training,” – so I’ve made sure all the stories I tell face-to-face are in the videos as well.

Each module runs for a week and have six to eight lessons in them. Participants can do them at any time… however, people aren’t always good at online learning. They’re not good at self-pacing. What we’ve done to combat this is rather than it being self-paced, is we have a specific intake date. Everyone in that intake works through the program together. Each week you watch videos, do an activity, and then have a live coaching call where they get feedback on the activities that they’ve submitted and also a chance to ask questions. At the end of the 12 weeks you take an exam (at one of the 5000 approved exam centres across 175 countries) which gives you your certification, and you also participate in a digital showcase.

It’s a global course, so what happens with the live coaching call for people in different time zones?

The live coaching call session is recorded, so if they are at three o’clock in the morning in the US, they can watch it the next day. They can also submit their questions prior to that to make sure, if they’ve got any questions, they still get addressed in that coaching call.

How do the real-world projects work?

One of the things we have designed in our program is the opportunity to work on a real project for a real client over 12 weeks and build up that project, real-world experience and also your portfolio at the same time.

We’re trying to replicate a project where participants are working collaboratively. It’s hard when it’s online, everyone’s remote, working individually. So, each week everyone uploads their content, their interview findings, etc. to a Google Drive, and then they can see each other’s work. Between all of them, they might to 10 or 15 interviews – they can then draw on everyone else’s interview findings as well as their own. That way we’re trying to get collaboration just like we would in an agency, where people go off and do interviews, and come back together. We’re trying to get as much collaboration happening as possible, like you would on a real project. That’s why we’re all working on the same project as well, not all different projects.

What kinds of projects do participants get to work on?

We’re trying to find charities or non-for-profit organizations, because part of our philosophy at PeakXD is to empower others to improve the world through human-centered design. We’re trying to find projects where we can do good.

For example, with our next project we’re working with an organization that supports wildlife rescuers – which is a very emotive. As the whole organization is based around supporting wildlife carers, they’re trying to map out the best approach to do that. First of all research; what do they need? And then what do they need digitally? What’s the digital solution to that? We haven’t worked out what the problem is yet, so the program will first of all work out the problem, and then work out what digital solution is… maybe a Facebook group, a website, a forum, an app… we don’t know yet, but that’s for the students to work out.

How does the course help participants connect to potential employers?

We do two things – a portfolio and a digital showcase.

In week 12 we go through building a portfolio. We encourage people to keep records, journals of everything they’re doing – what was challenging, what was the approach, what went well, what didn’t go well – that sort of stuff. When they go to do their portfolio, they build it based on that – because employers aren’t just interested in a bunch of artifacts, they want to see the approach, the challenges, all that sort of stuff.

The other thing we’re doing to help them get a job at the end of the program is what we call a digital showcase. After their course, they can upload their portfolio or link to a portfolio, and that’s going to be open to a small number of employers and UX recruiters who understand the UX space. It’s a way for recruiters to see that pool of graduates and their materials and portfolios.

It’s just a way to showcase digitally, rather than face to face. UX people aren’t always good at selling their own wares, and selling themselves, so this way it’s a little bit less intimidating, and also non-geographic as well.

Why would people choose this course over another out there?

Asides from the certification, we really wanted to try and create something as rigorous as possible but at a budget that people could actually afford. To do this we decided to go with group coaching, but we’re also giving individual feedback when participants upload activities. So they get the best of both individual feedback and collaborative working.

We’ve also set up an arrangement with study loans (for Australian residents), so that if people can’t afford an up-front fee, they can apply through study loans. It’s basically a $200 up-front fee, and the interest rate is pretty reasonable, and then they basically can pay that off over up to four years. So, they could pay it off in as little as $27 a week over four years. That’s nice to be able to offer that for those that can’t afford it upfront.

How have people responded to the course so far?

We had someone recently who had already done another vendor’s course who did our pilot with us – basically she would do the course as normal, but in exchange for her feedback on what to improve she got the course for free – and she said “I’m already finding this is better than the other course,” which was exciting to hear! We did a lot of work over last year putting this together and that was really encouraging that our first pilot was already hitting the mark.

Bonus!

Normally, PeakXD only offers 12-month access to their course modules, as they continually update the modules as new UX trends and foundations come out.

For UX Mastery readers they are kindly extending that 12 month ONLY access – to lifetime access to the video lessons for as long as their program is running (provided your account remains in good standing).

Use referral code UXMASTERY when registering to gain lifetime access.
Enrol now to be part of the October 21st intake.

*A previous version of this article mistakenly named only David Travis as a collaborator on this project with BCS, when it was, in fact, a whole team. You can read more about the certification here.

The post Interview with Tania Lang, Instructor of PeakXD’s Accelerator Program. appeared first on UX Mastery.

Shopify is the world’s leading e-commerce platform with 800,000+ people from 175 countries using its platform as of 2018. Its ability to empower entrepreneurs and small businesses has pushed it to the forefront of the industry.

Shopify’s design and research team has been growing steadily over the past few years. We spoke with Erik Goyette, and other members of the Shopify design and research team, to learn more about how they approach user research and design.

What’s Shopify’s mission?

Erik: Shopify is a commerce platform that helps entrepreneurs and businesses of any size design, set up, and manage commerce stores across multiple sales channels. We provide merchants with a powerful back-office and a single view of their business. Our mission is to make commerce better for everyone so that entrepreneurs around the world can easily start a business to sell online, through social media or in person.

How does user research work across Shopify?

Erik: Shopify’s goal is to help small and large businesses become more successful, so making sure our product is easy to use is essential. We’re super passionate about understanding the problems our users have and building tools that will help them accomplish what they need to do.

One thing that maybe differentiates us from other businesses is that user research is directly embedded into teams. Being part of a team helps us researchers get a lot of deep context in a specific product area. On the other hand, researchers love discovering new things, so we also have the freedom to stray off the path and start digging into larger, more undefined problem spaces.

Could you let us know about a recent user research project?

Erik: I conducted a series of exploratory interviews and concept tests for my first project at Shopify, and thought to continue using my old method for sharing information: an atomic research database (Tomer Sharon explains the method best here).

I analyzed all of the interviews into a bunch of really interesting individual observations that were then grouped up into insights. As a researcher, I love this method because it serves as a very detailed, searchable, and well organized “second brain”.

However, as a method of sharing findings, it wasn’t very effective. The team had very specific questions to answer and though the answers were available, the atomic research format has a little more friction involved in finding them. Where a presentation or a report pushes insights to its audience, insights have to be pulled out of atomic research. As a method of sharing research, it’s much more demanding on the people who need insights to inform their decisions.

Realizing the lack of engagement with the atomic research format, I went through and turned some of the more relevant insights into stories. Those stories were then included in a little presentation.

Stories informed by data is very impactful at Shopify, so I’ll have to find out how to pair that with atomic research as a method. Ideally, atomic research doesn’t just exist as a hyper-detailed library of knowledge, but also as a driver for change.

What software does Shopify use? What have you tried in the past? What’s been working well?

Erik: We use Slack and G Suite extensively. We try to use tools that the rest of the company also uses, so we can more easily collaborate and share resources. But we’re also lucky to have the freedom to use whatever we believe will get the best results.

