Communicating the UX Vision: 13 Anti-Patterns That Block Good Ideas

328 Pages·2015·19.33 MB·English

by  Martina Schell

Communicating
the UX Vision
13 Anti-Patterns That Block Good Ideas
MARTINA HODGES-SCHELL
JAMES O’BRIEN
AMSTERDAM • BOSTON • HEIDELBERG • LONDON
NEW YORK • OXFORD • PARIS • SAN DIEGO
SAN FRANCISCO • SINGAPORE • SYDNEY • TOKYO
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For Ed and my parents. You are my inspiration.
For Melissa, and for Mum and Dad.
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FOREWORD
At the end of the movie “Soylent Green,” Charlton Heston famously cries out, “It’s
people!” when he discovers the primary ingredient in the food system. Every time
someone sends a goodbye note on their final day at a job, they always say, “I’ll miss
the people the most.”
At the center of a great user experience design effort is – you guessed it – people.
In the case of the UX project, the people are our customers and we function as
their main advocate in our agencies, companies, and teams. We study them. We
observe them. We learn their motivations and their needs. We figure out how to
help them and ensure that our solutions meet their needs. We know how to speak
to them. More often than not, we also know how to speak to each other. Why then
do we struggle as a profession to make compelling conversation happen with our
colleagues in other disciplines, our leaders and executives, and our clients?
Technology shifts in the last decade have made conversation with our customers
increasingly easier, faster, and richer with insight. Capturing this insight and trans-
lating it to our colleagues and clients is core to our goal of creating delightful and
usable products. It’s also core to building successful collaborative teams. It is these
highly engaged, cross-functional teams (made up of UX designers, visual designers,
content strategists, software engineers, product managers, QA engineers, market-
ers, and others) that can properly respond, in a timely fashion, to this vast trove of
insight now available to us. The more effective these teams are, the more responsive
the organization can be to changing customer needs.
UXers are uniquely positioned to take advantage of this new reality to bridge the gap
between individuals and interactions while shedding the constraints of processes
and tools.
This new opportunity is often seen through the lens of facilitation. UXers are the
most qualified individuals on a team to take the lead in facilitating productive,
meaningful team discussions. We know how to take input from various sources,
synthesize it into something meaningful, and present it back to our customers for
feedback. Yet we struggle to do this with our own teams and stakeholders.
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FOREWORD
It is the tactics covered in this book that will help you make, and continue to make, a
bigger impact on your organizations. They will teach you to translate your work into
language your audience cares about. You will learn how to take data and metrics, and
use them to not only inform your design process, but to make a compelling case for
the decisions you’ve made.
Martina and James have put together a treasure trove of tactics and insights to en-
sure that UX is at the center of these Agile, collaborative teams. And it is with this
know-how that we, together with our colleagues in other disciplines, can continue to
build amazing products moving forward.
—Jeff Gothelf, author, Lean UX,
August 2014, New York, NY
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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Many thanks to our great editing team at Elsevier, especially Meg Dunkerley and
Lindsay Lawrence, for making this book happen.
A special thank you to all our contributors who shared their stories with us: Aline
Baeck, Chris Downs, Chris Nodder, Eli Toftøy-Andersen, Evgenia Grinblo, Jonathan
Berger, Sarah B. Nelson, Richard Wand, Sophie Freiermuth, and Jeff Gothelf.
Many thanks for the feedback and patience of our technical reviewers: Darci Dutcher,
FJ van Wingerde, Linda Newman Lior, Richard Wand, and Spencer Turner.
Chris Rain contributed the design of our playable card game, for which you can
find downloading instructions in Conclusion. We’re so grateful that he shared his
graphic design skills with us to create such a beautiful card deck.
Thanks also to all of our friends and colleagues who agreed to take and pose for
photographs. And to Pivotal, Method, Immediate Media, and Proximity London:
thank you for your understanding of our time and space needs while we worked on
this book.
