Website Lean user Experience (UX): Get rid of results-oriented work

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"Editor's note" is translated from Smashingmagazine and compiled by @damndigital. In the design process, UX designer Ken will devote more effort to the delivery of the results of the work of the document. This may occur to facilitate communication with the team throughout the development process, or to be responsible for the boss.

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

Web pages (and interactive design, interface design, etc.) are traditionally executed on a deliverable basis. Frameworks, site maps, flowcharts, content lists, classification systems, prototypes, and specification documents (also known as "the Spec") help define the implementation of the site during its initial phase. These results form the metrics of a system's user experience.

Over time, this deliverable-oriented design process has placed user experience designers in the delivery business, measuring and complementing the depth and breadth of their design results, rather than the quality and success of the user experience that was designed. Designers have become document-targeted experts who understand the quality of the documents they create rather than design and develop the ultimate user experience.

When combined with a series of waterfall development approaches, the amount of time and money that is spent on design results is ultimately a waste. Waste means something that has no effect on the final product development.

Internal personnel immersed in a protracted design cycle, lack of risk-taking spirit, thereby losing market opportunities.

Engaging in long drawn-out design cycles mandates paralysis by internal indecision as as as as missed windows of harsh. Image by Opensourceway.

To maintain an edge in the vagaries of the market, it is important to be quick to enter the market. Wasting time on lengthy design cycles due to indecision in internal decision-making leads to missed market opportunities. In other words, market demand has changed as the company determines how the product should be designed.

Waterfall software development looks like this:

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

The design phase is usually broken down into:

Wait for the requirement definition to be generated and approved →

Consumer demand document →

Develop advanced sitemap and flowchart →

Get approval →

Experience development Interface framework for each part →

Report to project stakeholders and get approval →

Visual design for each wireframe →

Report to project stakeholders and obtain approval (repeat reporting process) →

Define design specifications, detail to each pixel and interaction →

Usability testing for future lifting space →

Submit to the development Department for Review, approval and execution.

Depending on the scope of the project, the process could take 1-6 to six months, wasting time and making designers suffer.

Access to a lack of user experience

Lean User Experience

Inspired by lean and agile development theory, the lean user experience is a quick practice of our truly natural work, less emphasis on results and more emphasis on actual process experience.

Traditional documents will be discarded, or at least eliminate the missing parts, providing only the minimum amount of necessary information needed to execute. With a lengthy and detailed design cycle, we prefer a short, iterative, minimum-real design cycle, and can receive feedback from all members of the executive team earlier and more frequently. The cooperation of the whole team is the key to the success of the product.

It is not surprising that the direct victims of the lean user experience design approach are those project beneficiaries who work silently and invite them to take a look at the project "done". This mentality has also become the biggest obstacle to the widespread implementation of this approach.

Let's take a look at the lean user Experience Process:

Stay lean, focus on the experience, not on the paper.

Look familiar? Yes, if you are familiar with agile or derivative products. The whole process starts with a lightweight concept. It can be generated on a whiteboard, a paper towel, or a fast wireframe. It is designed to quickly present the core concepts of ideas or processes to your team.

The team began to provide insights and observations on the direction and feasibility of this design. May change the original idea, perhaps the original concept completely overturned and put forward a new idea. Initially the investment in the sketch stage is very small, even if it is completely overturned the original direction will not have a significant cost. Once a direction is agreed internally, a rough model helps to effectively present the concept to the customer. This approach helps to improve creativity and recycle.

The most important thing here is that the lean user experience is closely focused on the design phase of the software development process. Whatever method your organization chooses (waterfall, quick, etc.), these concepts can be applied to your design tasks.

Isn't that what the Committee is designed to do?

The lean user experience encourages you, designers, to show your work to your team earlier, gather their insights and embed them in the next iteration of the design. For many, this sounds like a terrible "design by the commission," which has stifled many designs in the past few years.

In fact, even with so much feedback, designers keep a say in design, they evaluate what is most effective for business and users, and then iterate the design forward. As early as possible to provide insights to your team members rather than further hinder the design path, you should do a few steps:

1. Ensure that you are consistent with your team and your business vision;

2. Let developers sneak a peek at the direction of the application (accelerate development and respond to challenges earlier);

3. Further add to your idea, because when you present your concept to others, it will force you to focus more on areas that you have not considered before.

The trick is to keep the lean: Keep the results lightweight and editable. Do not waste time in precise pixel positions and perfect annotations. Got an idea? draw him on the whiteboard, and then grab the product owner or project supervisor and tell them what you think. Ready to start the design? Draw him roughly on your sketch board. How do you feel? Is that enough? post it in the office where it's visible, and then invite people passing by to comment on it.