For interviews, we’ll often use Google Hangouts, Zoom, or Lookback. The nice thing about Google Hangouts is that participants don’t have to install anything, but it doesn’t work if you’re using Safari. Lookback is a fun one because it works on mobile and desktop. Notes you take are time-stamped to the recording, which is fantastic when reviewing.

To catalog our research, we’ve built a research library. Anyone across the company can go there to find our reports, slide decks, and recordings of our presentations.

Dovetail’s been great for our research team as well because if we’re ever curious about certain keywords or themes, we can search across multiple projects for them. With 50 researchers, there’s a lot of qualitative data available to remix and learn from. In a way, it’s become our second research library in addition to being our main tool for qualitative analysis (goodbye, spreadsheets!).

What challenges do you have with user research?

Erik: Before focusing on research, I was a UX specialist. I dabbled in designing the product (wireframes and interaction design patterns) in addition to running research initiatives. When designing, I received a lot of feedback on my work that helped me re-assess my approach. Moving to a role where my focus is now entirely user research, I’ve been reflecting on how I receive feedback and how I measure the success of my research.

If I compare research to the design and engineering disciplines, where there are very clearly defined opportunities for feedback from team members, the feedback cycle for a researcher is less structured and less frequent. We’ll get eyes on our research plan. If we’re lucky, or ask for it, we’ll get some feedback on how the research findings were presented. Questions about whether or not we could have shared the information in a better, clearer, or more memorable way are rare. Feedback on how the analysis was performed? That’s a black box for most people, and it takes a long time for even a talented researcher to understand someone else’s analysis, so the lack of feedback there is understandable.

What we’re often left with as feedback on how we’re performing is the impact of our research. If the research leads to a project (which isn’t always the case) it can be a difficult thing to measure because of the long stretch of time that user research lives at.

As a researcher, you could be conducting exploratory research on a project that won’t be prioritized until a roadmap planning meeting many months in the future. Leading up to that meeting, you could try measuring the impact of your work by paying attention to how people think about a problem. At the very least, you can feel a sense of satisfaction when something you have uncovered becomes a team’s focus. It isn’t necessarily something you use to improve on your work and methodology in the future, but it’s nice to know that there was alignment on a goal and user research played a part.

What’s changing about user research at Shopify?

Erik: As Shopify expands into new markets, we’re exploring how researchers who have a deep understanding of a product area can approach international research. Localization of content is one thing, but we also have to consider how business processes and expectations may be different in each of the countries we support.

We’ve also been checking in on how our knowledge management solutions are performing. In an effort to be more resourceful, we’re going to make sure existing user research is organized and formatted in a way that can be consumed and understood by other teams. Some research is almost timeless and will always be relevant.

Why do you do what you do?

Erik: I am absolutely in love with Shopify’s users. They’re driven, they’re smart, and they’re a wonderfully diverse group of people. Seeing someone gain independence by turning their passion into a business is so inspiring. Every day I wake up wanting to better understand how they work, what their challenges are, and uncover opportunities for us to help them reach their goals.

Any advice for new user researchers?

Erik: If you’re new to the industry or are thinking of turning user research into a career, my biggest hope is that you already have some of the foundational stuff down. The most important thing you’ll need starting off is the ability to think critically about the projects you’re working on, the questions people are asking, and your own work. You have to be able to zoom in, fuss over the details, and then zoom out to see the whole picture at a high level. If you have that down, you’ll be in a really good place to grow.

What comes afterwards is getting experience and growing your skillset. You don’t need to have first hand experience running card sorts, usability tests, interviews, surveys or a dozen workshops under your belt. You’ll learn that as you go, and improve over time.

With that in mind, it’s important to find an environment that’ll allow you to try out a bunch of research methods. For me, that environment was working at start-ups. Start-ups move at a rapid pace, and people will tend to run off and build while still holding some risky assumptions (with the best intentions). If you can find yourself in a place like that, equipped with your research mindset, you can experience a lot of growth and have a lot of influence. The skill you’ll have is the ability to test assumptions before anyone has to invest hundreds of hours into building something.

The rapid pace also means projects might wrap up relatively quickly, giving you the opportunity to learn from the launch, find the gaps, learn from them, and experiment with your research methods next time. If you’re resourceful and can handle the pace of the work, you’ll expand your skill set dramatically in a very short period of time.

The post Inside Research – Interview with Erik Goyette, User Researcher at Shopify appeared first on UX Mastery.

I was fortunate to be able to steal some of Sarah’s time while she was in Melbourne. I wanted to get a broader insight into her book and how Content Design differentiates itself from other specialised fields within User Experience.

Q: How does UX Writing differ from Content Design?

(Laughs) There’s a whole blog post in this! There are two parts to this. One is the UX thing.

At Government Digital Services in Britain where I worked for 10 years, we actually took UX out of people’s titles because User Experience is everybody’s responsibility, right? I mean, what are you doing if you’re not doing UX?

A lot of people will see UX writing as Microcopy in transactions. They don’t do long-form copy. So, they won’t do information pages, they won’t do selling pages, they won’t do landing pages, they don’t do any of that. They just do microcopy in transactions. And for some people, that’s what a UX Writer is.

This is where the confusion comes.

Content Design, as a term was used for the British Government at the time as I wanted to change the conversation around what we were doing. UX writing wasn’t prevalent then and it wasn’t relevant for us because we were doing more than microcopy.  More than tools and transactions. I wanted Content Designers to understand the whole journey. Do all the data, do all the evidence, be present in the research process. Understand all of that information and then pull it across to wherever it needs to be in the user’s journey.

Again, some UX writers do that. But some won’t then go on to write letters, which is very important because for government, the letters that they send out to people are often the first interaction people have with the organisation. That letter then sends them to a website. If those two communications don’t match, then there’s discombobulation going on in the experience.

Q: It’s true that in different work environments, terms and titles can mean different things. Is this a problem for the legitimacy of the practice?

There are in fact different titles we can call ourselves right?

Content Strategist, Content Designers, Content Writers, Editors, Technical Writers, UX Writers. And often we all have mix of the skills. But they won’t be the same. They’ll be a mix of them. Some people are just picking up a title so that they can get paid more money.

That’s a nightmare. It’s a total nightmare! I walked into a new project once, and I had been told prior to that, “Oh, we’ve got a team of established Content Designers.” I was delighted!

So I walked in on the Monday and said to the team, “Right, we’ve got three days of discovery, and then we’re going to do this and we’re going to Critique on Thursday and then we’re going to sketch words on Friday and then we’ll have the best version out by next week…”

They all looked at me horrified. They had no idea what I meant.

I was mortified because I looked like a twat.

It’s all because I just figured that they all knew what I was talking about because they called themselves Content Designers. They were copywriters and they’d just changed their titles. It was literally mortifying. I think I blushed for three days straight.

Q: How does the term fit? Are you a Content Designer or are you a UX Writer, and what does it depend on?

It depends on what you do before you put any fingers to a keyboard. That’s the main difference between any of these titles. A copywriter, for example, would generally be given a brief and say, “There you go. We’re going to do a tube ad in the summer. This is the subject.” And they will create an environment and they will sell and they will inspire and they will make you love the thing. They may be given some language. They may be given some insight. But in a lot of advertising places around the world, you’ll get none of that because you are expected to inspire.

