Recliner Designer Podcast Series
Had a great chat with Lance Shields, Head of International Design at Adobe, about the current environment and how blueegg has responded in this current environment. Hope you enjoy listening…
Had a great chat with Lance Shields, Head of International Design at Adobe, about the current environment and how blueegg has responded in this current environment. Hope you enjoy listening…
It’s been a rough few weeks and we are surrounded by the ongoing uncertainty. I’ve recently been saying to others “Stay safe and healthy” more than “How are you”. During this hard time, all we can do is what we can control and take a step back to reflect on what we have been missing while we rushed through our lives.
Since I have turned my career path into a UX Designer, I have been meaning to highlight the benefits that UX design can offer to businesses, compared to traditional marketing, based on ten years of my journey from Digital Advertising industry into UX Design and why we should now focus more to enhance user experience and get it right.
Since ‘social media’ was introduced, we started to create our personal space on the internet and share with others. As a result, the trend levelled the playing field and opened up the era of ‘personal media’ where consumers play a marketer’s role, which is the biggest change we experienced in the mid-2010s.
But social media can only take us so far. As the importance of consumer marketer’s role has become more vital, the focus has shifted to where consumer and user experience happens along the entire life cycle of product and services. As the Customer lifecycle with when marketing and UX Design is involved by Nura Lim, 2020 map shows, UX Design can still have an impact on customer journey even when advertising was finished delivering messages – and it touches pretty much every point.
You can see how it works through this example:
Marketing and UX Design plays differently even when you purchase a laptop
The point it tells you is that marketing and advertising will always cost business. But when UX Experience is well established throughout the customer lifecycle, the cost will be less, but the impact will be continuous because the focus of UX Design is building the core value of the business based on what the actual users’ needs.
UX Design process generally includes the five key steps and it can all be done remotely.
During this time, decisions that business make is critical than ever before. But if we know what’s essential for business for the long run, I believe we can focus more on it, and go through this together wisely. Hope you all stay well and healthy.
Listen to our podcast – Plastic Grass Square – on Apple Podcasts
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blueegg Lead Experience Designer Angela Liu recently spoke at EUXSyd’s March Meetup talking about Research Archetypes and User Interviews.
A bad user interview…. We have all had them. You spend 60 minutes going around in circles, gaining no new insights. Why do they go so wrong? And more importantly, what can you do to stop them? One of the main causes I’ve found of bad user interviews, is what I call a black hole conversation. While some rabbit hole conversation may lead to interesting insights, black holes lead to empty discussions, which are a waste of your time.
A rabbit hole is a trail of conversation that goes off script but can lead you to find golden nuggets about the user and the product or service you are designing for.
A black hole, is an empty discussion holding nothing of value inside, where users delve into the minutia of their industry or an emotional experience they have been through. These are a waste of your time and, like a real black hole, are tricky to get out of once you have fallen in!
Black holes, or more specifically, users who create these black holes seem to have some pretty similar characteristics. They tend to be people who are extremely close to the content you are designing for. A medical consultant, talking about the health system, a tenured professor discussing university education or someone who has never had a no claims bonus from their car insurance.
These users know the system, has lived through previous updates and has all the stories to back it up. They want to talk about the minutia of the content or their experiences in general, not caring how it relates to the new product or service you are trying to build. They want to speak, and you are going to listen to them… because that is why you asked them to come in is it not?
These are the people you need to watch out for…
Having experienced falling into some black holes, I’ve pulled together some tips on how to avoid them:
User interviews are hard, and a bad user interview can be difficult to recover from. Understanding how to approach them, what to look out for and what to avoid can help make the experience for you as a designer much more successful and enjoyable.
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blueegg Experience Design Director Adam Faulkner recently put together a list of tools, tips and techniques to help you effectively facilitate remoter user research in a changing environment.
This is a bit of a weird time. Countries closing borders, events cancelled, daily press conferences announcing new social distancing measures and hardly any toilet paper at woolies or coles. It can all feel a bit overwhelming so I think the most important thing to remember is have empathy and be kind to each other. Lets not forget that we are all humans and after a pretty chaotic start to 2020, being kind and remembering to smile is a really good start.