In lean design methods, it is critical to spend time on real goals and form design decisions. It helps your client to match expectations with reality. Figure by Kristian Bjørnard

In an iterative process, suggestions and feedback from different team members inevitably reflect their own experience. The team members who present their opinions will begin to create a sense of ownership that can be seen in others. Now it is another way to innovate. This sense of ownership will equip the designer as a new ally to defend the work and to deal with the pressure from outside. The team eventually became the most valuable part of this successful experience.

Lean user experience is not a lazy user experience

Perhaps at first it seemed like a lazy way to experience the user because the goal was obviously less work. On the contrary, you do use the tools of the user experience. Sketches, introductions, reviews, studies, tests, prototypes, and even wireframes--all have been tested solid in each process. The trick is to use these tools properly, but more importantly, use them at the right depth to solve the problem you are trying to solve.

Designers need to feel that everything is under control.

"But I have given up control of my design!" This is the most frequently heard complaint from designers who are trying to lean the user experience. They are concerned with how to collect feedback from non designers, their value to the team is gradually reduced and become pixel-driven servants.

Sticking to concepts and avoiding unnecessary constraints are key to the lean user experience.

LC on to the concept and avoiding the unnecessary are vital in Lean UX by Kristian

Keeping lean, however, frequently collecting feedback from the entire team actually spends time in the wrong direction. Designers keep driving the design, but the guardrail (that is, constraints) becomes more and more visible after each iteration and review. Basically, if you spend three months perfecting a design, but when you finally come online and find that it doesn't meet your customers ' needs, you're wasting three months of your life, not to mention your team.

The lean user experience also accelerates development time. By letting the team have an early insight into the direction of the design, you can lay the groundwork for that experience. The basic guidelines for this phase will help to uncover the feasibility challenges of the proposed solution. Adequate time, material and resources, and then optimize the product elements. All of this affects how designers allocate their energy to reduce futility.

Prototyping: The quickest way to communicate between you and your client

The lean user experience makes prototypes work. In the initial sketch phase, the prototype that focuses on the important components of the experience is essential. Select the core user base (or two), and then only the images are reflected in the prototype. The ultimate fidelity of a prototype is not important, so create it in the way you are good at it. Once created, user testing can be done immediately.

Successful lean prototypes can be created with Adobe fireworks and even PowerPoint. Sometimes your customers (internal or external) will require the creation of a certain precision prototype to help them better demonstrate the experience. Use these tools to help you communicate design concepts to your customers more quickly and with sufficient fidelity.

Next, evaluate the prototype you designed internally to see if the prototype meets business requirements.

The above diagram is the design iterative and evaluation process.

Diagram of the iterative design and critique process. Warfel, Todd Zaki. 2009 Prototyping:a Practitioner ' s Guide. New York:rosenfeld Media.

Most importantly, the prototype is presented to the user. Let them periodically test the workflow, preferably once a week. You do not need a large number of users to participate in the test. Jakob Nielsen Studies suggest that if there are more than 5 testers, they are less likely to encounter new obstacles in their experience. If you test regularly, you can reduce the number of users who participate in the test weekly to 3. This also lowers costs.

Collect feedback. Find out what works and what is not. Adjust the embryonic form. Heck, you have to streamline it: this is the beauty of the lean user experience. The cost of your investment at each stage is so much that you can redesign, reconfigure, or redesign it at any time.

Once validated, demonstrate the updated prototype to your team. Explain the process, the user motivation and why you are so designed. At this point the prototype is your best document. It is the "norm". No need more (if any). In any case, you can answer all the questions that come along. Through the design of validation, designers can go to the next core of the experience, rather than spend six weeks to create design requirements documents and accurate to pixel specifications, which is the advantage of the lean user experience.

The power of the prototype is that it can make the design direction more quickly to the final decision maker-your users to verify. They can make the design themselves open to explain, in such an environment will eventually succeed.

Maintain full visual effects

"And what about my visual design?" by splitting the design and assigning them to the team one by one, eventually, the user accepts the visual effects of the product I designed and creates an extra experience! "

For lean and rapid development cry!

Lean and Agile Development are called for! Image by Kristian Bjørnard

User experience designers always have a lot of titles in front of them. Now you have another title: The manager of visual design. In this new role, your responsibility is to keep the bigger picture. The lean user experience forces you to prioritize experiences. Eventually, the scattered parts are condensed into a product. This condensed product reflects your bigger picture. Even if the design changes during the iteration and user feedback process, you are always designing for better goals. "Increase the time of the website report user" may be a dream. "Being able to deliver content quickly in a more realistic context" may be another dream. No matter how the design changes, these goals drive you to continue working.