Martina wants to thank Ed, her parents, and her friends for the inspiration, love, and
support to make this project a reality.
James wants to thank Melissa, his parents, and the UXers of London for the support,
solace, and sanity-checking. He also wishes to apologize to the many, many people
on whom he has researched his own anti-patterns over the years.
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INTRODUCTION
As creative actors in the world of digital product development, UXers and designers
are expected to combine our training and experience in the pursuit of great out-
comes. But all too often, the focus of that training and experience is on the techni-
cal aspects of creating design, leading us to fall short when it comes to the other
important aspect of our roles: explaining our work to the people who are developing
and paying for it.
When the technical side of the role takes all the focus, good design can end up be-
ing rejected because it’s not sold-in well enough for the buyers to see its value. In
more extreme cases, the relationship between the business and the designer can be
seriously harmed. The worst case of this the authors have experienced was in 2001,
when James was a web designer working for a startup that had hired an external
design agency for branding and graphic design. The relationship was turbulent, with
the design agency struggling to adapt from their comfort zone of print design to
a transactional website. Usability tests demonstrated that many of the designers’
favorite ideas needed to be toned down or rethought for the ultimate product to be
clearly related, but not identical, to their comps.
At the go-live, the startup invited the agency to review the implementation. The de-
signer they sent was annoyed by what he saw as the startup’s lack of adherence to his
design vision and refused to listen to the reasoning behind the changes. Finally, as
James tried to explain why it was important to let the user scroll, the designer held up
his hand to stop him and said, “If you were a designer, I’d listen to you.”
The agency was fired the next day.
Since those early days of the web, we have built many digital products for many
different organizations. While it’s rare to encounter such an extreme outburst these
days, we still regularly encounter the attitude that design is us-and-them, with “our
skill” battling “nondesigners’ ignorance.” This attitude can come from third parties,
clients, and, yes, even ourselves. Many UXers and designers seem to believe that
people who don’t have the word “creative” in their job titles aren’t capable of judging
creative work (and, by reflection, that they themselves are incapable of turning in
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INTRODUCTION
anything but perfect work). Even we are sometimes guilty of falling into that trap.
You can believe it when we say that many of the lessons we’ve put into this book have
been learned through firsthand experience.
But these supposedly “noncreative” people are still creating digital products. They’re
specifying, building, and – most importantly – funding our design work. Building a
fence around “creativity” cuts these people out of a process they have every right to be
involved in. It leads to a toxic environment, and not just for that project. People who
have had a poor experience with designers will take that experience, and the after-
work horror stories it gave rise to, to their next project. And the project after that.
They’ll work with unfortunate designers who, regardless of the quality of their work,
always have to begin by justifying their involvement. That’s a situation that leads to
shackled creativity and further poor experiences on both sides.
It is possible to work in a different way – one that helps business-focused minds see
the real value of design, that gives us better outcomes for loosening our iron grip,
and that builds a foundation for ongoing collaboration. But to get to this way of work-
ing, we need to address the negative patterns of behavior that we learn – or at least,
never unlearn – over the course of our careers.
None of us are formally taught how to communicate. We learn how to speak through
a sort of osmosis in our early lives. Then, at school, we’re taught how to read and
write, but meanwhile there’s a whole social thing going on that you have to muddle
through on your own. This organic way of learning how to address others and par-
ticipate in a culture forms a set of communication patterns that we rely on in our
day-to-day interactions. Like many other aspects of our brains, these patterns let
the brain filter and process the vast amount of information it constantly encounters
by making assumptions about what’s important and what’s not. For the most part,
our trial-and-error process of anchoring these patterns allows us to make friends,
function in daily life, and avoid major conflicts. But when, as makers, we come into
the workplace, we’re suddenly doing something that we haven’t done in a serious
capacity before: building together.
