Website lean user experience (UX): Get rid of results-only work

 

 

[Editor's note] This article is translated from SmashingMagazine and compiled by @ DamnDigital. In the design process, the UX designer is willing to focus more on the documents that deliver the results. This may occur to facilitate communication with the partner team throughout the development process, or to be responsible to the boss.

However, if the design is just a job, who is responsible for the core user experience ?.

Web pages (as well as interactive design, interface design, etc.) are traditionally executed in a deliverable form. Frameworks, website maps, flowcharts, content lists, classification systems, prototypes, and standard documents (also known as The Spec) help define The implementation of websites in their initial stages. These results constitute a measure of the user experience of a system.

Over time, this design process that focuses on deliverables puts user experience designers on the delivery business to measure and supplement the depth and width of their design results, rather than the quality and achievements of the designed user experience. Designers have become document-Oriented experts who understand the quality of the documents they create rather than design and develop the final user experience.

When combined with a series of waterfall development methods, these design results that spend a lot of time and money are ultimately just a waste. Waste refers to things that do not have any effect on final product development ..

　　

 

Internal staff are immersed in long design cycles and lack of adventure, thereby losing market opportunities.

Engaging in long drawn-out design cycles risks paralysis by internal indemo-as well as missed windows of market opportunity. Image by opensourceway.

To maintain an advantage in the unpredictable market competition, you must maintain sensitivity. Therefore, it is especially important to quickly enter the market. Due to the indecisive nature of internal decisions, the time is wasted on lengthy design cycles, leading to missed market opportunities. In other words, when the company decides how to design the product internally, the market demand has changed.

Waterfall software development looks like this:

Definition → design → development → test → deployment (serving)

The design phase is usually divided:

Wait for the requirement definition to be generated and approved →

Consumption requirement documentation →

Develop Advanced website maps and flowcharts →

Recognized →

Develop the interface framework for each part of the experience →

Report to project stakeholders and gain approval →

Visual Design for each line diagram →

Report to project stakeholders and gain approval (repeated reporting process) →

Determine design specifications, detailed to each pixel and interaction →

Test the availability of the space to be upgraded in the future →

Submit the application to the Development Department for review and approval.

Depending on the scope of the project, this process may take 1-6 months, not only wasting time but also suffering designers.

Enter a scarce User Experience

Lean User Experience

Inspired by lean and agile development theory, lean user experience is to quickly practice our real natural work, reduce the emphasis on results, and pay more attention to practical process experience.

Traditional Documents will be discarded, or at least the missing parts will be removed, and only the minimum necessary information required for execution will be provided. Compared with lengthy and meticulous design cycles, we recommend shorter, iterative, and affordable design cycles, and receive feedback from all members of the execution team earlier and more frequently. Cooperation between the entire team is the key to product success.

It is not surprising that the direct victims of lean user experience design methods are those of the project beneficiaries who work silently while they are just inviting them to take a look when the project is "finished. This mentality has also become the biggest obstacle to widespread implementation of this approach.

Let's take a look at the lean user experience process:

　　

 

Keep lean and focus on the experience, instead of staying on paper.

Looks familiar? Yes, if you are familiar with agile or its derivative products. The entire process starts with a lightweight concept. It can be generated on a whiteboard, a paper towel, or a dashed line chart. It aims to quickly display the core concepts of creativity or process in front of your team.

The team began to provide their insights and observations on the design direction and feasibility. The original idea may be changed, and the original concept may be totally overturned and a new idea may be proposed. In the initial sketch phase, the investment was very small, and even if the original direction was completely overturned, there would be no significant overhead. Once a direction is agreed internally, a rough model helps to effectively present the concept to the customer. This method helps improve creativity and repeat repeatedly.

The most important thing here is that lean user experience strictly focuses on the design stage in the software development process. Regardless of the method you choose (waterfall, fast, etc.), these concepts can be applied to your design tasks.

Isn't it designed by the committee?

Lean user experience encourages you, designers, to show your work to your team more and more early, collect their insights and embed them into the next iteration of the design. For many, it sounds like a terrible "by-Committee design", which has killed many designs over the past few years.

In fact, even with so many feedbacks accumulated, designers still have the right to speak about the design, they assess what is most effective for business and users, and then iterate the design. Provide insights to your team members as soon as possible, instead of further hindering the design path. You should take the following steps:

1. ensure that you are consistent with the vision of your team and your company;

2. Give developers a sneak peek at the application direction (accelerating development and coping with challenges earlier );

3. Further supplement your ideas, because when you present your concepts to others, it will force you to focus more on areas you have never considered before.

Keep lean: Keep Results Light and editable. Do not waste time on precise pixel locations and perfect comments. Is there an idea? Draw the image on the whiteboard and capture the product owner or project supervisor to tell them what you think. Are you ready to start designing? Draw a rough picture of your sketch board. How do you feel? Is that enough? Paste it in a visible place in the office and invite people passing by to comment on it.

