A Report from the Summer 2019 UX Hallway Study
It takes a village to make a great product. Thankfully, we have one. Alisha Edwards shares her thoughts on a great, big user test.
As a UX designer, there’s no gift greater than honest feedback. On Thursday, June 27, we turned our office into one big hallway study, allowing all of my design and content partners and myself to get thoughts on our newest concepts and projects.
The hallway study was a great opportunity for the many user experience professionals across our customer journey teams to come together as a group and test out new ideas being developed. The main goal for the event was to gather feedback from participants with a fresh perspective that they can apply to improve their ideas. It was also a way to gain exposure in other areas of the business and UX.
Logan Green is one of our newest UX content strategists, and he had some great perspective on the day. “It’s important to show people what we’re working on,” Logan said. “We need to have fresh eyes on the projects we’re developing. And just having the whole department together is really great.”
Kasia Ciesla, one of our rockstar product designers felt similarly. “I think there are a few facets to this. Exposure to other people’s work, and exposure for your own work. It’s great to see, face to face, how many people interact with different types of studies. And just the valuable research from it. We can definitely measure the impact of all of this great feedback.”
Senior product designer Abby Marsh assembled one of the day’s most popular tests, assembling a number of icons and asking participants to try to explain what each icon may be used for. “I’ve been seeing icons that just weren’t resonating with me in some of our work, specifically in terms of communicating something being in progress,” said Abby. “We’ve been using a lot of different terminology, and we were using the same icons for ‘in-progress’ and ‘pending.’ We wanted to get a feel from a larger group.”
“As the test went on,” Abby continued, “we placed the icons in context of the actual pages they’d be used on. We let people go through the test and come to a conclusion. It’s been really great.”
Amanda LibreSinn — a senior product designer who lends her talents to our customers in the renewal cycle — had more to add. “It’s going great. I’m getting a lot more feedback than I expected to, quickly. And it’s a great way to just get immediate feedback on whether or not a concept will work. And we can do additional testing. Especially when it’s a brand new design , and it really hasn’t been fleshed out yet, getting some hallway-style feedback really helps us get on the right track.”
Hallway tests do more for us than just get feedback on our designs. It also creates an opportunity for us to open up a dialog with our partners in development, and address some of the biggest questions we face as a team.
In 2018, we went through a major brand redesign which ultimately led to the creation of our digital design system. We went through many iterations before ultimately making the decision to move to one singular pattern library, but this has been challenging. Across the three domains of UX, IT, and Product, the sensation within the teams has been foggy when it came down to the “how” behind implementation. But why? With all the moving parts, it’s been difficult to pin down exactly what the root cause might be.
Our UX leaders asked themselves, “How might we better understand what the problem truly is so that we can experiment with meaningful solutions?”
The answer: Customer research.
“Thanks to the hallway study, we were able to get detailed qualitative feedback on the design system. Within our survey of 30 questions, we asked about expectations, responsibilities, motivations, and fears. We received 36 responses and quickly started to see patterns around communication, support, and a desire for an improved plan,” shared Stacey Messier, Sr. UX Director. “In times of struggle it’s important to remember our expertise, and sometimes apply it to ourselves. We’re customers, too! Especially when it comes to consuming components within a shared design system.”
One of the developers we work with frequently, Orlando Martinez, offered his thoughts on the day.
“It’s a unique opportunity to receive feedback from a variety of roles across the department,” said Orlando. “It’s also a chance for some of those different roles to really offer feedback. It can lead to better customer experiences — and better collaboration between devs and designers.”
Devoting the time to gathering real feedback on our designs and processes makes us better creative professionals, and more importantly, it ultimately leads to better experiences for our customers.