With UX, again, it maybe that you have a lot of insight from your research, but you have edges to your digital sphere that you’re working in. Whereas Content Design needs to understand a lot. For me, it’s not Content Strategy. A lot of people call Content Designers Content Strategists as well. But I think Content Strategy is more about holding the strategy itself. Who’s doing what, when they’re doing it, who’s got governmental control. All of those things. And Content Design delivers that strategy. There’s this blog post on my site explaining the difference and there’s a little tool that you can go through and answer five questions. It will tell you what sort of writer you are.

Q: In your book there is a big chapter on facilitation and collaboration. If you take that out of the practice of Content Design, what does it become?

This just becomes how to write for the web! Very much choosing the format. Is it a tool, a calculator, a calendar, a video, what is it? Then it’s just a bunch of techniques on how to produce content that is most usable to the audience who is using it at the time.

Q: OK, so what does facilitation give it then?

I find that with most content people, actually producing content is like 30 to 50% of the job. The rest of it is talking to people to get their ideas through. Talking to the organisation about why they can’t have four and a half thousand words on how to put on a jumper. Talking to the organisation is actually a huge part of the content person’s job. That’s why the facilitation is in there, because you can have all the best training in the world, you can have all the content techniques, you can do all the discovery and research. If you can’t communicate that to the person who’s blocking you it’s null and void. Which is a shame. It shouldn’t be but it’s just reality at the moment.

Q: Do you think that content on a site should be frictionless and smooth, or should it be enjoyable too, should it be obvious, should it be loud?

I think it depends on the audience. If you are buying Viagra for example, no. You just need to do the thing. As quick as you can. If you want to be entertained, if an author is launching a new book, you need prose and language because you’re pulling people in and you’re selling something and you’re inspiring them.

If it’s entirely transactional, you can still have your tone.

Some people are saying that Content Design is functional and Content Marketing can’t use Content Design techniques. I really hate that and I disagree. As a person who coined the term, I think I get to say that’s utter bollocks. Because it’s a bunch of techniques that you use to find your user, where they are and what channel they’re on and what language they’re using and what they care about.

How can you not use that in marketing?

How can you not use that in advertising and sales?

It’s exactly the same thing. I think it entirely depends on your audience. Where they are in the journey of whatever it is that they’re doing, and you should manage that appropriately.

Q: What was your motivation to write the book?

The book actually came out because I was running courses and I wanted to give something to people to remember the course afterwards. We hammer through a lot. You get very tired because of a lot of it is new techniques, but based on stuff that they’ve already done.

So that can sometimes be a bit harder, because the people you are teaching are in an industry and they understand what they’re doing. They think, “Oh, this is just a bit of a little something on top.” Then they realise that we’re going to take away that foundation they know and then build up.

So it can get quite confusing. It’s really intense. It’s a very intense course. So I wanted to give them something to go away with afterwards, and it just got bigger and bigger and bigger. At one point, I was like, “This is just ridiculous. It’s now a small book.”

It actually took six days to write. Six weeks to muck about with and then two years to publish! I spoke with two publishers and they wouldn’t let me get away with the layout I wanted. They wanted it to look like any other textbook.

So I decided to self-publish because and I’m like, “It’s a book about Content Design. About how content AND design work together. I don’t want it to look like every other textbook.” People are not interested in reading an academic textbook. As a reader you have to be totally absorbed with your subject.

Q: What was the process like for you as an editor and content person, having your work dissected and combed through and critiqued?

I think actually going through a process like that gives you a better understanding of what it’s like to be on the other end of a Content Designer. When they’re saying, “Why are we saying that? Why have we got four and a half thousand words on how to put on a jumper. That’s ridiculous.”

Q: What difference do you hope this book makes for the world of Design

Funnily enough, when I first wrote it, content people picked it up. We do get a lot of Journalists and Copywriters and Technical Writers picking it up to see how different it is from the thing they’re already doing. But now what I’ve found is that content people are buying it and giving it to Designers, Product Managers and Service Designers. They’re like, “This is what we do. Stop telling me to proofread your work. I don’t do that. This is what I do.” It’s a small book. It takes like two hours to read and it’s designed in a funky way that makes people kind of stop and sit back.

I hope people are finding it easier to just say, this is a thing now, because there’s a book about it. Rather than justifying their position all the time. That’s humans talking to each other and they bring all their baggage with them. Whereas, this is an independent thing that sits outside of all that and it can articulate what they do that other people in the organisation wont see because the Content Designers are doing their jobs… Also it if just sways a couple of Product Managers and Service Designers and Designers to talk to their content people, I would be happy!

You can learn more about Sarah’s work and Content Design at https://contentdesign.london/

The post In Conversation: Content Design with Sarah Richards appeared first on UX Mastery.

I was lucky enough to sit down with one of the foremost educators of User Experience, David Travis. I picked his brain about what he thinks are some important areas of attention for aspiring and current professionals in the industry.

What do you see current graduates or practitioners struggling with when they first enter the field?

There are five things I see people struggling with when they first enter the field. These are:

• Self design
• Thinking product first, not user first
• Believing user likes are user needs
• Thinking that “Big Data” is better than “Thick Data”
• The Oracle misconception

SELF DESIGN

One problem I see in new UX’ers is that they fail to realise they are designing for people other than themselves. For example, when making design decisions they focus on what they like or what works for them or what’s fashionable.

Now, a core concept at the heart of user experience is, “You are not the user”. Intellectually, this is simple to understand but even the brightest UX designers seem to forget it as soon as they get in front of Sketch or any other prototyping tool… At that point, they begin to make design decisions based on their own experience.

Although this is an easy issue to understand, in my experience it’s the hardest for people to overcome. In fact, I think the only way you can overcome it is by immersing yourself in your users’ world: their context and behaviour. In practice, this means observing usability tests, going out on field visits, reading about users, getting first hand experience of their world. It’s very Zen like: you must almost become one with the user to prevent self-design.

You’ll often hear this characterised as “gaining empathy for the user”. That’s definitely an element of what you’re trying to achieve. You want to feel what it’s like to walk in their shoes. It takes work but when you follow that path of user immersion you get immediate, practical insights: for example, you might discover that the 10pt grey text that looks so good to you doesn’t work for your end users because they’ve got poor vision, or they sometimes forget their reading glasses. You may even discover that the team’s great idea for a new product doesn’t solve a problem for the user.

THINKING PRODUCT FIRST, NOT USER FIRST

The second misconception I see is people mistaking a field visit with a usability test. For example, a designer will say to me, “I want to do research on my product but I have no one to talk to because we don’t have any users yet”.

Well that’s a red flag.

That product will almost certainly fail, because the designer is thinking product first instead of user first. Instead of thinking about the product in discovery (the earliest stage of design), people need to think about the users. A good question to ask is “What meaningful activity do users carry out with my product or service?” Whatever your answer to that question, that’s the thing that you go out and research.

So if you’re taking a prototype with you when you’re doing early stage research, you’re not doing discovery at all… what you’re doing is usability testing. I’m sure you’re familiar with the Double Diamond approach that’s been popularised by the Design Council: the idea is that there is this important phase in discovery where you are trying to understand the needs of users before you come up with any prototypes or any ideas about the way that thing could look.

But most people forget that first part of the design process, or gloss over it. They start their research once they have got a definite product idea.

