UX Day 2013

Notes and reflections on UX Day 2013, organized by Cascade SF

Well, it’s been a long time since I sat in a lecture hall and listened to people talking about User Experience Design and User Research methodologies. But it feels good when the paradigms and methodologies we learned at school are still in use, and have gained validation in the real, lean business world.

The success of a product build on top of many small details of design. Most important of which is the notion of design thinking. Designers aren’t just people delivering mockups and following whatever specs have instructed, they are good at inductive thinking, drawing knowledge from good patterns that solves some problems that users themselves may not yet pronounced. There’s a trend for making design less about the artifacts (namely, mockups, prototypes, specs, etc.) but more about the problem. There exists bigger questions to address before people dive in to produce visual artifacts. The future of designers, as pointed out by one of the speakers, is going to be more leadership in facilitating conversations within a collaborative team working together towards a solution to a problem. What makes a good designer will be shifting from portfolio (which is traditionally a good indicator of their deliverability of visual artifacts) to outcomes of their projects.

The UX toolkit provides us with an abundance of sweet and pragmatic methodologies, computer-based and non-computer based tools, for each and every design phase of the product design. The most accessible and effective one seems paper prototyping, namely drawing wireframes on paper. The importance of prototypes cannot be stressed enough. Low-fidelity paper prototypes can get you out rapidly in the iteration cycle in terms of getting use cases validated by your users, clients and stakeholders. Also, prototypes create small wins by speeding up the process of product development and building trust among your customers.

Anyone can have good product ideas. It’s not up to the UX or visual designers to come up with the killer idea that changes the world. But it’s not a design-by-committee either. Designers have a unique role in this process as a facilitator, moderator, who really can grasp what people mean and consolidate them into something actionable.

User research today is incorporating more quantitative and analytical elements. And I personally really like it this way. People understand the opportunity provided from mining vast sea of information and looking for common patterns that could’ve been neglected through individual interviews. But in the meantime, people also understand that quantitative data doesn’t necessarily answer the questions of WHY after pointing out the problem.

There’s also a very interesting talk on giving feedback. Because, we all suck at giving feedback. Sometimes it’s too easy for us to get emotionally and personally involved in our work to hear the gist in others’ feedback. And most of time people really suck at giving good, concrete feedback. One piece of advice on giving better feedback is to ask the relevant questions to keep the feedback system on track: - Is this good for the user? - Is this good for the business? - Does the work justify the win? - Can the team execute on it?

Recently, there’s also a trend of bringing “lean” to User Experience practice. What does it entail, really? Very much like lean startup businesses, lean UX is a small, collaborative, cross-functional team that cohabit an office space (or sometimes a war-room) and figure out stuff together.

In general, I do enjoy this very short, effective, single-track UX event. It’s nice to hear in people’s real experiences how problems occurred, what methodologies and tools they used, and how the solutions iterate from there. The whole event was video and audio taped. So if you are interested in the original talk, go check out Cascade SF’s event page on Lanyrd, once they’ve updated the links to slides and talks.