Thinking is more interesting than knowing, but less interesting than looking…
NokiaConversations has released the ‘behind the scenes at Nokia’s London design studio’ video documentary, starring Stefan Pannenbecker, VP of Industrial Design at Nokia, Chris Linnett, Head of Lumia UX design and Kate Freebairn, Creative Director for Lumia UX design.
The video portrays the story behind the creation of Nokia’s first Windows Phone and their tight collaboration with various teams at Microsoft.
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While reading an interesting article written by Jason Gross on ‘The Role Of Design In The Kingdom Of Content‘, I was intrigued by the kind of examples he mentions about the importance of design when world is still craving for content.
Excerpt from article : “The role of a UX designer is not always to make everyone feel all warm and fuzzy inside. A rich Web experience could include the emotion of happiness, humor, discontent, sadness, anger or enlightenment. A well-designed website enables us to attribute our emotion to its source and connect us to that environment through a range of senses. A UX designer should understand why and how to utilize the principles and techniques they have learned to support the website’s precious content.”
Read full article here.
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Haruki Maeda from Meiji University shows his presentation software that can sense where you stand and orders the text into the visible space around you. Transitions are handled with gestures and you can even pinch-to-zoom live on stage. The modest Mr. Maeda says all it took was some C#, the Kinect SDK and an Excel spreadsheet to get this beauty working.
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I have always had this post at the back of my mind and often check myself against the qualities I have listed here. Of course I fail in some of them, but if you can aim to succeed with just a few of these qualities, your design work will get there too. At the moment I am working on a particularly tough project. The type that consumes your – energy levels, time, and concentration on any other task is difficult. Without being surrounded by good people it would be unbearable. So if you hire people, or are looking to join a team, try and find out these qualities exist in the people you are working with.
Some personal qualities to try and gain or maintain within a team and elements to consider when working as a unit;
Persistence
Commitment to a project needs to go beyond just time allocated to it. It needs to be exhibited as a character trait. To not give up, maintain momentum and motivation and keep on moving towards the overall goal is a core trait for a UX person to show. Inevitably this may result in annoying a few colleagues as you will not leave them alone until specific tasks are finished or you get an answer to a particularly important problem. Using a bit of charm will go a long way to ensure you can get progress.
Passion
There needs to be an underlying desire to ensure that the project succeeds and a genuine care about seeing it fulfill it’s initial promise. Having passion means going the extra mile, but also enjoying the elements of the work once it has started. Being interested beyond the bounds of a project but also spending the time to go beyond the normal delivery will affect other team members and soon create a positive working environment. Having passionate people on a team makes an enormous difference to the success of delivering a product or service.
Positivity
It is very easy to become dejected due to research findings or user studies that have shown results that were either not expected or detrimental to a project. Having the ability to look for the good, from a bad situation will pay off. A positive attitude to the work, difficult colleagues, stakeholders or customers, inevitably results in a better atmosphere, working environment and an increased potential for more work in the future.
Patience
UX work typically has the ability to impact on everybody inside an organization and certainly the customers or users who will interact with what is produced. The repercussions on some of the decisions made, affects different decision makers at all levels in a company hierarchy. Be aware that some changes will take years to see come to fruition and the plans that are laid out are likely to be the foundations – that you may never witness being executed. Therefore being particularly patient with people is a necessary part regarding change management. With UX work, your users will test you as you are testing them! Learn to control anything you may say in response to seemingly stupid comments or actions. Again it will serve you well in terms of collating valuable design research.
Progress
Be aware that on a project UX work has very different tasks that have outcomes with different time requirements. The pace of a project cannot dictate the pace of research and so compromises need to be met, either on budgetary expenditure or time spent. The important thing to be aware of is that incremental progress is a desired outcome for large scale ux projects – particularly on live products. Changes made need to be done in an orderly, considered manner so as not to disenfranchise or confuse customers. On new products, change can be made quickly, but be aware that the grand plan will be phased and broken down into critical elements first, the ‘nice-to-haves’ coming later.
Stamina
Some projects will last months and at times will require focus to ensure that the quality is not affected as issues occur and problems arise. The importance of giving the team a break in high-intensity work is very important but not quitting is really important. The ability to finish the work started is important to UX work, why research something if it is not followed through? To exhibit stamina, means that the necessary long hours and unusual times to conduct field research will be needed to offer a product that is well designed.