This is a problem because if you do research on a prototype web site, you’ll end up with a web site. If you do research with a prototype mobile app, you’ll end up with a mobile app. But your audience may have no need for a web site or mobile app. That’s what I mean by thinking product first. If the product is the start of your user research then it’s already too late. To overcome this, you have to believe user needs are more important than any product ideas you have. This is because understanding user needs will ultimately help you become truly innovative and develop much better products.

USER LIKES ARE NOT USER NEEDS

UX researchers will often show users a prototype and be influenced by what users say they ‘like’. For example, the researcher will show participants two alternative designs and ask which one they prefer.

Now obviously we want people to like our designs. But a raft of evidence shows that people are not very good at having insight into what’s best for them. I think this quotation from Rob Fitzpatrick captures it perfectly:

“Trying to learn from customer conversations is like excavating a delicate archaeological site. The truth is down there somewhere, but it’s fragile. While each blow with your shovel gets you closer to the truth, you’re liable to smash it into a million little pieces if you use too blunt an instrument.” (Rob Fitzpatrick, The Mom Test).

Asking people what they like is too blunt an instrument. A lot of the time, people may not have a strong preference but they’ll give you an answer, even if it’s not deeply held. To be more delicate, you must ask what works best for users. That means not focusing on what they like but focusing on what they do.

This is about believing that behaviour is more important than opinions.

User’s may well prefer Design A over Design B. But if they are more successful with Design B — that is, they are more successful at achieving their goals — then that’s what you choose. It’s not about what users like; its about what they perform best with.

BIG DATA VS THICK DATA

Why is it that people are more likely to believe the results of a survey of 10,000 people than a usability test of 5? People believe that having a large sample size must make the data more robust and reliable. But the data won’t be more robust and reliable from your survey if you’re not asking the right questions.

Nevertheless, people seem to believe that Big Data (quantitative data from surveys and web analytics) is somehow better than Thick Data (qualitative data from usability tests and field visits).

In fact, both kinds of data are important. Big Data tells us what’s happening, but
in order to do really great design we need to understand why things are happening — and that’s where Thick Data comes in. Big Data helps us identify areas where we should be doing in-depth UX research. And what we discover in field research and usability tests identifies the things we should be checking in our surveys, web analytics and multivariate testing.

Sometimes I wonder if this love of Big Data is actually based on a fear of speaking with users. Thick Data requires you to get face-to-face with your users. But real people can be unpredictable. They can make you feel uncomfortable. It’s easy to skirt this issue by sending out a survey or by studying your web analytics. That way, you can convince yourself you’re doing UX research while not having to get face-to-face with users.

Another example of this “fear of speaking with users” is the growth of remote, un-moderated usability testing. This is where users record themselves doing tasks and then upload the video to a Cloud-based server for you to watch afterwards. You don’t observe the user in real time: they work entirely on their own.
At first sight, it looks like a reasonable example of qualitative research.

But it’s not. If you’re not there to speak to the user you can’t find out why they are doing certain things.

What’s unique about the discoveries from qualitative research is that we often don’t know what we don’t know; we don’t know the questions to ask until we see people behave.

Do you think that’s a symptom of the companies commissioning these tests not properly understanding UXD, or does it fall on the UX Designer?

I think that novice UX designers and researchers tend to do what the client says or what their development team says. For example, their team might say, “Go out and do a survey to find out what people want from our product”. So that’s what they do, rather than pushing back and asking, “What hypotheses do you want to test? What questions do you have? What is it that you want to find out?”. A survey may be a good way of finding that out, but it might not be. So this is about understanding the problem before deciding on the best way to answer it.

THE ORACLE MISCONCEPTION

This is about the UX designer thinking they need to be the expert. Caroline Jarrett captures this well when she writes “User researcher’s fallacy: ‘My job is to learn about users’. Truth: ‘My job is to help my team learn about users’”.

User researcher's fallacy: "My job is to learn about users". Truth: "My job is to help my team learn about users". #ux

— Caroline Jarrett (@cjforms) July 4, 2014

An important part of the UX researchers’ job is to act as a facilitator, not just the person who does UX research. The findings from UX research aren’t useful if they live inside the researcher’s head. The findings need to be part of the development team’s consciousness. You need to immerse the team in the research to help everyone gain competence in understanding users and their needs.

The notion that the team is bigger than the individual is true in many areas of UX. For example, in the face to face courses I run we do a prototyping application activity where we split people into small groups of 3 or 4 and they create paper interfaces. This is very different to the way they normally prototype, which is on their own in front of a computer screen. The upshot is that people discover for themselves that design is best when you have multiple people involved. The problem with an electronic prototyping tool like Sketch is that one person is in control of the mouse, which means one person does the design rather than involving the whole team.

It also applies in other areas like expert reviews. We know from the literature on expert reviews that one expert will find about 75% of the usability problems that would be found if you had 5 experts doing the review. No matter how good you are, no matter how much of a guru you are in UX, you won’t find all the usability problems.

But UX designers and researchers don’t always want to believe this, especially those new to the field. They think they have to appear as an expert. If they don’t present themselves as the oracle of all things user, they worry they will appear weak. In fact, it’s a sign of strength to involve other people in UX research: not just users of course but the team too. That’s a misconception that people find difficult to overcome. Rather than think you need to answer every question thrown at you, become an expert in the process: “I don’t know the answer to that question, but I know how to find out”.

The post Things UX Designers Should Know – A conversation with David Travis appeared first on UX Mastery.

How do you learn from mountains of data, and then make sure your insights create a tangible impact in shaping your product’s design?

We couldn’t think of anyone more qualified to ask than the prolific Steve Portigal, user researcher extraordinaire. From analysis and synthesis through to framing your findings, Steve walks us through a few post-research considerations to keep top of mind for your next research project.

What tips do you have for converting insights from research into action?

It’s a lot of work. According to Cooper’s Jenea Hayes, it’s roughly two hours of analysis and synthesis for every hour of research. I get grumpy when people talk about coming back from a research setting with insights. Insights are the product of analysis and synthesis of multiple sessions. It may just me being semantic-pedantic, but there’s something off-putting about the perfunctory way people describe: “Oh I come back from the session and I write up my insights and there you go.”

I see two different stages in making sense of research. Step one is to collate all the debrief notes, the hallway conversations, the shower thoughts you’ve had following the experience of doing the research. It’s a necessary first step and it’s heavily skewed by what sticks in your mind. It produces some initial thoughts that you can share to take the temperature of the group.

The next step is to go back to the data (videos, transcripts, artefacts, whatever you have) and look at it fresh. You’ll always see something different happened than what you think, and that’s where the deeper learning comes from. It’s a big investment of time, and maybe not every research question merits it. But if you don’t go back to the data (and a lot of teams won’t do it, citing time pressure), you are leaving a lot of good stuff on the cutting room floor.

I’m also a big fan of keeping the activity of sense making (what is going on with people?) separate from the activity of actions (what should we about it?). You want to avoid jumping to a solution for as long as possible in the process, so that your solutions reflect as deep an understanding of the problem as possible. Set up a “parking lot” where you can dump solutions as they’ll come up anyway. Depending on your research question, work your way to a key set of conclusions about people’s behaviour. Based on those conclusions, explore a range of possible solutions.

In your analysis, how do you decide what’s important?

Take time at the beginning of the research to frame the problem. Where did this research initiate? What hypotheses – often implicit ones – do stakeholders have? What business decisions will be made as a result of this research?

