Even Penguins Test: Part 2 — What is Design?
By Amelia Sander Wong, Mobile UX Technical Specialist at Google
This series breaks down the term “UX” into terms and tools you can take to your stakeholders, use to educate your team, and get buy-in. Part 2 focuses on integrating design best practices into any team or organization.
In Part 1 of Even Penguins Test, I examined strategy from the traditional management view with a User Experience lens. Strategy is a way of planning that professionals use to achieve business goals. I shared background on five different strategies used for different purposes: classic, shaping, visionary, renewal, and adaptive.
Now, while these schools of strategies are great to use as frameworks to plan ideas, I’d like to help you answer the question, “where does UX fall in”?
UX is often associated with UX Design — which frequently gets confused with with PR stunts, advertising, and graphic design.
Let’s take a step back and analyze what design is to help avoid confusion that can lead to redundancy.
According to The Usability Bok:
Design is a discipline that explores the dialogue between products, people, and contexts.
Design is a process that defines a solution to help people achieve their goals.
Design is an artifact produced as the result of solution definition.
Design is a Discipline
Design facilitates conversation. As a discipline, people can study and learn design from either official or unofficial sources. In this learning experience, people talk and question a product, people, or context. We may choose to question the existence of a product, wonder why people behave a certain way, or understand how a process is used. In UX Design, the user is the focus — how can we best understand and design for a user’s needs?
Design is a Process
Design is known to be chaotic, with no one-size-fits-all process. Stanford’s d.school has created a framework to manage design chaos called “design thinking,” which is often used in UX Design. However, design thinking is a framework and a tool to be used, not a process to be followed strictly. Depending on the problem, design thinking may go through a 5-step process, skip steps, go forward or backward, or not reach a solution. Regardless, it is helpful to be familiar with each step.
Step 1: Empathize with Users
Through empathy, a UX designer or strategist can learn more about a user’s motivations and pain points to identify the problem. Here, best practices involve asking a lot of questions. Asking the 5 Why’s: Who, What, When, Where, Why, and How allows a designer to identify the ecosystem early on and see the connections between the stakeholders, motivations, and goals.
Step 2: Define Problem
What? You thought we had a problem already? In the problem definition phase, it’s important to question the presumed problem entirely.
What’s our situation? What are the pain points? What are we trying to solve? What are our goals?
In the problem definition step, we take a step back from our research and ask ourselves, “what is the bigger picture?”
I’ve found Jobs-to-be-done (JTBD) to be helpful when defining the problem with product managers and business stakeholders. JTBD allows UXers to set expectations and a common language to bridge the gap between user and business’s goals. JTBDs are similar to user personas because they structure a user’s goals, pain points, and needs through a holistic experience, accounting for constraints and breaking down this qualitative data into measurable goals. Hit those KPI’s!
On a previous project, I worked with business analysts who had transitioned to the role of product managers. They came in with beliefs that personas were marketing’s expertise; they wanted nothing to do with “creating a fake person.”
After one-on-one stakeholder interviews, I realized that these product managers aimed meet very specific business goals, such as increasing the number of new users by 10%. Focusing on these business goals allowed me to reframe the conversation around goals and pain points, using the JTBD. Together, we moved towards opportunities that inspired designs focused on achieving business goals.
Step 3: Ideate
Ideating is brainstorming, and can be done alone, but is better with friends. Ideating is an inexpensive process that can start with pencil and paper.
Co-creation sessions are often useful for alignment with stakeholders having different areas of expertise. At these sessions, everyone with a say in your project (data scientists, designers, marketers, developers…) gets together at a table and sketch out ideas.
The elements of diverging and converging are at play. To generate ideas, our group sketches as many ideas as possible — the craziest solutions they can think of. After the second sketching session, we start to figure out what ideas are similar. We “yes, and” others’ ideas — acknowledging that we are aligning. Finally, we converge as we all vote on the best solutions.
Step 4: Prototype
After prioritizing our ideas, we move into the prototype stage. Prototypes are hypotheses that can be tested — ideas that can be validated. Prototypes are not finished products, but the minimum viable product (MVP) of the most important ideas or features that we want to test.
Designers use different types of tools for prototypes, but pencil and paper work well in the beginning. After a co-creation session, you can sketch together all the ideas your team has prioritized to create a low-cost paper prototype that can easily be modified. In this basic sketch, you can share ideas with all your stakeholders to ensure that everyone’s idea has been included and the team is aligned.
From paper prototypes, designers put together low-fidelity wireframes. These wireframes often include grey rectangles, circles and boxes. Shaded in boxes indicated areas of interaction, such as a button. Depending on where you are, your company may have established wireframe standards.
Step 5: Test
You should take your prototype to your users and test your hypothesis; their feedback is essential to your product’s success. Before getting started, it’s important to agree on your research goals as a cross-functional group (you can’t test for everything at once). I’ve found that including developers in user testing sessions has helped ensure that your user experience visually matches designs and functions well. After determining what works, you can iterate on your prototype as you continue to learn. The testing and iterative process is continuous, allowing designers to continuously adapt and keep their ideas up-to-date.
How do we use design thinking?
As a framework, design thinking offers an interesting process to approaching problems. Framing creates a structure to look at a problem, instead of going in uncharted. For me, framing user research as a “jobs-to-be-done” or “data-driven design” has been an effective way for my stakeholders to understand UX strategies for business cases.
Design Produces Artifacts
Artifacts are important because they are proofs of concept, showing that your idea worked. An artifact may be a functional prototype that draws either praise or complaints from users. This feedback is important because it will allow your product teams to focus on a great idea, or iterate and fix what is broken. If your call-to-action button is broken, your users may not be able to purchase items in your e-store — or maybe they can’t find the button in the first place. Iteration is necessary in order to fix your button’s functionality or visual distinction to ensure your goals will be met.
An example of focusing on a great idea is Instagram, which started off as Burbn, a whiskey app. The founders realized that users were using the photo sharing feature a lot and pivoted to focus purely on the photos feature. Scrapping their roadmap led Burbn to become the billion dollar business that is Instagram today.
So why did it work, and how can you repeat success? This is why it’s important to document your entire design process. Although artifacts are great, the entire design process is equally as important. What did you do? How do you know you met your goals and succeeded? When you know the answers to these questions, you can apply your learnings to future projects.
Amelia Sander is a Mobile UX Technical Specialist at Google, supporting ads. Her team works with some of Google’s biggest brands to dig deep into data and create personalized UX recommendations. Before diving into UX she was a researcher, IP lawyer, and product strategist. As a designer she has worked at Goldman Sachs, a non-profit, and a variety of freelance projects.
