Insights from Google, Facebook, Instagram, Uber and more
by IDG Korea
*The contents of this article has been translated into English in order to reach out to a larger audience.
Every spring and fall, IDG Korea hosts a highly insightful UX conference for working professionals. Here is my summary for the conference that was held this autumn.
Speaker 1 : Advice for UX Leaders
Jared Zimmerman, Lead UX Design Manager, Google
In the first session, Jared Zimmerman shared his experience about what qualities a design manager should have and how to manage design teams. He shared his experience on how he successfully made use of the Design Thinking Process as a team management discipline and what he learned from the process.
According to Zimmerman, the five stages of design (Define-Create-Iterate-Evaluate-Refine) can be applied to team building and management in the following manner.
1. Define : Define your team goals.
- Like design, creating a good team all begins with coming up with a clear objective for the team.
- An example could be a team that works efficiently, or a team with various design skill sets.
2. Create : Gather the people that will help you meet your team objective.
- One thing to keep in mind, is that when gathering people, you not only want to hire good designers but also good teachers. From a long term standpoint, it is crucial to have one or two designers that foster learning in the team, so they as a whole can grow.
- Also, hiring like-minded people is not always the best solution. Sometimes you will want people with different mentalities so healthy arguments can arise.
3. Iterate : Test out which team structures work best.
- Sometimes the best designers are not the best leaders. You will need to try out a few different structures before you find out something that works well.
4. Evaluate : Evaluate your current team based on the objectives set at the beginning.
- In this stage, it is helpful to use a Skill Grid, in order to visualise your team’s current status at a glance and define opportunities for improvement.
5. Refine : Define different learning points and restructure the team to test out the new hypothesis.
- Creating teams usually take a few iterations before you can get them completely right.
Speaker 2 : Customer Service Design and Chatbots
Aryan Porwal, Senior UX Designer, Expedia
In the next section, Aryan Porwal spoke about a new chat bot that Expedia is currently developing. Their ultimate goal for the service is to take automate most of the responsibilities currently taken by the Customer Service divisions; resulting in shorter waiting times for customers and a cutback on education costs for the CS teams.
Porwal emphasised that when a customer decides to call the CS center, it means that they are already going through a bad experience. Therefore, it makes it even more important to find out exactly what the customer needs and helping them complete that task on one try. He also mentioned that users tend to want to create interpersonal relationships with robots, so even a small gesture such as calling the user’s name improves the experience greatly.
Speaker 3 : Designing Beyond the Screen
Gabriel Valdivia, Lead Product Designer, Facebook
Valdivia introduced some of the VR design research currently in progress at Facebook. As Mark Zuckerberg demonstrated in his keynote speech last year, Facebook is currently looking for new ways to connect people through virtual reality. Valdivia shared that over time, they learned that the three main factors they keep in mind while designing for a VR environment are 1) Presence, 2) Comfort, and 3) Input. Details for each point are as follow :
1. Presence
- Presence is defined as the feeling that you actually exist in the virtual world, and believe that your perceived surroundings are real.
- Facebook decided to use avatars in VR contents to maximize the feeling of presence. They learned that hand gestures and eye movement (such as eye contact, eyeball movement, and blinking) play a big role in people perceiving their (or their friends’) avatars as real beings.
2. Comfort
- Comfort is the state in which a user does not feel nausea that comes from the deviation between perceived movement and actual staying stationary.
- In order to reduce the feeling of dizziness, Facebook uses a method they call ‘teleporting’; where a user feels like they are stable, while their surroundings are moving. (Example : 0:30–0:40) This is possible because people can perceive if they are moving or not by comparing if the ‘ground’ they are standing on (in the video, the boat acts as the ‘ground’) is moving or not in relation to the objects around them.
3. Input
- Facebook quickly learned that 3D worlds require different input methods compared to the 2D interfaces we are so accustomed to.
- For example, if we wish to ‘scroll’ to the back in the 3D world, the ideal solution would be to literally turn around 180 degrees. However, because the user is sitting down in most cases when using a VR device, this method becomes a bit more problematic. In order to solve this problem, Facebook decided to introduce scrolling through eye gaze. The scroll speed accelerates based on how far ‘left’ or ‘right’ the user is gazing.
- Another new interface that was introduced was the circular UI. In the 2D world, most menus and options are designed in a linear fashion. However, in the 3D world, a circular UI works better because it increases accessibility for the user. (Check out the ‘like’ interface below.) The user no longer has to spread out their arms to choose an option that is at the far end.
- Also, when showing a list of contents, they found out that it is better to use a ‘gallery’ view, instead of the common one-content-at-a-time list interface optimized for mobile devices.
