Business Keeping

Grades on Canvas.

Prototypes are often treated like “the answer” to UX problems

It is essentially a ‘draft’ of the final product. It is meant to allow for final feedback before the end product is considered completely finished. It is by no means the final product. It is something meant to be critiqued and then fixed based on suggestions. – Emily

So, in my humble opinion, there is a bias towards prototyping too early in a lot of the rank-and-file UX design community, AKA the people doing the majority of the work. These folks work insanely hard and are often put in very untenable positions: they have to do “design sprints” that are often as short as two weeks in length and that are supposed to produce high-fidelity prototypes.

Essentially, UX in a lot of organizations looks like this:

• Backend Developer: Does the heavy-lifting of programming an applications basic interactions
• Frontend Developer: Does the heavy-lifting of designing a program’s interface
• Graphic Designer: Makes non-programmable elements like logos, fonts, icons, etc.
• Additional Developer or Designer who says they know about UX, but who is really just good at prototyping

Of course, at this point in the process of this class, I hope you can see the problem with this arrangement. Just because someone can make something that looks really nice, and convinces other developers it solves problems, doesn’t mean it’s the best thing for users. In fact: often the thing that looks the best to developers is the worst thing for users.

User insights really are the answer, though

Usability is the assessment of how “easy and pleasant” it is for users to interact with a website.
There are 5 quality components of usability: learnability, efficiency, memorability, errors, and
satisfaction. Utility is another important element of usability; does it do what users need to
accomplish their goals in using the website? When usability is emphasized in the design process, it can drastically improve a website’s quality metrics. In other words, investing in usability increases key performance indicators (KPI) such as increase in sales or registered users or a decrease in employee training time. – Alexis

The fact that prototypes are often used to stand in for interactions with real, live users is symptomatic of the current state of web applications. There’s a reason why 97% of websites fail at usability. If everyone was talking to a UX person, consulting with them, etc., that number would be a lot lower.

They aren’t.

Here are some of the excuses I’ve heard from real, live people working as UX designers working in major, fortune 500 companies:

• “I don’t have time to do usability testing.”
• “I have a boss, just like everyone else, and they have a bottom line.”
• “We usually come up with a prototype the day before we have to launch it, so I literally have one afternoon to interact with users before the meeting.”

This is not to beat up on these folks. They are not the problem. They are part of the problem, certainly, but they are really not the problem.

The executives of companies are the problem. When you have a guaranteed audience of 50,000 users, it’s hard to justify conducting time-consuming, expensive usability testing and user research. This is at the heart of the UX conundrum: in order to solve UX problems the right way, you have to invest money and time, and you have to engage in activities not typically valued by corporate culture: qualitative research, research that doesn’t immediately create an ROI (although the cost of not having a good UX is estimated to be very high), product design that is a remove away from what the final product will look like, etc.

It’s understandable, given this culture, that solid UX research often gets short shrift. This also doesn’t mean that graphic designers and web developers can be effective at UX, however. It doesn’t mean none of them can. It means UX is a skill set all its own and needs to be treated as such.

Business Keeping

Grades and individual feedback on Canvas.

Proof you’ve been bit by the UX bug

The exciting thing about this class is that I get to make UX designers. Most people come into graduate classes with some pretty good working knowledge of the subject matter. Everyone has done research before. Everyone has done technical writing of some form or other.

With UX, though, it really is a different way of thinking that isn’t introduced elsewhere in our educational system. I get to see people start to adopt this way of thinking. I’ve seen you all do that in this class and I couldn’t be happier with your progress thus far.

Now go change the world

At this point in a UX class, I often tell students that their job after the class is to go change the world. This may seem like the usual humanities idealist bullshit, but: I really mean it. UX is important. And it impacts more and more of what we do in our society.

