5 Key takeaways from UX London — Part 1
At the end of May I had the pleasure of attending the conference “UX London” for 3 days. It was 3 days full of inspiration, insights and interesting people.
The topics
This year the conference focused on three important areas of experience design:
Day 1: Designing Products
Day 2: Designing for People
Day 3: Designing the Future
My expectations were high, and I can tell you this much: I was not disappointed.
Before the event
Even before arriving at the conference, the service was fantastic.
With the purchase of the tickets, helpful emails guided the user to the event with a day to day breakdown. This included what to pack, how to get to the event, information about the schedule, how to get Wifi, information about the sports offer and more. Onsite volunteers helped with registration and orientation.
At the conference
On the 29th of May the conference started. Each morning there were 5 talks, afterwards a lunch breakwith food trucks in the park in front of the Laban Building and the opportunity to get to know other attendees.
After lunch we could choose one of six workshops, which gave us the opportunity to dive deeper into a topic and to work hands-on.
In addition to great talks and workshops, the conference also offered sports sessions in the morning and community events in the evening to connect with like-minded people.
Key takeaways
1. Use feedback iterations for quick idea generation
On the first day I chose the workshop “Design Sprints 102. On The Road To Mastery” by Chris How and Jerlyn Jareunpoon-Phillips. Both work at Clearleft, a company that offers support as a strategic design partner.
These days everyone is talking about Design Sprints, but how does a successful Design Sprint work? Jerlyn and Chris gave us their insights. They ran a miniature Design Sprint 2.0 with us within 3 hours. It was exciting, it was fast and inspiring.
We started by forming groups of 7 people and got our assignment: The British department store John Lewis wants to offer a gift finder. Make a concept for it.
After creating a service blueprint together, we focused on the process step of finding a gift. We wrote down our goal and formulated it as a “How might we”.
Next, we started the idea generation. We did 3 rounds of scribbling, after each round we gave each other feedback and used a different criticism technique which Jerlyn and Chris introduced to us. After each round you could see how the ideas advanced in quality. Presenting your own ideas, listening to each other’s ideas while giving and receiving feedback in short iterations helped to constantly improve ideas. In the end, really good and innovative ideas were born in a short time.
As a final task we had to promote our product in a 140 characters tweet.
The workshop was fast and demanded a lot of attention for the 3 hours. It would have been interesting to have seen the solutions of the other teams, but due to lack of time this was unfortunately not possible.
One of the biggest strengths of the workshop was that Jerlyn and Chris provided us with so many methodologies and gave them to us as a handout. Perfect to recapitulate later and to apply in business. Thanks a lot for this really hands-on-workshop.
2. Make the least mature person of a team mature and you’ll improve the whole team
Jared Spool, CO-founder of UIE, spoke about how we learned to design and how we can increase the UX competence in UX teams and companies.
Individual growth
When we start to learn something, our knowledge is really limited. We may be highly motivated, but it is hard for us to differ between good and bad quality, because it exceeds our knowledge. Jared calls this the state of “Unconscious Incompetence”. It’s the state when we lack skills and knowledge, but we aren’t aware of it until told by someone. This leads to “Conscious Incompetence”.
When we become aware of our lack of experience, we practice a lot to improve our skills. We start to recognise what distinguishes good quality from bad quality.
Through repeated practice we are able to achieve a higher quality of work until we have reached a point where we have come to the level of “Conscious Competence”.
The more experienced we get, the more intuitive we work and the more likely we are to do things right intuitively. This is what Jared calls the final level of “Unconscious Competence”.
Team growth
Jared reflected on how the individual growth process works. But how do UX teams gain maturity, consisting of many individuals with different levels of competence?
“Make the least mature person of a team mature and you’ll improve the whole team.”
“Create a culture where learning is the most important thing.”
Increasing stakeholder awareness
How can UX competence be increased throughout the company?
When the competence in UX teams has grown, it is important to create awareness for UX work in other specialist areas and among stakeholders.
Stakeholders who are not so close to the project often find it difficult to place themselves in the position of the user and make their needs the focus of product development. Understandably, they focus on business goals, but there is often little awareness of the importance of user opinions for the success of the product.
How can the needs of users be put in focus for everyone?
Jared’s tip is not to participate exclusively with researchers in usability testings, but also to invite stakeholders and colleagues from other disciplines to attend.
For many stakeholders, it opens their eyes to what needs users really have and what they see as strengths and weaknesses of the product. The fact that “the user” is no longer an abstract term, but someone who sits in front of them, makes it much easier to think of their needs during product development. You really experience the emotions of this person and thus feel more connected and responsible.
To summarise it, to deliver a great experience to the users of their product, companies need to raise awareness of the importance of user opinion, create a culture of continuous learning and communicate a strong experience vision. In this way, design will become a company’s competitive advantage.
Part 2: Behavioural Design and AI
In my next post, I’m going to write about two talks on Behavioural Design and Artificial Intelligence and give you a special tip by Jane Austin from Babylon Health.
