The Japanese have a great word: ikigai. It has no direct translation into English, but roughly means your level of happiness in life, or your ‘reason for being’.

As you can see in the chart below, you can achieve ikigai—meaning in life—if you can find the right balance of 4 things:

• Passion
• Mission
• Vocation
• Profession

Your design Ikigai

Your ikigai encompasses your career and your personal life. But it’s also a great lens to use when looking for the next step in your design career.

With Ikigai in mind, we can design our own careers, finding a balance between working on the things that we love doing, the things that we’re good at, and the things that add meaning to the world. And yes, we need to be paid for our work too.

Many people spend their lifetime working out their reason for being.

But understanding where you sit on the chart above might help you realise what areas you need to work on to get there. Here are the questions to ask yourself.

Are you in a role that you love?

Nothing makes us happier than working in a job, or at least a project that gets us into flow state.

Ask yourself, “am I truly happy with the work that I do?”. Are there changes that you could make in your current role that could make you truly love your work? Or would a new role get you closer to finding your passion?

And if you haven’t found your passion yet, that’s okay too. Keep looking.

Are you building things that the world needs?

Where’s your moral compass at? Is working ethically important to you? (Hint: it should be). Are you producing work that benefits society?

If you’re not feeling satisfied with your design career, perhaps it’s because there’s not enough meaning in your work.

Are you doing what you are good at?

To be really satisfied with what you do, you need to be doing things that you are good at. And you need to feel empowered to do your best work.

Knowing that we can do something well gives us a sense of accomplishment. And when we’re stuck in jobs and work environments where we can’t achieve our full potential, it sucks.

Are you in a role that pays you fairly?

A good salary is, of course, another consideration to being happy in work.

We all know more money doesn’t make us any happier, so striving for big salaries is not the be all and end all. In some ways, getting paid more can make you less happy. But we do need to get paid enough to make ends meet.

What changes do you need to make to your career to reach your design ikigai? Finding your design ikigai won’t happen overnight, but I hope by next UXmas you’ll be a little closer.

This article was originally published for UXmas – an advent calendar for UX folk. Catch up on all 24 posts at uxmas.com

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Will 2017 be just another year, or will it be the year your product (or service, or experience) takes the world by storm?

Start by ‘Working Backwards’

The most successful projects often start by creating a clear vision of where you want to get to, and working backwards from there.

That’s why I love the aptly named ‘working backwards’ method. Most famously adopted by Amazon, it’s a method to create a customer-focused vision of your product’s future.

It starts by writing a press release.

That’s right. Before Amazon’s designers and developers start working on something new, they write a hypothetical press release from the future, celebrating the success of a product after its launch.

The benefits of working backwards

Because it’s written 12 months in the future, the ‘working backwards’ method forces you to dream big. To focus on your BHAGs (your Big Hairy Audacious Goals), and the the ground-breaking, game-changing changes you need to achieve them.

A well-crafted press release is a great use of good old storytelling. It gets the team excited and focussed before any lines of code are written.

It reduces waste because it keeps your team building the right things; if the press release isn’t worth reading, then it’s unlikely that anyone will be interested in you product either, which means you should probably think twice about building it.

Writing your press release

You can find a tonne of different templates and formats of press releases online. Keep it to one page in length, and include the following:

Title: A catchy but clear summary of what you’ve achieved in the 52 weeks ahead of you.

The lead paragraph: The opening paragraph should summarise the successes you’ve achieved over the last 12 months, and how you’ve achieved them. And most of all, why they’re important to your customer. Like an elevator pitch, it should be well crafted  and strong enough for the reader to read just this, and nothing else, to get the key details.

The target market: Writing a press release can help the team definite exactly who they’re targeting before they start building a product.

Problem / Solution: It’s important to describe your achievements from the customer’s viewpoint. Describe the actual problem that your customer has, and why this product solves that problem. What customer problem or task did you focus on in order to leapfrog towards your new-found success?

