ResDiary attends UXScotland 2018
For the third year running ResDiary attended UX Scotland. It’s great to see so many members of the UX Industry from across the world coming together to gain new insights, inspiration, tools and techniques which can help us create better products and services. We’d like to share with you some of the things we learned across the 3 days.
Designing services using DesOps in the Industrial Revolution 4.0: Peter Fossick, Factotum Design
Review by Elaine McVicar — Head of UI/UX
The first keynote talk was from Peter Fossick from Factotum Design on DesOps (Design Operations) in the fourth Industrial Revolution.
A key point Peter made is the disconnect between business, development and design operations. Each of these work very differently, but also have their own chaotic requirements, tools and processes. This can create very complex organisations. One thing we can do to help bring ‘order to the chaos’ is to use more effective and appropriate tools that communicate more clearly and efficiently between teams.
For ‘DesOps’, this means two things. Firstly using data to drive our insights, but doing this in a way that the business can support. Design thinking as a tool can often be seen as unwieldy and time intensive with very little obvious value being demonstrated. Instead we can use more effective tools such as analysing the data we already have, and using our expertise as UX Designers to apply empathy to it, to create insights more quickly and effectively. Using these techniques at IBM saved $196k on minor projects, $872K on major projects and had a 75% reduction in time spent gathering requirements. This highlights how important it is to develop and define insights before moving on to a design solution.
Secondly, we should look at the tools we use to communicate to development teams. A designers’ toolkit has historically contained software that allows them to envision a solution but doesn’t make it easy to communicate this to developers. There are now a better range of tools available, such as Sketch, that will help create more effective design deliverables.
Thoughtful growth: designing experiences for Instagram’s new and next users: Whitney Trump, Instagram
Review by Forbes Ramsay — UI/UX Designer
I really enjoyed this talk from Instagram and found a surprising amount of insight in, at first glance, obvious design decisions. The purpose of the talk was to demonstrate how Instagram maintain growth in the business. Whitney used the analogy of a party to explain how they make sure their users are having a good experience. The first step is to “Tell people about the party” which involved making use of their close integration with Facebook and also using advertising on the iOS App Store. Then they “Greet them and get them inside” which involved onboarding and welcoming a user to a system. They highlighted how important the onboarding process was in retaining customers in the future which is interesting. Next is, “Making sure they know their way around”. Instagram makes use of tooltips and coach marks to highlight new features or features that are being ignored or abandoned. “Helping them find friends so they don’t feel alone at the party” focuses on the many opportunities Instagram gives the user to link their contacts and social networks in order to allow the app to make friends suggestions and explain how they know the suggested contact, basically using permission priming. The final step is “Helping you keep in touch with people you meet at this party”. This involves using notifications, push activity etc. I thought this talk was interesting as it made you think about what users value and in turn helps to make the business grow.
How to create a user-centered ‘digital ecosystem’ across devices: Søren Engelbrecht, Maersk
Review by Elaine McVicar — Head of UI/UX
Many companies have a complex array of services, products, sites and apps, including ResDiary. Søren described tools and techniques he uses at Maersk that help define how he chooses the platform and level of functionality for each of their digital solutions.
Firstly, it’s important to look at the user context and the tasks that need to be carried out, for example, if a user spends their day in front of a computer then moving functionality to a mobile app will not suit them, whereas someone working on a dock would have a great benefit from a mobile app managing their workload. It’s also important to look at the type of task and the frequency of user engagement over time. This helps define the relevant platform and device and ensure a business saves money by choosing the most effective solution.
Søren also described that a digital ecosystem needs to be well considered to ensure users interacting across sites and apps can find what they need easily. This means we need to consider how many apps best match the users’ requirements. One app for all features could be too difficult to navigate through, and too many apps would mean users could be confused about which app is the correct one for their needs.
This talk definitely provided some useful techniques that would be quick to implement and provide us with a clear answer on what platform solutions would best meet both user and business needs.
UX Designers vs Climate Change: James Christie
Review by Elaine McVicar — Head of UI/UX
The environment and climate change is something I’m personally getting more concerned about. Having two children has definitely made me think more about how we treat the world we live in and what state we’ll leave it in for future generations. I hadn’t really considered how my role in digital could really have a big impact on this. James Christie’s talk, however, brought up some really good insights into how UX Designers can positively impact the world.
One key thing we can do is ensuring that our infrastructure, code and imagery are all optimised. Reducing file sizes, streamlining code and moving towards vector imagery will all have a positive impact on the user experience as well as reducing our C02 impact.
