I wanted to discuss this because more and more I’m running into people have been burned by terrible UX practices and general misunderstandings about what UX is and what it can and cannot do.
7. The UX Toolbox
TOOLS
Strategy
Taxonomy (naming & grouping)
Information Architecture
Interaction Design
Prototyping
Usability Testing and Evaluations
Graphic Design
Front-end Development
Analytics
THINGS THE TOOLS MIGHT BE APPLIED TO
Overall Business Plan
Marketing
Advertising
In Store Experience
Packaging
Product
Documentation
Support
Lifestyle
8. To start, you have to have a plan…
Goal
The business outcome
Strategies
The broad approaches you are going to take
Objectives
The measurable tasks that will be undertaken
Tactics
What you will use to achieve the objective
All of this is part of the larger company /
product strategy
It is VERY important to define and
understand. When arguments arise this is
where the discussion should turn for a
resolution.
When a new feature etc. is proposed (or
mandated) it should be vetted against this
list.
If it doesn’t fit you need to reassess this
list and come to a new agreement...or you
need to put that feature on hold.
More info: https://propr.ca/2006/goals-and-objectives-strategies-and-tactics/
9. Goal:
Sell more cereal
(Improve Topline Revenue)
Improving bottom line efficiencies is another
area to explore but we’ll leave that for
another talk...
It’s important to note that the following
strategies are all children if this goal.
10. Strategies:
1) Create more compelling ads
2) Make it cost less for the customer
3) Help Customers eat more cereal
11. Objectives (must be measureable):
1) Make it less filling
2) Provide bigger servings
3) Make it so they can eat it quicker so they can eat
more before noticing they are full
12. Tactics:
1) Optimize the shape and texture of the cereal (content)
Captn’ Morgan Crunch can hurt your mouth...slowing you down or preventing
you from eating it at all.
2) Optimize the bowl (interface)
Some bowls work better than others (pictures of flatter bowls vs. deeper ones
3) Optimize the utensil (interaction)
Maybe we could design the utensil better or make it out of better materials?
13.
14. Tactics:
1) Optimize the shape and texture of the cereal (content)
Captn’ Crunch can hurt your mouth...slowing you down or preventing you from
eating it at all.
2) Optimize the bowl (interface)
Some bowls work better than others (flatter bowls vs. deeper ones)
3) Optimize the utensil (interaction)
Maybe we could design the utensil better or make it out of better materials?
15.
16. Tactics:
1) Optimize the shape and texture of the cereal (content)
Captn’ Crunch can hurt your mouth...slowing you down or preventing you from
eating it at all.
2) Optimize the bowl (interface)
Some bowls work better than others (pictures of flatter bowls vs. deeper ones
3) Optimize the utensil (interaction)
What’s wrong with our utensil? We based the design off what Google does!
17.
18. The UX Toolbox
TOOLS
Strategy
Taxonomy (naming & grouping)
Information Architecture
Interaction Design
Prototyping
Usability Testing and Evaluations
Graphic Design
Front-end Development
Analytics
THINGS THE TOOLS MIGHT BE APPLIED TO
Overall Business Plan
Marketing
Advertising
In Store Experience
Packaging
Product
Documentation
Support
Lifestyle
19. Usability Testing:
1) Document participant recruitment criteria
2) Identify what is to be tested
3) Recruit participants (pre-screening interview)
4) Write Script and get approved
5) Facilitate testing Sessions
6) Review and document findings
7) Present to team and document next steps
20. At this point many companies…
A) Begin designing a better
butter knife
B) Begin developing a butter
knife out of the best materials
available
Why would they do that?
21. The UX Toolbox
TOOLS
Strategy
Taxonomy (naming & grouping)
Information Architecture
Interaction Design
Prototyping
Usability Testing and Evaluations
Graphic Design
Front-end Development
Analytics
THINGS THE TOOLS MIGHT BE APPLIED TO
Overall Business Plan
Marketing
Advertising
In Store Experience
Packaging
Product
Documentation
Support
Lifestyle
22. Why doesn’t my Graphic Designer know all this?
Because they know many, many other
important things about the design of
your product.
