UXThursday Toronto 2014 Part 1
This past Thursday I hit up Toronto for the UX Thursday Conference. UX Thursday is a travelling mini conference sponsored by UIE and VitaminT to highlight the awesome UX work happening in cities where awesome UX work is happening. I loved the single-day, single-track, short format conference approach to get maximum learning out of a one day investment.
I’m going to cover half the talks in this post, and the other half at a later date.
Aim for Delight, not Satisfaction
Jared Spool — Bulding A Winning UX Strategy Using the Kano Model
Jared talked about how a user’s experience can be mapped over time as a fluctuation between frustration and delight, and the job of UX is to manage that. The Kano Model is a way of sciencing that all out.
The main takeaways Jared touched on:
- Try to get the point where rather than removing frustration, you are adding delight
- Experience Rot: increased features and complexity means decreased experience (the upstart competitor that unseats the established tool is always simpler and less functional).
- Basic Expectations are sometimes crazy irrational, but need to be accounted for. You cannot control them, and you cannot advertise them, but you have to spend time on them or your product will suffer.
- Delight comes from pleasure (Crutchfield has passionate writers making custom product descriptions and their customers will spend 237% of their budget vs 89% at WalMart), flow (Progressive made filling out Insurance forms not tedious) and meaning (Zipcar gave credits to customers who drove people to polls on election day)
- Innovation is not about new inventions. It is adding value in new places to raise the current experience.
It looks like a previous iteration of the talk is available on YouTube, as are the slides. Also an awesome sketchnote by Andrea Ong Pietkiewicz
Everyone Sees The World Through Their Own Keyhole
Ilona Posner — Keyhole Impact for User Experience and Beyond
Ilona shared the notion of The Keyhole — everyone sees the world in a very limited way, informed by their culture, experience, education, beliefs, business goals etc. When a bunch of keyholes looking at different but nearly-similar-enough aspects of an issue come together, we get a situation like where it took 35 minutes, a cash deposit, and a call to customer support from a second cell phone to purchase a soda from a vending machine using your mobile phone (the future is now!).
Agile UX Means Knowing What To Cut
Desirée Sy — Design, Test, Learn, Repeat: Learning as You Go in Agile
Desirée covered the development of the transform select tool in Sketchbook Pro and how to iterate designs in an agile environment.
The rationale behind the design of the function and the app in general was really interesting and not something I can easily cover here. The main generally applicable takeaway was that when doing User Experience work in an Agile environment, designing to the release goals is essential. Knowing the release/business goals means you know when you are “done” even if things aren’t perfect or let go of features that are not as important (even if they are more important to you).
These are the Voyages of the IBM Enterprise
Kimberly Peter — Lessons from the Labyrinth: Designing in the World of Enterprise
The main takeaway was how tricky it can be to get a whole enterprise onside with going in a direction (when there’s that many cooks, you’ll spoil the broth). Kimberly provided some methods for figuring out which direction to go despite potential for conflicting reports.
- During conference calls, someone’s job is to write down what sounds like the takeaway and it gets posted for all the callers so they have a chance to disagree.
- “Backcasting” is a process for combining vague future goals, with present scenario into some sort of actionable timeline.
- User Story Mapping is a valuable tool for figuring out what to build.
- User Experience is often moulded by technology forces: scalability, availability, rapid deployment will affect process.
- The importance of having a way to get people on a level as teams inevitably lose/gain members with different background (book clubs!).
also more Sketchnotes !
And then lunchtime came down upon the land.