What research reveals doesn’t always fit into the structure that is handed to you ahead of time, so knowing what those expectations are can help you with both analysis and communication. Some things are important to understand because they’re part of the brief. But other things are going to emerge as important because as you spend time with your conclusions you realise “Oh this is the thing!”

I had a colleague who would ask, as we were getting near to the end of the process, but still wallowing in a big mess “Okay, if we had to present this right now, what would you say?” This is a great technique for helping you stop looking intently at the trees and step back to see the forest.

How do you make sure research data takes priority over stakeholders’ opinions?

So many aspects of the research process are better thought of as, well, a process. Talking to stakeholders about their questions – and their assumptions about the answers – is a great way to start. In that kickoff stage, explain the process. Share stories and anecdotes from the field. Invite them to participate in analysis and synthesis. Their time is limited, but there are many lightweight ways to give them a taste of the research process as it proceeds.

You don’t want the results to be a grand reveal, but rather an evolution, so that they can evolve their thinking along with it. If you’re challenging closely held beliefs (or “opinions”), make a case: “I know we expected to learn X, but in fact, we found something different.” Separate what you learned about people from what should be done about it so that you can respond to pushback appropriately.

What are some common mistakes you see that stops research staying front and centre during the design process?

To summarise a few of the points I’ve made above, some of the common mistakes I see are:

• Not including stakeholders in early problem-framing conversations
• Not including a broader team in fieldwork and analysis
• Delivering research framed as “how to change the product” rather than “what we learned about people” and “how to act on what we learned to impact the product”
• Researchers not having visibility into subsequent decisions
• Failing to deliver a range of types of research conclusions

How do you make sure your recommendations make it through to the next design iteration?

It’s challenging to ensure that research travels through any design or development process intact. Ideally, you’re involved as the work goes forward, sitting in meetings and design reviews to keep connecting it back to the output of the research, but think about the different aspects of the research that might take hold to help inform future decisions.

Is it stories about real people and their wants and needs? Is it a model or framework that helps structure a number of different types of users or behaviours? Is it a set of design principles? Or is it the specific recommendations? Often it’s a combination of several of these.  

About Steve Portigal

Steve is the Principal at Portigal Consulting LLC – a consultancy that helps companies discover and act on new insights about their customers and themselves. He is the author of Interviewing Users: How to Uncover Compelling Insights and recently Doorbells, Danger, and Dead Batteries: User Research War Stories. In addition to being an in-demand presenter and workshop leader, he writes on the topics of culture, design, innovation and interviewing users, and hosts the Dollars to Donuts podcast. He’s an enthusiastic traveller and an avid photographer with a Museum of Foreign Groceries in his home.

The post Making an Impact with UX Research Insights appeared first on UX Mastery.

In this interview, Deborah Clarke, Director of UX at CarTrawler talks to Sofia Quintero, Founder at NomNom. They discuss the interdependent roles of User Experience and Customer Experience, and why testing and communication are critical keys to organisational success. 

Hi Deborah! To get started, why don’t you tell us a little bit about CarTrawler and your role there?

My role is Head of UX but in reality, UX as a function in CarTrawler is actually more like a full product development team. I currently manage a team of Engineers, Researchers, Product Managers and Designers, who are all working towards producing and creating the best possible product that we can for our users.

It’s actually quite refreshing to have UX as a core part of what we do – rather than being restricted to the design discipline. In this way, everyone on the team owns UX and it has become synonymous with Product Development.

Our mission as a company is about simplifying how the world travels through innovative technologies. I suppose you could say we’re sort of like a hybrid of a travel company and a technology company.

What’s it like to run product and design and UX in such a large company as opposed to, say, early-stage start-ups that have a smaller structure and fewer people?

I think when you’re in a small team, it’s very easy to get everyone to buy into the same purpose, mission and ideas. But as you broaden the team and the organisation itself grows, broader commercial mandates and objectives come into play.

I think that’s when it becomes even more important to focus on clarity of purpose and efficient delivery. More specifically, crafting a compelling roadmap and building a culture across the team around what we create and how we build.

How do you keep your mission and vision aligned with all your teams in a complex, multi-faceted environment?

‘Customer-centricity’ is a long-term goal for any organisation in that it takes a long time to build relationships with customers that are meaningful. Most businesses are inherently focused on shorter-term goals like revenue and profitability which can often challenge this thinking. However, short-term commercial goals are indeed necessary to get us to longer-term customer-centricity!

I think as you grow in an organisation, it’s about being clear about what it actually means to embody the customer and drive customer-centric thinking throughout the business. For me, it ultimately comes back to understanding what the end-customer really wants and building on that.

What is your definition of UX and how, if at all, is it different from customer experience?

I think customer experience is actually distinct from the user experience, in the same way that an offline interaction is different from an online interaction. When we craft our products, we do need to think about both the offline and the online experience. CX includes every touch-point a customer has with your brand, whether it’s contact via phone, in person or online. It’s really all-encompassing.

Whereas UX is specifically focused on the online experience that aims to actually make the product, website or app easy and enjoyable to use. I suppose that the distinction is there, but customer experience also encapsulates user experience and the two are inextricably linked.

For example, if a user experience includes an easy-to-use website when purchasing travel along with an app that helps with the journey, but the experience when reaching the customer service desk is poor, then the overall experience could be viewed negatively. Conversely, if you find it difficult to purchase travel on the website, you might never actually even get to the customer experience step. So I think the two need to be woven together in order to give customers a consistent experience, whether it’s online or offline.

Do you have within your organisation, a team that is focused on overall customer experience as well as the user experience, and do they overlap?

We have a UX Team, which is our Product Development Team, and then we have what we call our Customer Centre of Excellence (CCE). The latter handles most of the responsibility for the CX piece. Interestingly enough, however, our CCE recently produced a customer journey map to document what our customer experience actually involves – mapping all of the departments that actually affect each touch-point of that customer journey.

The most fascinating thing about this is that while one specific business unit is technically deemed responsible for customer experience, the customer journey map revealed that in fact, every single other department in the business also has influence on what that customer experience is going to look like in the end.

So rather than saying, “Yeah, we have the perfect solution,” I think sometimes, it’s around surfacing what you’ve learned and thinking about the ways in which the different business units are actually driving change within a customer’s experience. For instance, how Finance, Marketing or even just hiring the right people have as much of an impact and in some cases more of an impact on our customers. It’s about thinking that through and viewing things through a different lens.

So while we take responsibility for both within the organisation and within different departments, it’s actually incumbent upon all units and departments to understand what customer and user experience mean in practice.

What advice would you give to someone that is just starting their career in UX and may want, at some point in the future, to join a larger organisation like yours?

I think my advice is kind of two-fold – specifically in terms of UX and more generally, in terms of how we operate within these larger-scale organisations.

If we talk about UX specifically, I think the first thing I would say is work on the craft of understanding your end-user or customer. Because ultimately, you can’t get to where you’re looking to go without actually having an inherent passion or drive to understand what an end-user or a customer is actually looking for. That’s the foundation of engaging people with product, building things that they actually need, understanding why they need some things and not others. It also encompasses an understanding of the successes and failures of business – it’s as much about learning as anything else.