- Finally, because it requires a lot of time for users to learn new interfaces, Valdivia also mentioned that Facebook is currently testing out ‘tool’ interfaces; where you grab a tool that is resemblant of a real life object (such as a camera), and operate it like you would normally do (e.g. Take a picture with it by pressing the shutter button).
Speaker 4 : Product Design Process at Instagram
Jason Kim, Product Designer, Instagram
Jason Kim shared how Instagram is currently trying to enhance their shopping experience through UX. He stated that there are over 15 million business accounts on Instagram at the moment. However, the flow of viewing items and buying them are not optimized for the app, so people have been using 3rd party services like Like2Buy (Website) as solutions.
In order to buy an item on Instagram, users had to go to a user’s profile, click on their link, wait for a long duration for the webpage to load, then open up a new app to process their purchase. Instagram felt that this process was not only complicated from a user standpoint, but also caused a majority of their users to exit their app. They felt that only the people who really wanted to buy a product would actually go through this tedious procedure.
This is why they decided to create ‘Product Tags’, as shown above. If you click on the tag, you can open up an in-app browser that leads you to a purchase page where you can also view similar products. Jason noted that by using an in-app browser, they were able to shorten load time so people could concentrate on their shopping, resulting in an ideal shopping experience.
Speaker 5 : Designing for Self-Driving Cars
Nuri Kim, Senior Product Designer, Uber ATG
In the next session, Nuri Kim of Uber shared some of her personal learning points while designing Uber’s self driving car system. According to Nuri, Uber’s self driving car has already been launched in Pittsburgh, and is currently undergoing multiple cycles of testing and upgrading. She mentioned that they were not planning on a launch date, but rather waiting for the cars to reach a certain safety level before they opened it to the public.
The process of designing a self driving car can be divided in to 4 parts : 1) Software Development — 2)Computer Simulation — 3) Outdoor Simulation — 4) Real World Simulation (A simulation in which real passengers ride the car, with the assistance of a safety agent).
Nuri Kim stated that throughout this process she learned the importance of always being open to new ideas and aspects, the need of having a strict personal guideline of what a ‘good design’ is, and the importance of having a strong, multidisciplinary team. She also shared that the role of designers was changing. Nowadays, she believes the role of designers is to visualize concepts and bring user context to the product, whereas before, designers were usually the ones that ‘perfected’ them.
She also mentioned a few methods they used to collaborate with robots, such as conducting role plays to understand the robots, and creating systems to visualize what the robots are learning so humans can understand them too. Also, she emphasized the importance of dividing the tasks efficiently between people and robots, because some tasks are done better by the other. For example, although they leave most of the learning to robots, they leave the interpretation of any heavily contexted road events to humans.
Speaker 6 : Designing for the Real World
Kyle DeHovitz, Lead Product Designer, Uber
In the last session, Uber’s Kyle DeHovitz shared examples of his work, all with a focus of designing for a O2O service. The main concept that unified these examples was the following question : “How can you make the users map online touchpoints to the ones in the real world?”. Some examples of this would be creating clear, yet concise maps that helped you understand where to meet your driver, designing the wording so that the users would understand their push alarms, and creating good experiences for users that don’t have great internet.
Here are his 3 guidelines :
1. Communication Matters
- Create a different map for each context (e.g. The Rider / The Driver). Show only what you need on the map. Also summarize the way to the destination in order to enhance the user’s information perception.
- Make sure your push alerts are concise and have only the information the user needs. A friendly alert like the one on the left may contribute to the brand experience, but does not really help the user do anything.
- Also, use the same metaphors for both the offline and online worlds. Uber usually installs a sign for each of it’s airport taxi stops with the same icon the users see on the map, so the users can be more confident that they had come to the right place.
2. Trust People’s Abilities
- Just give the people a minimum amount of information so they can understand their surroundings, and they will function perfectly well on their own from there.
- For example, Uber Eats shows how the driver should find the restaurants, pick up the food, and deliver it to their customers with words and images, but they don’t tell them exactly where to park.
3. Create Empathy
- Most global services tend to think that once their service succeeds in one area, they can take that ‘formula’ and apply it to any other context. However this is very misconceived.
- Uber found out that India did not have the same internet environment that the USA did, and that the phones the people were using there were older versions. Also, some of the landscape was different and had not been fully designed for. This is where Kyle learned that even though emphasizing the importance of creating empathy with your users may seem a bit like a cliché, it is important to always remember that real people exist at the end of every single design.
*This is a third person interpretation of the sessions. All content belongs to its’ respective owners.