This is not a simple matter. In the past, it is inconceivable that all of you should be authorized to design specific directions. With the lean user experience, it is inevitable that opinions that conflict with your point of view occur frequently in an iterative cycle. You can start fighting back from here. Use established perspectives to help you organize your feedback and focus on your ultimate goal.

The results of maintenance have no meaning

Documents have long been used by enterprise organizations to maintain their software. It became a reference tool for understanding past and present decisions. It may also help with complex business rules, but it is useless for design. The final product is a document. This is an experience. The thick deliverables created are just a reference to the user experience in the future, which is obsolete when it is completed. In the user experience, when asked how one thing should work, we find the simplest way through the product flowchart. The old document approach is a waste and does not solve the current problem.

How does content fit into strategy and planning?

Some Web sites and applications that focus on a large number of content releases (as opposed to tasks-or functionally based sites) will require some prior planning and documentation. It may not be necessary to revert to the original level of pages and articles, but a rich variety of content types and hierarchical arrangement is essential for first sketches and prototypes. Once the team has mastered the scope and type of content that the experience requires, the work can unfold as defined by the experience.

Can it be applied to my organization?

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

The lean user experience is easy to achieve for an in-house software/design studio. Your job is to solve problems, and you don't use design documents to solve problems. You use elegant, efficient and advanced software to solve problems. Using these new attributes to work should ultimately be simpler because you are looking for more collaboration, more dialogue and a successful rollout to the customer. Yes, culture will change-a product that carries a minimum requirement may be difficult for a series of subsequent designs. Then, faster decision-making power and more frequent user feedback will eventually become a winning weapon.

It can be difficult for an interactive organization because they are in the delivery business. Spending a lot of time writing documents for customers is their business. Each expert creates each document and is responsible for the document that is created. Cutting this kind of work means a steady decline in income.

The lean user experience proposal is that the upfront revenue shortfall due to delivery results can be remedied in a simple way, and then presented to the customer more quickly by providing some quality work. The whole process was slightly adjusted:

The lean user experience process for interactive organizations.

Lean UX Process for a interactive agency.

In the process of interactive organizations, the most important difference is the regular and frequent customer participation. Generally set to 2-3 times a week, each time 30 minutes, with the customer review inspection. Roughly set the goals you will achieve, the direction of your work, and the feedback you expect to receive. Each time you discuss a design sketch with your client, they will notice your changes and progress. They will use their way of feedback and, like their internal stakeholders, they will have a sense of ownership.

With customer involvement, faster design iterations, and a real user testing, you'll get the best solution in less time.

In the agency sector, spending a relatively short amount of time means earning only a smaller income, which can be a fatal wound to the lean user experience. But although the time of each project is shortened, the results are more useful, which will make you more efficient, resulting in more repeat customers. In addition, you let the customer participate in the process, so that they have a sense of ownership, this is what they like.

This is not an easy change, as the agency's corporate culture has been unchanged for decades. Only the most daring agencies dare try. And they can really be successful and will soon be followed. These ideas are well worth experimenting with in-house projects, perhaps by redesigning the agency's own website. To verify that the method is feasible and then apply it to an external project.

I am a consultant/freelancer, is this useful to me?

Consultants are essentially a kind of agency. It stands to say that the agency can also operate well under such circumstances. Constant feedback and iteration, building trust and dependency between each other.

A big challenge for consultants and freelancers is their ability to allocate time to each customer. Assuming they can handle multiple projects or customers at the same time, it becomes 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 are made more meaningful at the same time.

Optimize your flowchart and gain time.

Optimize your workflow and win time. Image by Kristian Bjørnard

It is worth mentioning that one of the big challenges for the lean user experience to succeed in these environments is for the front-line developers to use it. One of the fundamental principles of success in achieving a lean user experience is collaboration-the ideal is face-to-face communication, but it can also be done via Skype or other virtual meeting technologies. A lean user experience may not work perfectly when a customer can only communicate with your design team at a minimum level of communication but requires a fairly reliable document to help them get their work done.

The lean user experience is increasingly being used by organizations. TheLadders The most recent case is to maintain delivery, promote greater cooperation and achieve successful goals.

Conclusion

Lean user design is an evolution, not a revolution. The user experience designer needs to drive its development through constant engagement. The lean user experience allows the designer to get out of the delivery process and back to the experience design. That's what we're good at and trying to do. By abandoning the onerous specification document, let's be the expert who delivers the best results through the perfect experience design. This is not an easy thing. Culture and tradition will drive its course, and the end result of this investment will be more rewarding work and a more successful business model.

Original link: http://www.damndigital.com/archives/17899