Humour
This is something you must have to get you through elements of UX work that are difficult. User testing in odd locations, the ability to convince a board member using charm and an outlook that can deflect hostility by using humour, is essential to a career in this field. UX people tend to be socially competent because they primarily deal with people to get products designed effectively. Having a sense of humour will allow events that may derail a project to not have a detrimental effect on the outcome. Sometimes you may simply have to laugh to keep sane and the ability to show this, effects team morale and positivity.
Embodiment
UX work is all about empathy for the user and designing for their needs whilst also aligning the business requirements in combination. To design with empathy requires somebody to have that as an attribute in their personality. To be concerned about user’s experiences means you cannot just pay it lip service. If a comment by a user is ignored and not represented in the final design, your attitude to their plight will be revealed.
As a UX person it is your responsibility to be the voice of the user and make sure it is heard as a product develops. Evangelize the needs and wants to those that are building the solution. But also consider the realities of what must work for the business and the inevitability of compromise. Diplomacy and politics are a necessity here but with all the factors being present above – you will be well equipped to tackle the hardest UX challenges.
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UX shouldn’t be the purview solely of UX specialists; a well-rounded developer can become a UX professional, too. The “T-shaped” professional, who has both the breadth of skills (the horizontal stroke in the “T”) and the depth of a particular discipline (the vertical stroke), is a much more valuable team member than one who has but one skill and focus.
But how can a developer start learning about UX without formal education in UX concepts? I am an engineer by training but have transitioned into UX and product design, so I hope other developers can benefit from what I have learned.
“Read, read, read.” – William Faulkner
There are so many great UX books out there nowadays. Here are a few that I would recommend for the developer who’s serious about UX:
A good place to start is with sites like UX Magazine—but if you’re reading this, you’ve already figured that out. As well, Jakob Nielsen’s website, useit.com has results of some very helpful research and studies.
“Good artists copy, great artists steal.” – Pablo Picasso
It’s impossible to talk about great UX without someone bringing up Apple, but even Apple doesn’t come up with their brilliant ideas in an ivory tower. If anything, they have a history of freely borrowing great ideas, wherever they may come from. Both the mouse and the WIMP (Windows, Icons, Menu, Pointing) device came from the Xerox Star workstation at Xerox PARC.
Good ideas and examples come from everywhere, and it’s up to us to know where to look.
I keep my eye on a few types of websites:
“Don’t tell people how to do things, tell them what to do and let them surprise you with their results” – General George Patton
Don’t settle for the specs. If you are just handed a list of features to implement, don’t take them at face value. Get to the why. What problem are they trying to solve? It may be that the features and requirements listed aren’t the best way to go about solving the problem. How do these features help accomplish the user’s goals easier or faster?
“I have not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work.” – Thomas A. Edison
You may think that once you’ve found a good design pattern, that task is done. However, I find that if I come up with a few different ways to solve a problem, I often find a better solution or I find justification of why the first approach was better. It’s also important to prototype. It’s hard to imagine if an experience is going to be great or compelling without having actually using it. Don’t be afraid to develop different approaches and throw away the ones that don’t work.
“Get outside the building” – Steve Blank
When was the last time you actually interacted with a customer face-to-face or on the phone? Sometimes at large organizations there are positions that deal exclusively with that. They are supposed to interact with the customers and “translate” what they want into functional specifications or user requirements. But sometimes you just need to cut the middleman and talk directly to the source. That way, you feel their pain and nothing gets lost in the translation. If you never talk to the customer or the user, then everything is just an assumption or a guess. You are essentially developing and designing in the dark.
“Usability testing is the killing field of cherished notions.” – David Orr
Once I have a working iteration, it is time to test it in the wild. I often have someone who’s not tech savvy try out things. I frequently find that what I thought was crystal clear is in fact not at all. Watching someone trying to use your application is a quick and easy way to get feedback.
There are also applications and services for usability testing.
I believe that great UX is important and if your career is creating software, then UX is a part of that. Familiarity with the discipline can make you more customer-focused and improve your product. Deliberate thought and focus on UX can lead to some great products and is not hard.
It is a matter of educating oneself, getting inspired, validating ideas, talking to users, and doing usability testing. There’s no one thing you can do, but a whole host of things that add to the overall experience and ultimately produces a great user experience.
I’d like to end with a favorite quote that applies when thinking about designing interfaces.
“A well designed and humane interface does not need to be split into beginner and expert subsystems.” – Jef Raskin
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