UX IRL Ep. 19: UX Help Desk
Hello! Here are our show notes for episode 19 of UX IRL: UX Help Desk. We hit the highlights in this article, but get the full context by listening to the episode:
In this episode we check out #uxquestion on Twitter and answer some of the internet’s burning UX questions. We got this idea from the podcast My Brother, My Brother, and Me. If you have UX questions to ask us, please let us know! We’ll probably do a future episode where we answer listener questions. Also, come talk to us on the zeroheight Slack community, comment below or reply on Twitter @uxinreallife or on Instagram @ux.inreallife.
Our take
Great question! “It depends” as an answer is indicative of the work we do — we’re finding solutions to complicated situations and there’s not always a “one size fits all” answer. Maybe with some best practices, you can get to a more universal answer.
We also thought things you can’t bend on is where “it depends” wouldn’t be an answer. For example, ethics, life and death situations, regulated fields (e.g., finance, GDPR, etc.). Accessibility might be another area, but even with that there is wiggle room on how you provide an accessible solution.
Our take
If this were a free-standing button, we thought it might be used to copy a link.
Our take
It depends! Team structure was something Michelle and Dan Mall talked about in a panel discussion around happy design system teams. How structured a team will be depends on the size and maturity of the team. Maybe at the beginning you need to meet everyday, but over time, you can meet every other day, and so on.
At Insight, Mary Fran meets with her team every other week. It’s a nice way for her to keep in touch with what other people are working on and to ask questions.
Michelle’s current team meets daily for 15 minutes, but it’s mostly social. It’s great to keep in touch with the team since we’re all remote across multiple time zones.
She’s had in-person stand-ups before that were pure chaos. It involved stopping what you were doing, running to a spot in the office, being out breath, and trying to think of what you were going to say. This meant you were totally not listening to anyone else’s update. We moved to async updates on Slack, which was much calmer. People eventually stopped posting and it wasn’t enforced. So we ended up not knowing what people were up to, which wasn’t great either.
There is a time and place for stand-ups, but make sure they work well for your team.
Our take
Coming from the Washington, DC area, Michelle is super familiar with government clients. When she’d ask, “Who are your users?” clients would often say, “It’s everyone!” They’re not wrong, the government is there to serve its citizens.
Michelle would often try to help her clients reframe things in terms of common use cases for the site. For one project, this still meant nine personas, which was a lot.
Mary Fran mentions another way to think about it is to ask, “What job is this website trying to do?” It might help you narrow who to focus on.
Our take
This is something Mary Fran has been thinking about a lot in her new role. When speaking to potential new clients, she’s often asked questions like, “How would you explain UX to someone?” Her example ties into this question well:
Think about the old Heinz glass ketchup bottle. You’d have to shake it really hard in order to get the ketchup out. The redesigned bottle is squeezable. So you easily squeeze the bottle and the ketchup comes out.
Both accomplish the same thing, but the glass bottle is more difficult. It adds friction to accomplish the task. Focusing on “it’s good enough”—is it really good enough? This touches on having a growth mindset, too. Is there a way we can improve and iterate to make something better? Consider if Sketch + InVision were good enough, we wouldn’t have Figma.
Michelle wanted to unpack this question a bit more — what was the design about? Was there some settling on a solution that wasn’t originally planned? She recommends some quick usability testing to see how well the flow performs. Have the developers join and see if this solution is actually good enough.
Our take
It depends! We’d love to get more context on this since we know UXers can have a tendency to get caught up in specific process for things. But so much of what you decide to do depends on constraints, users, etc. You won’t use the same activities for every project. Rather than focus on if auditing is part of the design process, think of it as a tool in your tool kit that you can use when appropriate.
We also love how he refers to Jared Spool as “Sir Jared Spool” — Michelle pictures Jared being knighted in the Kingdom of UX. Also, this tweet sounds urgent; definitely don’t use twitter for anything urgent. 😉
Answering this question at face value, auditing is a great tool at the beginning of the design process. A lot of people want to skip it, because it can be tough, but it’s a great baseline to reference later.