So, now that you know something about it, your obligation is to help make things better in your specific neck of the woods. Here are some tips for doing so based on my experiences doing UX for the past 4+ years:

• You don’t help people by doing free work. I’m certainly not saying: “become a full-time UX designer for your current organization on top of your regular job.” I pretty much did that when I first got to ECU and it was a huge mistake. Everyone was asking me for help and I got sucked into a million hours of unpaid service work and all it did was slow down my research, which is what ultimately gets you tenure as a college professor.
• There is room within a lot of existing jobs for UX. That being said, my work with the NCCA has been great, and has created a lot of opportunities for me. And: I wouldn’t be involved in the project if it weren’t for UX. I’m not a geographer, but my value-add is that I can help them think about design in a new way.
• At the heart of UX is the user, so whatever you can do to make things better for users of any stripe is a good thing. All this being said, if you’re in a position to make an application better for a certain type of user, you have to do so. Even if this is as simple as pointing out a flaw in a design that precludes a certain type of user. Or doing a 5-minute usability test to demonstrate why an application isn’t performing as well as it should be. Or helping a non-profit better manage their content.

Business Keeping

Grades on Canvas.

Content strategy and info architecture are misunderstood… and very profitable

An information architect needs to know the overarching content needs of an
organization. They don’t need to create or even necessarily know the details of the
content (though they might do both) but they need to know how information should be
organized for efficiency and, most importantly, ease of use and retrieval by users. They
provide plans for containing content, sort of like how a building architect creates plans
for making a beautiful and elegant building. Hence the name, information architect.

– Kasen

Think about it: the Web is still primarily textual information. It needs to be organized, edited, channelled, delivered. This is very hard work that few people are suited for. How much bad, poorly organized content do you experience online on a daily basis? How much of it is useful to you? How much of it is what you were looking for when you searched for it or clicked on its headline?

This is a golden age for writers, in other words: people who understand written content and its importance for users of all kinds. There’s a reason that an entire institute was recently formed on this subject: http://contentmarketinginstitute.com/. Even marketers now have to be good writers.

This is also good news for us, the humanities majors! We were all born and raised on the written word. Designers are a dime a dozen nowadays, largely because of the prevalence of open source Content Management Systems like WordPress (which currently accounts for a whopping 22% of all registered web domains). These technologies are making it increasingly hard to sell your ability simply to make one website. Why pay someone to do that, when you can buy an entire CMS that allows you to make unlimited websites… for nothing?

Being a “web designer” now means being a developer which is something else entirely. Gone are the days when you could get by knowing HTML and CSS. Now you need to be a programmer. You have to master boolean logic, which, let me tell you: is tough.

But no one has yet created a content engine capable of replacing human writers. They’ve tried, but failed. Which is probably why fields like technical communication, UX, and content strategy are set to grow by leaps and bounds over the next decade or so. The needs for humanities-style thinking isn’t going away, despite what every pundit who has access to a microphone is saying. We just don’t understand where to send our graduates for jobs or what to call our majors (though TPC is a pretty good name ;-).

Business Keeping

Grades on Canvas. Check there for individual feedback as well.

Key learning from this module

Persona = User as character in a story called “design process”

UX is iterative

I say I have been doing UX for about 10 years, but I’ve been a researcher far longer than that. UX simply gave me a name for the collection of interests I had: usability, communication, content strategy, etc. I had always been a researcher interested in messy, complex problems with no simple solution.

When I found UX, I simply found a community of people who were interested in similar problems. At its core, UX people are people who realize that shortcuts and simple solutions rarely provide maximum benefits to clients and users.

There is no right way to do UX, but there are many wrong ways

At the same time, there are a lot of UX hucksters out there selling pretty, but unusable designs to unsuspecting folks. They usually come from graphic design or web design. They are used to there being a simple solution to problems, in other words: make something that looks a certain way.

This is not to bash graphic designers and web designers. We all need them. They are the people who make all the things we use on the Internet. They are also sometimes dead wrong about what the best thing for users is.