Quotes: Including quotes in your press release adds personality and emotion. Consider including a quote from a company spokesperson, or even a customer.

An image: Press releases with images are viewed and shared 3 times more, so make sure you’ve included a visionary concept of your future-product. Whether it’s a back-of-the-napkin sketch, or a pixel-perfect concept, thinking about what it looks like in the future can help bring your product to life.

Find out more: A quick summary, and an indication about where the user needs to go to learn more.

In my experience, the best results come from writing a press release collaboratively as a team, perhaps as a half-day workshop. This creates a shared understanding of your product vision, and how your roadmap will support that.

What’s next?

Once you’ve written your press release, don’t hide it away in a drawer and never look at it again. Make sure you:

• Stick it on the wall.
• Show it to anyone and everyone.
• Get feedback and iterate
• Live and breathe it

Your press release should become the North Star for your product, and guide you towards making the right decisions to what to focus on 2017.

Where exactly do you want to be, one year from now?

This article was originally published for UXmas – an advent calendar for UX folk. Catch up on all 24 posts at uxmas.com.

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This short animated video will give you an overview of how and why they are such a valuable tool.

What are wireframes?

A wireframe is like an architect’s drawing. It’s a draft visual representation of your user interface. You can use them to communicate four things.

•  The structure of your navigation and information architecture.
• Layout, which includes page hierarchy and placement of elements on the screen.
• Real content. Wireframes give content writers an idea of how content will be placed within the design.
• Functionality – Wireframes can describe how your product will work, and how it interacts with the people using it.

Wireframes are an indispensable tool in any UX designers’ toolkit, and they come in handy in many situations. They can be created at varying levels of fidelity, and this is what makes them so powerful.

How much detail?

At the low-fidelity end, you have the hand-drawn sketch. Sketches are a great way to flesh out ideas on your own or with your team. They’re fast to create and quick to iterate on. It doesn’t matter if you’re not great at drawing – anyone who can draw a square, a circle and a triangle is perfectly capable of creating sketches.

Next, we have the more traditional wireframe. There are literally hundreds of tools that we can use to create these. Balsamiq, Omnigraffle, Illustrator and UX Pin are just a few examples.

Wireframes like this allow you to communicate your ideas to your team, your clients and your stakeholders. They can be very useful to explain your product, and exactly what you’re building.

At the high-fidelity end of the spectrum, a clickable prototype lets you design interactions and user flow. Clickable prototypes are the way to go when conducting usability testing. You could use Axure, Keynote or even create wireframes directly into the browser using HTML, with the help of frameworks such as Foundation or Bootstrap.

Sometimes a quick sketch is all you need. Other times, an annotated wireframe is more appropriate. It really depends on the project, and the stage you’re at. Your wireframes should convey just the right amount of detail, and no more.

Here are just a few practical tips to keep in mind when you’re wire-framing:

Keep them simple

The key to wireframing is speed and simplicity. We will ultimately throw wireframes out, so in most cases they don’t need to be highly polished or pixel perfect.

Use a grid

Grids create structure and simplicity to your layouts. Every decent website these days is built on a grid, so make sure you’re using one in your wireframes too.

Use short, sharp annotations

Unlike a 50 page functional spec doc, team members actually read wireframes more than any other document. So make sure you add some key annotations. Don’t go overboard though. Keep them brief and to the point.

Encourage feedback

Finally, sharing your wireframes, and encouraging feedback from your team members is a sure-fire way to improve them. So, stick your wireframes up on the nearest wall, and encourage your team, and anyone else, to give you feedback.

As you can see, wireframes can be easy to create, but it does take some experience to understand when and how to get the most out of them.

As with most things, practice makes perfect!

The post How to Create Wireframes That Wow appeared first on UX Mastery.

Delight is a word that we are hearing more of to describe pleasurable moments in our digital and offline products; those microinteractions that can make an experience just that little bit more fun.

We’ve been researching what others had to say on the topic of delight in an attempt to answer the question, “Is there a formula for delight?”