　　

 

It is critical to spend time on real goals and design decisions in lean design methods. It helps your customers match expectations effectively with reality. Figure by Kristian Bj ø rnard

In the iteration process, suggestions and feedback from different team members inevitably reflect their own experiences. The team members who put forward their own opinions will begin to have a sense of ownership and can be seen on other people. Now it has become another way of innovation. This sense of ownership sets the designer as a new ally to jointly defend the work and cope with pressure from the outside world. This team eventually became the most valuable part of this successful experience.

Lean user experience is not a lazy User Experience

In the beginning, it may seem that this is a lazy approach to user experience, because the goal is obviously less work. On the contrary, you actually use the tools for user experience. Sketch, Introduction, comments, research, testing, prototype, and even line diagrams-all of these are proven in each process. The trick is to use these tools properly, but more importantly, use them in proper depth to solve the problems you are trying to solve.

Designers need to feel that everything is under control

"But I gave up my design !" These are the most common complaints from designers who try to improve user experience. They are concerned about how to collect feedback from non-designers who are increasingly less valuable to the team and become pixel-driven servants.

　　

 

Adhering to the concept and avoiding unnecessary restrictions is the key to lean user experience.

Holding on to the concept and avoiding the unnecessary is vital in Lean UX. Image by Kristian Bj ø rnard

Keep lean, but frequent collection of feedback from the entire team is actually spending time in the wrong direction. Designers constantly drive the design, but the barrier (constraint) becomes more and more visible after each iteration and review. Basically, if you spend three months to complete a design, but after the final launch, you find that it does not meet the customer's needs, so you just wasted three months in your life, not to mention your team.

The lean user experience also accelerates the development time. By allowing teams to gain insight into the design direction at an early stage, they can lay the foundation for this experience. The basic principles at this stage will help reveal the challenges in the feasibility of the proposed solutions. Time, materials, and resources are sufficient, and then product elements are optimized. All of these affect how designers distribute their energy and reduce their futile efforts.

Prototype: the fastest way to communicate with customers

Lean user experience makes the prototype play a role. In the initial sketch phase, prototype is essential for an important component that focuses on experience. Select the core user group (or two), and then the prototype only shows these images. The final fidelity of the prototype is not important, so you can create it in a way you are good. Once created, you can perform a user test immediately.

Successful lean prototypes can be created using Adobe Fireworks or PowerPoint. Sometimes your customers (internal or external) require the creation of precise prototypes to help them better demonstrate the experience. Using these tools can help you communicate design concepts more easily and quickly to customers, with sufficient fidelity.

Next, evaluate your design prototype internally to see if the prototype meets your business needs.

　　

 

Design Iteration and evaluation processes.

Distriof the iterative design and critique process. Warfel, Todd Zaki. 2009. Prototyping: A Practitioner's Guide. New York: Rosenfeld Media.

The most important thing is to display the prototype in front of the user. Let them regularly test the workflow, preferably once a week. You do not need a large number of users to participate in the test. The Jakob Nielsen study shows that if there are more than five testers, they are less likely to encounter new obstacles in the experience. If you often test, you can reduce the number of users participating in the test every week to three. This also reduces costs.

Collect feedback. Find out which are feasible and which are not feasible. Adjust the prototype. Hell, you have to streamline it: this is the beauty of lean user experience. The cost you invest in each stage is so low that you can reinvent, reconfigure, or redesign at any time.

Once verified, your team is presented with updated prototypes. Explain the process, user motivation, and why you design it. The prototype is your best document. It is a "Specification ". No more (if any ). In any case, you can answer all the questions that follow. The verified design allows the designer to enter the next core part of the experience, rather than spending six weeks creating design requirement documents and standards accurate to pixels, this is the advantage of lean user experience.

The power of prototype is that it can quickly deliver the design direction to the final decision maker-your users for verification. They can let the design speak for themselves, and they will eventually succeed in that environment.

Maintain a complete visual effect

"How is my visual design? By splitting the design and assigning them to the teams one by one, the user can accept the visual effects of the products I designed and have an additional experience !"

　　

 

Scream for lean and rapid development!

Lean and Agile Development are called! Image by Kristian Bj ø rnard

User experience designers once held many titles. Now you have another title: The manager of visual design. In this new role, your responsibility is to maintain a general picture. Lean user experience forces you to give priority to experience. In the end, these scattered parts are merged into a product. This cohesive product reflects your overall situation. Even if design changes occur during iteration and user feedback, you always design towards a better goal. It may be a dream to "increase the time for website reporting users. "Being able to quickly deliver content in a more real situation" may be another dream. Regardless of how the design changes, these Goals drive you to continue working.