UX in the wild: mentorship: Sarah Klassen Rempel, Descartes Systems Group
Review by Nikolaos Kampitsis — UI/UX Designer
Mentorship is important, especially for UX, but not only that. But what is mentorship; is it just learning from each other? Achieving your career targets it is not a straight line, and because of that you need a really good guide. Not to hold your hand, but to give you directions, and then by following them you will be able to achieve your goals. A mentor, and especially managers, need to let people stand on their shoulders; they need to look at everything from different angles and approach with intent to learn and grow, because mentorship is a mutual thing. Everyone can benefit from it, including the mentors. We are a community and we learn from each other.
Accessible everyone: Michael Crabb
Review by Forbes Ramsay — UI/UX Designer
This was probably one my favorite talks. It mainly consisted of Michael, Lecturer in Human Computer Interaction at the University of Dundee, explaining his work and research but there was an overarching topic of how accessibility can be used to help and support disabled people but also enrich the lives of non-disabled people.
He explained the WCAG (Web Content Accessibility Guidelines) and where they are heading in the future. The main takeback from this was that these guidelines aim to standardise certain attributes of web content so that there is ideally a consistent experience for some disabilities throughout the web.
In Crabb’s research he uses what he calls a ‘model of accessibility’ to measure the skill level needed for certain activities. The model is broken down into Visual — how we see the word, Cognitive — understanding the world, Physical — motor controls like using your hands or VR, Communication — what you hear and read, Emotional — does it require you to feel anger, humour or sadness etc and Socio-economic — Can you afford to buy what is required or are you limited because of age or gender.
This model allows us to create a more complex and appropriate accessibility model. In the past we simply said if a product or service was appropriate for disabled people. This was flawed because there are many forms of disability, and cannot be contained into one scale.
As part of his studies he visited schools with the aim of teaching children about disabilities and trying to get them to think differently about it. He used the metaphor of a pirate which I found interesting.
Leveraging customer service expertise to improve UX: Llara Geddes, Beauty Bay
Review by Elaine McVicar — Head of UI/UX
I really enjoyed this talk by Llara Geddes. She started out working on the shop floor at Schuh, then moved to customer service, and from there fell into UX. She is now Head of UX at an online e-commerce company called Beauty Bay. Llara discussed how ensuring that customer service are included in the design process will help give incredibly valuable insights on current and potential problems, particularly if you don’t have large budgets available to spend on user research. We’re lucky that ResDiary has excellent sales and support teams that are already very focused on sharing customer insights and helping us improve our products and services. Llara discussed us some useful methods that will let us better leverage this insight, including team shadowing, team surveys, looking holistically at the process, defining customer pain points, and digitally recording types of enquiries that come in through customer service.
Backpack, our journey in creating a design system: James Ferguson, Skyscanner
Review by Nikolaos Kampitsis — UI/UX Designer
Without a well organised design system a company can fall apart. Duplicated efforts to complete a task, inconsistency among their products and platforms, hard to making wide changes are some of the big problems that can lead to a “free for all” behaviour. How to avoid all this? Start from simple things such as a unified colour palette or by publishing your assets and make them accessible to your colleagues. Create a guide, so the design and development teams can create fast and easy more usable products and services. Collaborate with the rest of the team, to create something that everyone will find easy to use.If you don’t know how, make some research and see how “giants” do it like Google and Amazon. Having an inconsistent product damages everyone, the staff, the company and the users. Needs a lot of effort and hard work but it’s worth it.
Conclusion
There have been some clear themes throughout the 3 day event.
Data + Empathy: Empathy in terms of data was a theme through a few of the talks. Many organisations, including ResDiary, have a wealth of information and analytics available to review, however we need more than graphs and charts to create insight. We need to look at data through a lens of empathy and understanding human behaviour to gather any really effective insights.
Organisations are complex: Whatever company you work for you will come up against a variety of challenges. Not only legacy systems to navigate, but also legacy behaviours and processes. UX can also help consider how we can improve things within the organisation we work for.
Services vs Products: The difference between a service and a product was also discussed. Many things that we as designers see as a product are really seen by the user as what is the value of the outcome to them. Users are looking for a service to achieve something for them, rather than caring about the actual physical or digital entity. This should shape how we consider what and how we design.
GDPR: Unsurprising GDPR also had a few mentions; although this has been challenging for some organisations it is a positive change for the user.
Accessibility: This was also a clear theme throughout. More and more we need to consider accessibility, not as an edge case but as something that is essential. Many accessibility use cases, such as use of colour, shortcut keys and tabbing through navigation are actually relevant to expert users of complex systems as well as those this visual impairments.
We all had a great few days at UX Scotland. Met some really interesting people and have some good ideas about how we can improve our own internal design processes.