On a broader scale, certainly something I’ve learned through my own experience is the importance of mastering the art of efficient creation. I think, all too often, it’s very easy to get caught up in the research and forget to act. In reality, sometimes you just need to act because ultimately today’s digital world is moving at such a pace that we’re actually all struggling to keep up. The expectations of a user are changing every single day.

Recognize that we are operating in an environment that is constantly changing and evolving. The sooner you get things out there – and learn what works and what doesn’t – the better off you’re going to be.

Are there any common mistakes that people tend to make at the beginning of their careers that those reading this might be able to recognise in themselves?

Sure. I’ve seen lots of people thinking that they have the right solution without actually thinking about the end-user. Or embedding and investing so much into one area without thinking about the bigger picture. I also think getting caught up in the commercial reality can be negative to the creative process.

At CarTrawler, we do a lot of A/B testing on our products because we hold the philosophy that testing is actually for learning and the future success of our products. In other words, if you were to strictly look at A/B testing within a commercial environment, what people start to think about is the wins or the losses that come out of the A/B test.

So they start to say, “Oh, well, that led to an increase of X% in conversion,” and it’s all about whether that user converted or not. Sure this is an important success metric to measure, but sometimes it’s the losses that are actually our most valuable learning experiences. The more that we put the things that we’ve created out there and have them used and tested, the more we’ll learn. The future success of our products is dictated by the speed of our delivery and how our users respond.

Do you have any other advice or insights you’d like to share with our audience?

Yes, one final point. When we think about UX and CX we need be forward thinking about the integrated experiences they are – what it means to contextualise a customer’s or user’s experience in real time.

Phones are the devices that travel with us and therefore bridge the gap between UX and CX – they can tell us when to leave based on traffic conditions, order our coffee on the way to work, pay for our groceries through one tap – hubs of frictionless experience.

About CarTrawler: CarTrawler (www.cartrawler.com) is the world’s leading B2B technology platform. They build high-yield partnerships for travel businesses such as airlines, online travel agents and accommodation providers by connecting their customers with car rental, private transfers, bus and rail connections all over the world. CarTrawler also owns and operates Cabforce, Holiday Autos and arguscarhire.com brands and is located in Dublin, Ireland, with additional offices in Boston, London and Helsinki.

About Deborah Clarke: Deborah is the Head of UX at CarTrawler. Learn more about Deborah here.

About NomNom: NomNom is all your customer feedback and user research in one place. Learn from customer faster and share insights with your team easily. Learn more about NomNom here. 

The post How Companies Can Focus on the Customer Experience  appeared first on UX Mastery.

Ahead of the Mobile UX London conference this month, we chatted to Sandra Gonzalez, conference host and Principal UX Designer at Just Eat. Since joining the online food order and delivery service at the start of the year, Sandra has built the company’s Digital Brand Studio from scratch and delivered the latest product redesign. Sandra talks to us about best practice in UX design, where she see’s the industry heading, and how UX design is making the world a better place.

Can you tell us a bit about your role as Principal UX Designer at Just Eat?

Just Eat is one of the most exciting places I’ve ever worked. As Principal UX Designer I am responsible for the UX vision at Just Eat, as well as ensuring a cohesive experience across all digital consumer touch points. What excites me most about working for Just Eat is knowing that the designs created by our team touch millions of lives on a daily basis in 12 countries around the world. To be quite honest, it is a very humbling feeling.

How did you get into UX Design?

After getting a triple degree in Computer Engineering, Mathematics and Education, I knew I was at my best working on multidisciplinary challenges. That’s why UX design was such a natural career progression for me after working as a online-producer, front-end developer, high school teacher and product manager. In 2008, I found myself in a UX Program Manager role at Microsoft. I was creating prototypes to validate ideas and experiencing the thrill of observing usability research on some of the suggestions I’d made for improving their search engine experience. I knew then that I had found my passion.

You’re working in food tech – an extremely competitive, fast changing sector. How do you stay ahead when it comes to UX?

There are two factors that I believe help Just Eat stay ahead in our sector. First, the ability to develop strong partnerships with industry leaders such as Apple, Amazon and Google. To give you an example, we were launch partners for the Amazon Echo in the UK. These opportunities put us in a situation where we have to push ourselves beyond the traditional UX process because we are creating experiences for devices that aren’t even available to our customers yet.

For these challenges we use lean methodologies to make sure we are continuously learning and testing our design assumptions. On the other hand, we are also solving one of the most basic needs any human experience — hunger. This means we need to always honour our human basic needs, regardless of the technology used to get our user closer to food. That’s where a deep understanding of the cognitive science can give us the edge in the food tech sector.

If you need to update a feature, what’s the design process you and your team go through?

Before thinking of features, we focus on the problems we are trying to solve. Stacking features on top of each other, in many instances, is a recipe for disaster. At Just Eat we identify the need to improve an experience through qualitative as well as quantitative research. On some occasions looking at tweaking a feature may be enough to solve the problem. On others, we may need to reconsider the end-to-end experience. In general, our process is divided into four phases: design strategy, ideation, user research and UI design. During this process, we work closely with product managers, researchers and engineers in order to collaborate and agree on the best approach to solve each design challenge taking into account user needs, business requirements and technical constraints.

What role does prototyping play in getting mobile and web users hooked on the app?

Prototyping plays an extremely important role in our design process. From low-fidelity prototyping to start conversations with our users or stakeholders to gather feedback at an inception stage, to using smooth high-fidelity micro-interactions while finalising the UI and everything in between. When it comes to getting our users hooked, we constantly research new interactions and experiences with our customers by creating prototypes and inviting them to give us feedback on their experiences in research sessions. We sometimes even pay them a home visit, just to make sure we can observe them in their natural environment where they’re more comfortable and relaxed.

What is exciting you about the industry at the moment?

One of the most exciting breakthroughs in the tech industry is the shift from continuous delivery to continuous learning. For a long time there was this expectation that, as a designer, you had the answer or solution to every design challenge. This created what Jeff Gothel in his book Lean UX calls Design Heroes. Now the industry is more focused on taking a more humble approach and allowing teams to learn in a continuous fashion.

As designers, we are now in a position where we can set up a hypothesis which can be validated through experiments in order to learn from our actual users, given that we could sympathise with them (as much as our personal experiences allow us to). However, that may not be enough in many occasions, so setting up experiments in order to learn more about our users is absolutely crucial. In a way, this has turned digital product design into more of a science than an art.

What key trends do you see emerging in UX? What changes will we see in UX in the next 5 or 10 years?

We are getting better at breaking down the barriers between machines and humans. The fact that I can have a silly conversation with some of the devices in my home is just mind-blowing. To give you an example, my five-year-old son asked Alexa (on Amazon’s Echo device) if she wanted to be his girlfriend and instead of getting an error message, Echo handled the situation very gracefully. We are at a point where we are blurring the lines between very rigid interactions and more human experiences with our devices.

The main change I think we’ll see in the discipline of UX is a deeper understanding of who we really are as humans. Up until now, creating an experience that was clear for the user to navigate in order to complete a task was considered good UX. In the next 5 to 10 years, creating an experience where the user may forget that they are interacting with a device at all is what will be expected.

Where do you look for inspiration?

I find inspiration listening to stories about how people solve incredible challenges. I try to not only listen to design talks but any talk about solving a challenge. I find TED one of the most inspiring places on the internet and that’s where I usually go for inspiration.