Our Journey to “Delight”enment

In his article, Some things can’t be wireframed, Intercom’s Des Traynor talks about delight and playful design. He suggests that wireframes actually discourage emotive design and that they’re only good for working out hierarchy and structure.

One example he uses is Keezy, a simple, but delightful sound-sampling app for the iPhone that is fun and and tactile to play with. But if the product designer had used wireframes to devise Keezy, the app may not have been as fun as a result.

The article concludes by saying that, across UX design as a whole, designing for delight is difficult, risky and messy, and that there is no real trick to it.

Is Delight a Buzzword?

Why should we even care about this thing called Delight? Is delight just a meaningless buzzword? Do we really need to bother with “delighting” our customers? Isn’t it enough to be simple, usable and useful?

There’s no question that “delight” has become an overused term, but delight is the magic that makes your users fall in love with your product, so it can’t be overlooked.

Delight Isn’t Everything

But before we can add delight, we need to get the fundamentals of our products right.

Aarron Walter from Mailchimp writes about the hierarchy of User Needs in his book Designing for Emotion. It’s similar to Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, but rather than describing our physiological, safety, love and belonging, esteem, and self actualisation needs, he describes our needs as users.

At their foundation, our digital products must be functional—they have to work to solve a problem. They also need to be reliable—they need to be up and running at all times. And they need to be usable—easy to learn, easy to use, and easy to remember.

Finally, they need to be pleasurable. This is where delight sits.

Maslow pointed out that we can’t satisfy the needs of higher levels until we get the foundations of the hierachy right. That’s true of our products as well. When it comes to adding pleasure or delight to our websites or apps, it’s crucial to be usable, functional and reliable first.

Minimum Delightful Product

Delight isn’t something that we can just tack on, or worry about later. It has to be baked in from the onset.

We hear a lot about minimum viable product, but I think the conversation should be around minimum delightful product. Viable is important, but if we’re going to market with something that’s not delightful, no one will get excited about it.

Thankfully, there are plenty of ways to add delight to our products, even if we are just at MVP stage.

Surface UX Delight

We use the term ‘Surface delight’ to refer to the things that are often very obvious and visceral in order to convey delight.

Surface delight is useful in attracting new customers. Surface delight draws strong attention to our products by creating that strong first impression. It can make our products more memorable and more shareable. Surface delight can be achieved fairly easily. Some examples include:

1. Beautiful User Interfaces

Not only is a high-quality and beautiful user interface an obvious way to add delight, it also has a huge impact on increasing the perceived value of a product. Airbnb‘s latest re-design is a strong reminder of this.

2. Microcopy

Great microcopy, such as a label on a form field or a pithy piece of instructional text, can help a user along on their journey. Used with the right tone of voice it can help to make an experience human and break down the barriers that exist between person and computer. Mailchimp is a great example of an app that has used microcopy cleverly and humorously.

3. Animation

Captivating animations, like those used to create parallax scrolling effects, can add surprise and delight.

Parrallax scrolling and animation has blossomed since it first appeared a few years ago, as displayed in this marketing site for Campaign Monitor’s mobile app, Monitor. The technique is used here to great effect as an educational tool. It teaches you how the app works before downloading it in a much more interactive way than just a video.

4. Tactile Transitions and Interactions

The earlier Keezy example is a great example of delightfulness through carefully considered transitions.

5. Sound

Sound is a contentious example, however done well, injects delight into a product.

For example, the latest Wunderlist To-Do app plays a twinkling bell sound when you tick off a completed task, making the achievement feel that little bit better.

These examples show that Surface delight can be very effective, but the problem is that the novelty factor of surface delight fades over time. What was new and exciting yesterday easily becomes commonplace today.

It seems that you need to go to a deeper level to truly delight your user for the long term.

Deeper UX Delight and Flow

While the surface delight examples are visceral and highly visible, delight is often about the complete opposite.