Our take
For Mary Fran, “data-driven design” as a principle comes to mind. If you can, take some time to measure success and get some quantitative metrics around your work.
For Michelle, “reducing anxiety” as a principle resonates well. As designers, we should be out there and doing work that reduces anxiety — especially with everything going on in the world today.
Our take
In the context of working on her own personal portfolio, Michelle has always been in a time crunch. Her go-to is pen and paper to sketch some ideas. Then she’ll make tweaks on the fly in Wordpress.
Mary Fran uses tools like Airtable and Miro (or other whiteboarding tools) to track and figure out content. For a design tool, she’ll use her favorite — Figma.
For actual portfolio sites, we like any CMS tool like Wordpress because it’s just so much easier to manage and maintain compared to hand-coding your own.
Our take
It depends! We have a lot of rhetorical questions. We’d love to know more info — what’s user behavior like now? How are admins navigating? What are they trying to accomplish? Why is the app complex? Who’s the user doing the admin work?
Depending on that — we’d have an answer. 🤣
Our take
Looking back, Michelle would wanted to know much she’d have to advocate for UX. Going to grad school for UX, you learn all the activities — card sorting, usability testing, etc. It’s preparing you to do your day-to-day job. But once she became a UX designer, she didn’t realize how little others around her knew about UX. She wasn’t prepared for how much education and advocacy she would have to do with stakeholders and cross-functional partners.
There are a lot of questions that you don’t know you need to ask or things that you don’t know that you’d need to know for later. Specifically for Mary Fran, she would want to know more around UX metrics, measuring success, what tools to use and when. Understanding what research would actually be like would have been great too. In an educational environment, you’re a little insulated — you have plenty of time, participants, resources, etc. In real life, you can run into a lot of constraints or need to advocate harder to conduct activities. It definitely ties into Episode 2 — Scrappy Research.
Our take
Alphabetically is the way to go. When you’re looking for the departure screen, the city is probably easier to scan. If it was by time, how many planes are leaving at 1:30pm? But what if your departure time was delayed to 1:45pm? You might not know that and you wouldn’t look for it.
Our take
Mary Fran points out that Figma has some fantastic animations baked in. Think of it as a flipbook! Also, if there’s something you want to animate, someone probably has already tried it, so you can look at their file in the community. Figma’s team also has a ton of great tutorials. Other tools to consider include Framer and Lottie.
Our take
We’d love to learn more about why they’d want to run a 20+ participant study. Sometimes people don’t know what’s involved with recruiting for user interviews — it’s time consuming to plan, recruit, coordinate, etc.
Since this isn’t being asked specifically of us, we have a lot of snarky questions back to the person who would like to have 20+ people. Do we have a lot of time? Are you going to help take notes? Are you going to help synthesize the info with me? Do you have a lot of money for incentives?
Realistically, you probably don’t need this many people to find out what you need to know. In Steve Krug’s book Rocket Surgery Made Easy, he mentions you find 75% of what you’re looking for from testing 3 people. In the past, Michelle’s tested with 6–8 people knowing a few might not show up. But you’ll easily find the same results over and over again, so you won’t need to have 14 people to tell you the same thing. (It’s a waste of time and money.)
If you have the budget for 20 people, it may be best to not have them test the same thing all at once. Instead, you can have a few rounds of iterative testing, so you can get feedback as you iterate on your work.
Want more answers to #UXquestions?
We had a lot of fun answering #UXquestions! Feel free to ask us your #UXquestions and get them answered in a future episode. Submit them here. You can also come hang out with us on the zheroes Slack community, where we talk about all things UX in real life! (zheroes is a Slack community by zeroheight, where Michelle works. They make a nifty design system documentation tool that won’t make you hate documenting your design system.
