Lean UXmas 2020

Kathryn & Adrian

“Linking Initiatives (which are experiments or projects) to quantifiable Key Results (business outcomes) means the impact they’re having can be monitored. This allows the whole organisation to take a more entrepreneurial approach and helps to embed the Agile principles that so many of us strive for. Furthermore, the cadence of OKRs is typically annually at the organisational level but quarterly at the team level, leading to a more dynamic and adaptable approach.”

“Task models are a technique for recording user needs. In this article, I’ll demonstrate how task modeling has helped me convert user research insights into compelling ecommerce designs. I’ll describe what a task model is, with practical examples from the world of ecommerce. Then, I’ll look at the psychology behind task models and show why they matter so much when designing effective ecommerce sites. Finally, I’ll walk through the process of creating a task model.”

“There is great value in building products through experimentation. The continual optimization, systematic testing, and incremental validation can help you avoid costly mistakes and enable you to reach your goals faster. However, as our experience demonstrates, without the right organizational culture, you will constantly be facing challenges from within. If you want to make product experimentation a core capability, you must establish a learning culture. Only then will you be able to focus purely on the work that has the most significant impact.”

“Don’t forget, collaborate with others. The process used to build the map is just as important as the map itself. Successful journey maps are not just about the resulting artifact and should be more treated as more than a checklist of the “right” elements. They should be informed by well-defined goals, and built from research.”

“The challenge is that organizations often struggle to define who owns problems and who owns solutions. The debate will never be resolved completely because at its heart, it’s a debate over how things are decomposed. It’s a debate over who decides how those things are all linked together. One test I use to tease out a problem’s full connection to what’s going on within the company is to imagine some really smart person in the back of the room continually asking, ‘Why,’ or ‘What are we hoping to achieve with this?’”

“A well-told story can be enough to convince even the most obstinate of stakeholders to take action, but arranging the plot points in a convincing way is a challenge when there’s so much data to make sense of. We took the “seeing is believing” philosophy, where insights from User Research were presented as bite-sized, tangible, and accessible nuggets of information that the stakeholders could understand. These nuggets served as research vignettes — evocative accounts of user pain points and desires.”

“I’m often asked what types of tools and techniques help reduce risk in non-profits, governments and mission based organizations. With a few exceptions, the majority of content available online and in books applies to profit based businesses. Mission driven leaders try to adapt these profit based recommendations to their work and quickly become frustrated. This guide is a high level overview of the tools I’ve used and adapted to help non-profits, governments and mission based teams visualize their strategy and reduce risk.”

“Strategy and execution have to be closely connected: The former should not only guide execution, but execution should inform strategy changes and help adapt the strategy. Based on this insight, I have come up with the product strategy cycle … It’s a model of an iterative process that systematically links the product strategy with the product roadmap, the product backlog, the development work, and the key performance indicators (KPIs).”

“I’ve now realised there are also different levels of sophistication between a research library and an insight library. Depending on how you define a research library. It could be a catalogue of research reports with metadata to describe the context of each report, which is a lot of work in itself. An insights library requires more curation, as it is extracting and cataloguing the meaning in the research.”

“There are many excellent collaborative tools out there. If you and your participants feel comfortable using them, they can offer a great collaborative experience … But I find that it’s often the simplest technological setups that work best. With a bit of imagination, a lot can be achieved even just over a simple video call. And when even that fails — due to a slow internet connection, for example — talking to your participants on the phone is much better than not being able to talk to them at all.”

“To my relief, almost a year later, TableKit continues to mature and improve with each release. While we still have a long road ahead and we continue to evolve, here are the things I believe we did right so far. If you’re a developer or a designer at a small to mid-sized company, involved in building a design system for your own team, hopefully these insights can help you find success as well.”

“Non-verbal communication can be quite telling, but it’s a tricky note type to record. Often the signals you are looking for happen in a split second: a little smile, eyes widening, someone shying away, etc. But when you recognize it, body language provides a powerful signal. Watching someone react to what you are telling them is like taking the filter out of the equation. So whether it’s positive or negative body language, make note of it. You might just find more truth in that than in the words of your customers.”

“For many of us, “where we’re going” looks a lot different from “where we are.” And navigating the fundamental changes—in our research scope, timelines, org structures, and deliverables—can be a clumsy process. Moves to Modern Research is a series of steps we’ve seen companies take as they expand and evolve their research practices. Use it to assess your organization’s maturity and to shape the way your research team grows, develops, and influences.”

“Organizational agility is a welcome transformation in every department. By approaching the work you do as a product with specific customers, giving your teams problems to solve and measuring their success with outcomes, rather than outputs, you create a company-wide customer-centric culture and ensure that whether someone is buying a product from you, is employed by you, or contracts with your organization you’re always maximizing both their success and yours.”

“Proactive UX research anticipates the critical user experience decisions that a team faces. The team’s UX research effort uncovers sound findings and insights to ensure they make the best possible decisions for their users and customers. This is in contrast to how most teams conduct their UX research today. Most teams react to questions that arise during the design process. … These are important questions to answer … However, they focus the team on one particular aspect of design: making sure the team delivers a solution that works well.”

“When journey maps are used in the right way — as a means to address a specific, known business goal — the benefits are vast … Because the structure of a workshop is dependent on the skill level and preferred methods of the facilitator, there are many ways to lead a journey-mapping workshop. This article provides an overview of one way — a case study with examples from a recent workshop — but there could be many variations of the activities listed that could also be productive.”