The same patterns that might work for us in social or learning contexts, around
like-minded people, aren’t always suitable for communicating with parties who
don’t share our outlook, don’t have the same context as us, or have unknown factors
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INTRODUCTION
skewing their own attitudes. When patterns fail to work as expected, our social mon-
key brains get stressed, and this can lead to conflict. Being challenged in a core belief
is an example of a pattern challenge that leads to defensiveness, argumentation,
and conflict. At this point, we usually rely on more negative patterns to deal with
the situation. However, patterns are so ingrained into our psyches that we either
experience cognitive dissonance when this happens – “Bob couldn’t understand my
perfectly rational argument, so Bob is stupid/evil/hates creativity” – or, even if we do
recognize the cause, we can’t simply reprogram our brains to accept it.
In this book, we’ve taken the thirteen most common negative patterns that we see
affecting projects every day and put names to them to help you identify them. For
each of these anti-patterns, we’ve also provided a selection of positive patterns that
you can use to displace the negative pattern, and lots of other helpful guidance. We
want this book to be a practical guide to creating positive working relationships, with
the understanding that the “work self” we create is built upon the learned behaviors
from our younger lives.
We don’t want you to think that the advice we give you in this book means you
need to make your personality disappear under a veneer of “business-ness.” As a
designer, your entire professional life is about communicating: communicating the
product proposition to the customer, communicating the interface needs to the user,
and communicating your decisions to the people who will decide whether and how
they’ll be implemented.
Our advice seeks to make sure that every time you’re communicating in that last
context, you’re doing it in a way that effectively relays the value of what you’re
doing, without being obscured by misplaced social gaffes. Equally, our advice will
help you identify when you’re suffering from other peoples’ anti-patterns and turn
those interactions around. Ultimately, we want to give you the tools to create a
working relationship based on mutual respect and trust between you and your
colleagues, one that really allows your design work to be valued and to shine in
execution.
If you can get to that place, then you don’t need the MBA, sharp suit, and smooth
line in doublespeak. Colleagues who have learned to see the value of great design
will also know how to recognize a great designer.
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INTRODUCTION
About the authors
Martina Hodges-Schell is a London-based digital product and service designer who
specializes in user-centered design, experience strategy, and qualitative design re-
search. She has been creating interactive experiences for web, desktop, TV, and mo-
bile devices since the mid-1990s. In her practice, she focuses on bringing a balanced
team together with a shared empathy for users, business, technology, and design.
Deeply fascinated by how people work together, Martina has conducted research into
methods for multidisciplinary collaboration and adoption of user-centered thinking
to support creativity and innovation for her MA in Applied Imagination from Central
Saint Martins School of Art and Design in London.
Martina mentors entrepreneurs at Seedcamp and Lean Startup Machine, and teaches
user-centered design at Birkbeck, University of London. She helps companies large
and small establish more user-centered, Lean, and Agile design skills and facilitates
the cultural and organizational change required to collaborate and take risks more
effectively. She has helped Fortune 100 and startup companies across a wide range
of sectors develop new products and services, or measurably improve existing ones.
Her clients include Amazon, eBay, Microsoft, Yahoo! Mobile, O2, Vodafone, Expe-
dia, Barclays, Lloyds, Not on the Highstreet, EDF Energy, and a growing number
of startups, among many others. She has worked for boutique UX consultancy,
creative agency, world-leading dot-com, and startup environments including Flow
Interactive, Method, and Pivotal Labs, and has experienced a wide range of team and
stakeholder constellations.
She shares her enthusiasm for UX as a member of the UK UXPA Committee, and
regularly organizes and speaks at events, such as IA Summit, Interactions, UXPA,
Agile, and Balanced Team events.
James O’Brien has spent the last twenty years designing and building digital products
in roles that always seemed to spill over the edges of the job title. Known at various
times as a webmaster, web designer, web developer, front-end developer, and UXer, he
has always been dedicated to getting the best possible experience into the users’ hands.
He graduated with a BSc in Media Technology and Production from the University
of Bradford in 1999 and worked with several fledgling startups during the first web
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