Because UX is tied to those pesky, non-sensical beings called “users” it will always partially be at odds with other professions. That’s your job as a UXer: to explain to other kinds of designers why the simplest solution is not always the best one. To explain to clients why throwing up a Wix site that has no classification scheme for information is not going to get them more business.

We are the muddiers of the design waters. And I can guarantee: every usable, brilliant design that users love and find useful has someone who gets UX behind it. Every. Single. One.

Overall

I think these are solid persona drafts. I’m excited to see the other deliverables that will be shaped by them.

There Are a Lot of Ways to Do Personas

As you can see from the drafts, there are various approaches to personas. Unfortunately, we don’t have a solid set of best practices outside of including general attributes such as:

• Demographics
• Frustrations
• Goals
• Bio / story

Outside of that, the ways of making personas are even widely divergent. Some practitioners I’ve spoken to create an amalgam of people when they create a persona. Some people surface one actual interviewee. I tend to the latter as it seems disingenuous to create a personally fictional persona. I think the temptation is too strong to just create the type of user I want to design for.

I Don’t Have a Lot of Feedback: These Look Like Personas!

I don’t have a lot of revision feedback on these. They look like personas! Maybe just go through your data one last time and ask yourself:

• Are these really representative of a key user segment?
• Are the goals and frustrations of your persona shared by the majority of other users in the segment?
• Are there additional goals or frustrations shared by a user segment you might have missed?
• Are there any other demographics that might have a larger bearing on their usage of the website you’re designing for (i.e., experience with technology, job title, etc.)?
• Are these really representative of a key user segment?
• Are the goals and frustrations of your persona shared by the majority of other users in the segment?
• Are there additional goals or frustrations shared by a user segment you might have missed?
• Are there any other demographics that might have a larger bearing on their usage of the website you’re designing for (i.e., experience with technology, job title, etc.)?

These are the types of questions I ask myself and my fellow researchers when we’re creating persona.

To Complete the Module

5) 2/24/22 by Midnight ET >>

Revise all your documents and hand them in. The point of receiving feedback from your peers, and also from myself, is to help you improve your writing. This process will be negated if the draft you submit to the course website is the same as the draft you hand in as your final. Revise, revise, revise.

• An individual Cover Letter (including how you contributed to your team’s documents) and a copy of your team’s Persona are due to Canvas by Midnight ET

Business Keeping

Grades on Canvas, as per the norm. You also receive individualized feedback on modules, however, so be sure to check for that.

Overall: I thought these were pretty strong. They demonstrated what I expect to see in a UX project plan, which is detailed below.

Key learning from this module

UX Project =

client goals +

problem with application +

benchmarks for solving problem +

translation of all this into normal human speak for client

Hint: planning is for clients and stakeholders 😉

No one has ever given me formal feedback on this class that Module 1 feels like a bait a switch: you go to all the trouble to create an awesome-sounding UX project, and then I just make you go through the modules anyway. People have told me, however, that they feel unclear at Module 1 what they’re supposed to accomplish by the end of the class. My response: welcome to the club ;-).

The truth is, Module 1 is about learning to communicate a UX project to someone else, because that’s what UX designers do. They never work in isolation. And most of the people they work with (clients, developers, product managers, etc.) have no idea what UX is, not really.

So: the planning is really for everyone else. As a UX person, you should know what you’re doing and be thinking ahead. That’s a given. But, like other forms of communication, you can’t assume anyone else is in your head. That’s why you have to let them in on the process.

At the same time, trying to plan a UX project is kind of like trying to plan for the weather: you have a rough idea what conditions are going to be like, but they could change at a moment’s notice. And that can cause a real struggle with clients. You can’t tell them “well, we’re going to learn some stuff, which will teach us some other stuff, and so on and then after about 10 iterations we’ll have some idea…” Clients want solutions, and they want them fast. They want to see how the whole process will solve their problem, not add new complication.