This question is a lot like looking in
your toolbox and asking why your
screw driver doesn’t do what your
wrench does…
Different tools, different jobs.
23. Why do I need usability testing if I have analytics?
Because you only get
quantitative data from
analytics. Quantitative data can
help tell you WHAT is
happening.
Usability testing helps provide
qualitative data. Qualitative
data can help tell you WHY it’s
happening.
Hi everyone,
My name is Kevin Braun and I’ve been designing and developing user experiences professionally since 1995.
In that time I’ve been lucky enough to work with literally the biggest names in the high tech, mobile devices, education, healthcare, insurance, and luxury apparel industries.
Most of my work is under NDA but some of my previous clients that I can name include MIT, Harvard, and Cisco Systems.
I’ve also worked with some of you at Vermont Teddy Bear, Draker, Competitive Computing, iSystems, and while teaching at Champlain College.
My talk today is called “Removing the Snake Oil from UX.”
I wanted to discuss this because more and more I’m running into people that have been burned by terrible UX practices and general misunderstandings about what UX is and what it can and cannot do.
What I’ll say right off that bat is that UX
Isn’t black magic
Isn't snake oil
Isn’t a silver bullet that fixes everything
Today as we cover this topic we are going to imagine that we all work for a company called E-Corp that has just gotten out of the banking industry because it’s proven to be too volatile.
They have recently entered the consumer cereal market and have developed some new products.
They did some research and found that many people are lazy and to take advantage of that laziness they have created a cereal product that includes everything you need to eat the cereal all in one package.
I won’t go into all the details now but the important thing to know is that for this product the shelf life of milk became a problem so they replaced it with an alcoholic beverage.
Now that we know what the product is let’s learn exactly what UX means from one of the people who pioneered the field and is famous for many things including his work at Apple in the early 1990’s...Don Norman.
Now that we know what UX is…here’s a listing of the high level tools in the UX Toolbox and some of the key aspects of the business that they can be used to improve.
We’re going to jump right into the process here…by looking at how to put together a solid plan.
We’re only going to focus on #3 from this list but I included the others because it’s important to understand that you can have multiple strategies under one goal.
Again we are only going to focus on #3 but the others are there again to emphasize that each strategy can have multiple objectives.
…and each objective can have multiple objectives.
Ok so let’s review our product…We got rid of Capt’n Morgan Crunch because it hurt people’s mouths. (Improved our content)We have a super deep bowl that makes it easy to hold and eat a lot of cereal (Improved our interface)
We have replaced the milk that goes sour with Heady-Topper
And we have a really nice utensil (Interaction) that we copied from Google because they are already really successful at helping people eat breakfast and have probably spent millions on this design.
So what could possibly be wrong?
Now that we have a new approach to our product we are going to do some usability testing…
Everyone can afford this…it’s not expensive because of modern tools that make remote moderated testing much easier.
When we did the usability testing we also found that people had a hard time eating the cereal with the butter knife we provide.
It’s at this point that I see many companies heading down the wrong path…because they don’t have many of the tools in the UX Toolbox it’s not obvious what’s wrong so they work on making the best butter knife possible.
This example is a gross oversimplification to be sure.. but the reason companies are designing and building the wrong things…is largely because their UX Toolbox only includes Graphic Design, Front-end Development and Analytics.
RISD…the best graphic design school in the country doesn’t include interaction design…and most of the rest of the elements in the UX Toolbox in their graphic design degrees. That’s because graphic design is it’s own profession…with it’s own value and it’s own specialized skills. Graphic design is a very valuable part of the UX design process…but it’s only one part.
Thanks for sticking with me. I hope this has helped to illuminate where some of the issues you face might be coming from and some possible solutions that might help.
One last thing I wanted to call out on this slide is that we here at E-Corp did some follow up testing and determined that a cheap plastic spoon out performed our knife that was made of pure silver. Because of this we didn’t only reach our original goal of improving topline revenue by selling more cereal but we also improved bottom line efficiency making the company more profitable as well.