A delightful user experience is often about invisibility. Getting out of the user’s way. We all know that something that “just works” can be extremely delightful.

Deeper delight is also about getting users into a state of flow to achieve that feeling of being completely absorbed in what you are doing and where nothing else seems to matter.

From a UX standpoint, if we create products that are completely frictionless, and encourage users to get into that flow state, we’re creating happy, productive users and a deeper level of delight.

A great example of flow at play in a digital product is iA Writer, a simple writing app, without any of the bloat or the complexity that tools like Microsoft Word have. Instead of getting caught up in using the software, you get lost in your own writing instead. You forget that you’re even using an application, and you move into a state of flow.

Flow contributes to a more sustained delight. Which ultimately means more loyal users.

Reduce the Pain

Keeping users in flow is about minimising pain points, frustration and anxiety that users may experience throughout their journey.

Giles Colborne speaks of the idea of focussing on these pain points by identifying moments of anxiety and using them as an opportunity to delight. If these pain points can be resolved effortlessly, we can delight our customers by exceeding their expectations.

For example, the moment of fear when we trip over our power cords, is quickly turned into a moment of relief, and ultimately delight, when we realise that our power cords are magnetic, and our laptops haven’t, in fact, come crushing to the ground.

Different Levels of Delight

We’re not the first to have considered that design and delight may happen on different levels.

Don Norman wrote about 3 levels of design in his book, Emotional Design:

1. Visceral—from the initial impact to its appearance.

2. Behavioural—the total experience of using a product and how it performs.

3. Reflective—how the product makes you feel.

We’ve already touched on the first two, but what’s particularly interesting here is the idea of this third level—the reflective layer. This isn’t about the product at all, but more what the product evokes in the user.

Dana Chisnell also wrote about 3 levels of design and delight in Deconstructing Delight: 

1. Pleasure

2. Flow

3. Meaning

Again, it is the third level that is unique here. Meaning refers more to the company’s brand and is about being authentic, with the company’s values aligned to it’s customers values.

Deeper delight = Helping users kick ass

Delight isn’t about your product at all, it’s actually about your user. Delight is in how you can help them become better at the thing they’re trying to achieve.

Samuel Hulick summed this up by saying, “People don’t buy products; they buy better versions of themselves.” The more we can help users become that better version, the greater chance we have of delighting them.

So we’re not actually in the product business as at all. We’re in the business of helping people kick ass.

Kathy Sierra talks about the Kick Ass Curve, a chart that demonstrates the importance of User Awesomeness.

In essence, we need to help our users get to awesome as quickly as possible. We need to move our users beyond the “Suck Threshold”, and past being frustrated novices, and towards the “Passion threshold”, where they become become passionate experts.

Tools like on boarding are therefore crucial to a delightful user experience. They can help our users become passionate experts more quickly.

It’s Not Gamification

It’s worth noting that we shouldn’t confuse true delight with gamification.

Earning that extra Foursquare badge wasn’t ever about User awesomeness. It was only a mechanic to encourage us to come back to use Foursquare again.

But if your app is helping users improve their skills, their health, and their lives, then that’s delight right there.

Online tools like Treehouse, that enable people to become better web developers. and the rise in wearable tech, like fitbit that help people become more active are just two examples of delightful products.

Is There a Silver Bullet?

So, back to our big question: Is there actually a formula to adding delight? Is there a recipe that you can follow?

Well, not quite. Delight isn’t just a simple, single, one-dimensional thing. It’s much more complex, with many aspects and varying levels of delight that form a delightful experience.

Designing delight is part art and part science. The science is made up of the same UX skills and techniques that we already use as UX designers. We need to do regular research into who our customers are, what’s important to them, and what progress looks like in their life, not just what they do on their screen.

The art is the trickier part though. Empathy is key, but it is also about knowing when and where to apply just the right amount of delight, and at what level.

And whilst there is no magic formula for delight, perhaps some of the tools and techniques that we’ve described here can go some way to helping you achieve it.

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