This is not a simple task. In the past, it was incredible to authorize you to design specific directions. Along with the lean user experience, it is inevitable that opinions frequently conflict with your views in the iteration cycle. You can start to fight back from here. Use the established viewpoint to help you organize feedback and focus on the ultimate goal.

The maintenance result is meaningless.

Documents have long been used by enterprises to maintain their software. It becomes a reference tool for understanding past and present decisions. At the same time, this may be helpful for complicated business rules, but it is useless for design. The final product is a document. This is an experience. The thick deliverables created will only serve as a reference for the user experience in the future, which is outdated at the time of completion. In the user experience, when asked how to proceed, we can find the simplest way through the product flowchart. The old document method is a waste and cannot solve the current problem.

How does the content adapt to policies and planning?

Some websites and applications that focus on publishing a large amount of content (relative to tasks-or feature-based websites) will require some prior planning and documentation. It may not need to be restored to the original horizontal pages or articles, but a wide variety of content types and hierarchical la s are necessary for the first sketch and prototype. Once the team has mastered the scope and type of content required for the experience, the work can be carried out as defined by the experience.

Can it be applied to my organization?

Two types of organizations that are too simplified: internal software/design studios and interactive organizations.

For internal software/design studios, the lean user experience is very easy to achieve. Your job is to solve the problem, and you will not use design documents to solve the problem. You use elegant, efficient, and advanced software to solve problems. Using these new attributes to work should eventually be simpler, because you are looking for more cooperation, more conversations and will be successfully presented to customers earlier. Yes, culture will change-products that carry the minimum requirements may make a series of subsequent designs difficult. Then, faster decision-making and more frequent user feedback will eventually become the ultimate winner.

It is difficult for interactive organizations because they are in the delivery business industry. Spending a lot of time writing documents for customers is the way they make money. Each expert creates each document and is responsible for the created document. Reducing this type of work means a decrease in revenue.

The recommendation of lean user experience is that the shortage of revenue in the Early Stage caused by delivery results can be compensated in a simple way and then presented to the customer more quickly by providing high-quality work. The entire process is slightly adjusted:

　　

 

The lean user experience process of interactive organizations.

Lean UX process for an interactive agency.

In the process of interaction, the core difference lies in regular and frequent customer participation. Generally set to 2-3 times a week, 30 minutes each time, with the customer to review the inspection. Set your goals, work direction, and expected feedback. Every time you discuss the design sketch with the customer, they will notice your changes and processes. They will give feedback in their way. Like internal stakeholders, they will also have a sense of ownership.

With customer participation, you can perform design iterations more quickly and arrange real users to test them. You will get the best solution in a shorter period of time.

In the agency field, a short period of time means only a small amount of income can be obtained, which may be a fatal injury to the lean user experience. However, although the time for each project is shortened, the results are more useful, which will make you more efficient and generate more regular customers. In addition, you let customers participate in the whole process and give them a sense of ownership, which is also what they like.

This is not an easy change because the corporate culture of the Agency has remained unchanged for decades. Only the most daring agency can try. And they can achieve great success and will soon follow suit. These ideas are worth trying out in internal projects; maybe they are re-designing the website of the Agency itself. Verify that this method is feasible and then apply it to external projects.

I am a consultant/freelancer. Does this work for me?

Consultants are essentially a type of agency. It is reasonable to say that the Agency can also operate well under such circumstances. Continuous feedback and iteration build trust and dependency between each other.

A major challenge for consultants and freelancers is the time they can allocate to each customer. It is assumed that they can process multiple projects or customers at the same time, but it is very difficult to provide the necessary attention and communication to maintain a truly lean user experience. In this case, go back to a deeper document to ensure that all projects become more meaningful at the same time.

　　

 

Optimize your flowchart and win time.

Optimize your workflow and win time. Image by Kristian Bj ø rnard

It is worth mentioning that a major challenge for lean user experience to succeed in these environments is to allow frontline developers to use it. A basic principle for achieving a successful lean user experience is cooperation-ideally, face-to-face communication, but it can also be achieved through Skype or other virtual conference technologies. When a customer can only communicate with your design team to a minimum but requires a fairly reliable document to help them complete their work, the lean user experience may not work completely.

Lean user experience is increasingly applied by organizations. One of TheLadders's most recent cases is to maintain delivery, promote enhanced cooperation, and achieve the goal smoothly.

Conclusion

Lean user design is an evolution, not a revolution. User experience designers need to constantly participate to promote its development. The lean user experience allows designers to get rid of delivery work and return to experience design. This is exactly what we are good at and want to work. Giving up heavy normative documents makes us an expert who delivers the best results through a perfect experience design. This is not an easy task. Culture and tradition will promote its process, and the final outcome of this investment will surely be a more beneficial work and a more successful business model.

Link: http://www.damndigital.com/archives/17899