What other brands do you think are doing great UX work?

I’ve been quite impressed with Google’s wearables. Given my line of work, I am on the iOS platform for two weeks and I then switch to the Android platform for another two weeks and so on and so forth. This way, I get to experience the two main platforms that my team designs for and it enables me to have a user-focused opinion when designing for either.

Having used the Apple Watch alongside Android Wear, I’m impressed with how Android handles the user experience contextually. To give you an example, my Android wearable knows how to stack my apps in order of importance, reflecting what matters to me at any given moment, without me ever having to program or manually prioritise it. If I’m listening to Spotify, regardless of what I was doing prior to that or if I have an incoming email, my music controls are always at the top of the stack. However, if my Uber is arriving then information on the car and driver takes over the experience as I look into my watch, without the need to even touch the watch. I know this is going to sound funny but the first time I used an Apple Watch I literally ran into a pole because I needed to look up the Uber’s information late at night, and the Apple Watch doesn’t easily surface this information; as I was trying to dig it out of the watch and continue walking, I went head-first into a lamppost. It got even more awkward when I got into the Uber and the driver couldn’t stop laughing. We ended up talking about UX all the way home.

This year you are hosting the Mobile UX Conference – what can attendees expect from the event?

The Mobile UX Conference will be a great event when we all come together as a UX community to learn from world-class UX leaders. Attendees can expect an inspirational day, full of new methods and techniques as well as amazing stories behind how these came about.

What talks are you most looking forward to hearing?

I’m especially excited to hear Hara Mihailidou talk about her work at Just Giving because something I am extremely passionate about is UX in non-profit organisations, which is why I founded UX for Change.

You’re also involved in UX for Change, a UX community founded to “share the goodness of UX to change the world”. Can you tell us more about it?

Yes! I founded UX for Change with the intention of connecting humanitarian projects and the public sector to UX designers who wanted to share their knowledge and skills on a pro-bono basis. We work on great initiatives such as teaching UX design in primary and secondary schools and helping design technology within a humanitarian context, for example, refugee technology with the focus on women’s health.

How can UX be used to change the world for the better?

The field of UX combined with a user-centric design approach focuses on understanding our needs, our fears, our desires and behaviours in order to design products that make our lives better. The discipline of UX enables us to create user-centric solutions to daily human challenges. By its very nature, UX has already changed the world for the better.

If UX designers ever wonder what they can do with this amazing opportunity to change the world, I recommend they look into teaching our craft. I have been very outspoken about how UX design should be taught in primary schools, given that children now have the tools to design their very own experience with games such Minecraft or Inventioneers. I believe teaching UX is a way to change the world for the better. This is one of the reasons I’ve been so actively involved in the Apps for Good programme is because it allows me to inspire children all over the world to create technology that makes a difference within their communities.

The post UX Design: So much more than great products appeared first on UX Mastery.

Can you tell us about 10collective?

10collective was a company that I started by accident in 2008. I walked out the door of my previous company, an IT recruitment agency, and received a call from a client who said, “Can you find me a developer”? I said, “Okay” and on autopilot I found one and made a placement.

At the time, it was just a bit of fun and I assumed I would spend my newfound free-time painting or writing books, but it snowballed from there. In the end, I needed to hire an additional employee, and soon after that we moved into an office in Fitzroy.

At that point I’d been recruiting user experience people for a number of years. There is some debate about whether the position should even be called “User Experience” anymore, because it’s really “experience design” to some of the more established UXers.

You’ve been recruiting UX professionals for quite a while. What changes have you seen in the industry since 10collective started?

Clients certainly want UX professionals more now than they did years ago. Employers understand that UX is important and that consumers want a better “user experience” for their public-facing website.

I’m not convinced that all employers actually understand what user experience means yet, although it’s definitely more prevalent. The first school of UXers that I worked with sought to evangelise UX as important and essential, but now it is less of a fight. There is still some education to be done around what a UXer actually does, but the term “user experience” has changed, or evolved, quite substantially. If you were to ask some job hunters or employers, the difference between “user experience” and “usability”, they can’t always tell you.

Nowadays, different types of organisations want UXers, not just organisations with immense budgets. Employers don’t necessarily want what I was looking for years ago—hardcore UXers that understand interaction design and contextual enquiry—they just want a UXer to use their common sense, which is not entirely unreasonable.

The first school of UXers were very much user and research-centric. That isn’t something that a lot of my clients can even do given their budget limitations. UXers are now being sought for their established expertise rather than what they can discover by research. Many user experience people still want to be involved with the user, though. It is frustrating that many organisations are offering user experience services and user experience expertise, but they don’t have much exposure to the actual user.

Are those who are getting into user experience coming from a visual background? Is that the general path?

Yes—if you have a visual background and a good foundation of the basic principles of user experience and usability, then that’s an effective avenue for you to get a job with the title, “User Experience Designer”. Whether you can truly be a UX Designer at that point is debatable.

Do you think that you’re on the back foot if you’re not coming from a visual design background?

I think so, yes. Many agencies, for example, don’t need just “researchers” anymore— they do require you to have visual design skills as well. You need to be able to get a piece of paper and a pen and throw together some sketches. You would need to have a basic understanding of user experience or usability in order to satisfy the job briefs that we’re getting from clients, on the whole.

What skillsets are clients looking for in UX roles? Does the client say they need a user experience person when what they really want is a visual designer who’s going to use their brain?

Commonly, a client such as a digital or advertising agency will want someone in-house who is a visual designer with agency experience, but who also understands the principles of user experience. What that means is they need someone to do wireframing and prototyping, interview stakeholders and users and be able to expertly review the application or site.

There isn’t a decent understanding of the need for the individual to lead focus groups or use eye-tracking equipment or do card sorting. In many cases, it’s unlikely that those activities are going to happen in a small to medium agency, unless their clients agree to pay a reasonable amount of money. The Account Services team also needs to be able to sell those services—which is another debate entirely!

Skills-wise, a UXer would ideally have experience with Axure and Balsamiq, have some exposure to Visio and be able to use the Adobe Creative suite. UXers need to be able to defend their designs and engage in conceptualisation and ideation. Importantly, they need to have worked on robust and meaty applications. They also need to know how to talk to people, obviously!

Nowadays, are UXers being employed in-house or as contractors?

A lot of people are doing contract work at the moment because they get better money contracting. Freelance projects are common. If you are a career UXer, you will probably end up contracting to say, three to five extremely loyal clients that use you repeatedly and pay you excellent money. Essentially, in recruiting we have had many top UXers wiped from the market which is a tragedy for smaller businesses who really could use the expertise of those people.

I advise UXers to do contract work as much as they possibly can now, but start looking for a permanent or good long-term contract within the next six to twelve months. Recruiting is a good option to help with that.

How do you determine whether an applicant truly understands what UX is?

When recruiting, I start by asking the applicant a basic and disarming question, “What is User Experience?” Oftentimes they just tell me what usability is and I might prod them until I get a better answer. Having a robust opinion about the field you engage in is compelling in job interviews. I know that UXers have to be pragmatic and maybe educate users, but users are supposed to inform your design. It’s a fairly good sign when I hear that a UXer is not attempting to change the user. Many applicants don’t even mention the user and that’s a black mark most of the time. User experience is not just the experience the user has with your product.

Would you say having a process and being able to talk about it is important?

I think so. I love it when I ask an applicant to take me through their process and the first thing they do is grab a piece of paper and a pen and take me through their process with some decent narrative.

Storytelling is a critical component of UX on the job, so I like to see evidence of that in a recruiting interview. A candidate must also have experience with the activities and practises that fall under the user experience umbrella.

What advice would you give a candidate coming into UX from another area, such as business analysis, creative production or development?

I’d advise against calling yourself a user experience designer if you’re not comfortable doing so—simply say you’re a producer with UX skills or a project manager with UX skills, or focus on the research side of things if that is how you are inclined.

The word “designer” is misleading to many companies. If a company is hiring, an applicant’s first gateway is an HR person who usually doesn’t know what user experience designers do. They see the word “designer” and they imagine someone creative for the job. You actually don’t need to be particularly creative to be a fabulous user experience researcher, in the traditional sense, although the UX discipline firmly belongs in the creative sphere.

I would advise job seekers to get into their UX community. Start reading some old school HCI usability UX blogs—for example Jakob Nielsen—but also get into some new blogs. Attend a UX Book Club and network. Simply being around UX people will give you some context around what you do and how that’s relevant to the user experience process. Doing so also gives you an idea of the language inside the UX and Design world—using relevant terminology is always useful in an interview!

Take a Business Analyst for example. What a Business Analyst does is so relevant to UX—how they interview and observe people, create specifications and evaluate scenarios. The thought process they go through is key for a UXer, but a Business Analyst needs to know how to describe what they do in UX terms.

How should a candidate prepare for an interview if they get to that stage? Would you recommend a portfolio for someone who doesn’t have a substantial visual background?

Absolutely. A user experience folio is not a design folio—it’s a case study folio and a dissection of all the activities it took to get to whatever outcome you’ve reached. What I recommend with UX folios is that once you’ve determined that a particular activity pertains to the UX discipline, you need to dissect it.

An infographic or something visual is a good idea to illustrate what you’ve done. It doesn’t need to be a band poster; it needs to be something like a screenshot of your wireframe or an infographic to show how you got to the end result.

Opinions don’t hurt, either. For example, saying, “These are the results—they were surprising for such and such reason” is pertinent for both user experience professionals and those who want to get into user experience. Giving your opinion demonstrates that you understand that those analytical skills are transferable to the discipline.

Having a folio to kick-off the discussion can be a difficult concept for many job seekers. Some UXers I know, who are absolutely amazing, have never landed a job with a folio or a CV because everyone knows their reputation so they get jobs via word of mouth. However, I still think that they should have a beautiful folio—a dissection of their ideas, their opinions and their assumptions and then how they’ve backed those things up with actual data, research and design expertise.

Do you have some general tips on how to make the most out of an interview?

Firstly, when running through your work history, ensure that your timeline actually makes sense. If you’ve been fired a bunch of times, you just need to come clean and admit it before it comes out later in the recruiting process.

Most interviews will have a behavioural interview component. The philosophy behind behavioural interviewing is that how you have acted in certain situations in the past can predict how you would act in similar situations in the future. I think it’s a flawed philosophy as nothing can predict any of those things, but behavioural interviewing during recruiting is generally believed to give an indication.

I think job seekers need to learn how to handle behavioural interviews. Most questions in this format start with, “Describe a time when…”. You need to think of a specific example in your past where you addressed the question and answer along the STAR format.

You should then analyse what you did wrong in the example you chose and also what you learned from it. If you can apply that way of answering to every behavioural question you are asked, you’re laughing.

It’s OK to use a personal scenario if you can’t apply the question to a work one. If you are changing fields, all people need to know is that you can learn and adapt to the new position that you’re applying for.

That’s where behavioral interviewing can be very useful during the recruiting process. It assesses your aptitude, emotional intelligence, commercial maturity, self-awareness and your ability to learn. If you have the skillset that is required but cannot demonstrate the key competencies in the role via a behavioural interview, then a client is unlikely to hire you.

The other piece of advice I would give is to practice your ability to decide which questions require a long answer and which ones require a short answer. It is fairly essential not to bore the interviewer.

There is some debate about how long your CV should be. What are your thoughts on that?

It depends on the client. Some clients need to be educated around what your experience is, in which case a four or five page CV can be helpful for them. There are also clients that are savvy enough to read between the lines and can draw what they need in a one to two pager. Your CV shouldn’t go any longer than four or five pages.

Your CV needs to compel a client to read on within the first five seconds of looking at it. If it does, they’ll spend the time to read the rest. If it doesn’t, it makes no difference whether your CV was one, four or thirty pages—it won’t get read.

Some of the most talented people I know don’t have good CVs. They have one page that says, “I’ve done this”. That’s good enough for them because they know people, but it’s not good enough for all of my clients.

For UXers, when you write your CV, you need to be prepared to answer the question, “How do you use your understanding of the UX discipline in the design of your CV?” Many people in the UX field do not use their skills in designing this very important piece of paper.

Your expertise has a Melbourne bent. Do you have a sense for whether there are hotspots for UX in the rest of the country, or globally?

I have many English and American people approach me for roles in Australia. Their understanding of user experience, and how it’s used practically, is quite different to ours. Recruiting for UX looks different in different places. One of the criticisms I commonly hear, from British people especially, is that nothing gets done in UX in Australia—we spend too much time in concept, too much time in research and not enough time doing.

The other piece of positive feedback that I get is that Australians are very detail oriented and we do get UX right. When I went to London last year, a mobile director for a very large and well-known digital agency remarked that Australia’s user experience for mobile applications was second to none. I’ve also heard—and I don’t know if this is true—that there is an amazing user experience scene in South America. I’ve not done any recruitment there, but I have had some people with South American roots come to me.

Considering there is a demand for UX, is it fair to say a UXer can be choosy about which jobs they take and what they do on them?

Yes and no. There was definitely a time I was getting frustrated at the UX community for being princesses during recruiting in all kinds of areas— wage, working hours, the stage of UX and design maturity—but the community is coming out of that now. Frankly, as any kind of job seeker, you should be picky about your job choice.

I think work cultures are very institutionalised in some organisations. Even though the organisation is saying they need a UX person, in fact, there may not be a place for them there culturally.

If you have to evangelise and educate, it’s a 24/7 job. It’s a very rare person who could do the job part-time. You have to be constantly showing the client that you are not only good at your job but that you are actually adding value. The issue is that what you provide isn’t necessarily something you can hold in your hand and show someone.

When you’re not proving to the client that you’re adding value, you’re being an entrepreneur, validating tests or doing experiments. Do you think the client values that learning?

Not always—and that’s a fairly dangerous position to be in during recruiting if there’s a recession imminent. Ultimately, if you’re not providing tangible deliverables and a return on investment right here and now, you might get relegated to middle management status, and I think we can all agree that middle management people always go first in the lay off rounds.

Is there a seasonal demand for UX work?

UX work is seasonal, absolutely. UXers are always involved during production, even though they should probably by around before the idea even happens. January is not a great time to go through the recruiting process to find a UX job compared to the rest of the year, but then January is not a good time to find a job for anybody!

You can read more about UX recruiting, and how to use it to your advantage as a UXer looking for work, in our ebook Get Started in UX. 

The post Is going through recruiting a good option for landing an ideal UX role? appeared first on UX Mastery.