We have been reflecting a lot over the past couple of weeks, as I know many of you have been as well, on what we do and how our research will be impacted during this time. The reality is that with many participants working from home it has is actually improved our ability to recruit, engage and facilitate participant research.
Depending on the types of personas or archetypes your business has, it can often be difficult to recruit the right people for your research as well as find a time that fits in with their work schedules and life. Having a large sample size of participants suddenly working from home has presented an opportunity to be able to recruit participants who are more receptive to research. They are also more receptive to taking part in research at times when they would normally be commuting to work.
It is more contextual. Often, research is conducted in artificial environments. With participants in their own environment, they are more comfortable, provide greater insights and share additional stories and artefacts that they wouldn’t share in unfamiliar surrounds.
To be clear, facilitating research in a pandemic is not about taking advantage but identifying how we can better engage with participants who are undergoing a number of changes to their work and home. It is not about exploiting vulnerabilities but being empathic and identifying ways to reduce anxiety and improve experiences.
Your research methodology should follow that of a standard research project. What is your aim, hypothesis, method, results and research conclusions? To facilitate your research a research plan is key and will ensure you are asking consistent questions across your users and to ensure validated patterns and insights. The exception to the research plan in a pandemic is the questions up front need to address the current climate, ask how your users are feeling and be kind. This is both the right thing to do as well as helping you to develop a connection and trust discussing shared experiences.
Communication with your team facilitating the research, stakeholders and the project are vital. We use a range of tools including email and slack to communicate as well as online project management tools to ensure transparency around timelines, dependencies and deliverables.
Whilst sharpies and post-it notes have long been the symbol of a designer, we have been using collaborative online methods for synthesis of our research. Having a collaborative, remote approach to synthesis using tools such as Dovetail, means design teams are able to work closely to identify patterns. It also means tagging of insights is more tangible, actionable and useful post synthesis when we are compiling our research findings.
It is a weird time but facilitating remote research effectively can be achieved as long as you are empathic, caring and kind. Participants are more receptive, more engaged and comfortable being interviewed in their own environment. Reducing anxiety, and improving experiences all start with research. Let’s take this moment to listen, learn, create engaging experiences and smile.
Listen to our podcast – Plastic Grass Square – on Apple Podcasts
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UX Australia 2019 is coming back next week. The blueegg team is excited to be attending and we are proud to be a sponsor AGAIN this year.
Now in its 11th year, UX Australia is happening in Sydney. 4 days of workshops and presentations, covering a diverse area in User Experience Design that suits everyone from newbies to experienced.
You can follow the blueegg team through our Twitter account @blueeggtweets and by following the hashtag #blueeggUXA19. We’ll be sharing snippets from our favourite talks and happenings around the conference.
We’re looking forward to seeing you all there!
Listen to our podcast – Plastic Grass Square – on Apple Podcasts
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We are running user research and would love to have you involved. We are running 30 minute interviews with people who live in Parramatta or who have had experience with the City of Parramatta website. We will be giving you $50 prepaid Mastercards. Complete our survey now to see if you are eligible:
Listen to our podcast – Plastic Grass Square – on Apple Podcasts
Thanks for listening to Plastic Grass Square. Can you help us by answering a few questions? Thanks!
blueegg, in conjunction with our friends from Sustain Digital, are the proud hosts of the Enterprise UX Sydney MeetUp. Our final event for 2018 saw Marla Mitelman from BCG Digital Ventures come along and talk to us about her vision for the Future of Design in 2019.
This was our last event for 2018, but we’ve got plenty more coming your way next year, including our first collaboration with IxDA for the Design Operations Essentials day with Dave Malouf in January 2019. Stay tuned for more EUX Sydney events in 2019.
Listen to our podcast – Plastic Grass Square – on Apple Podcasts
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“Design IS about communication, and I think words in your designs are so critical to be able to communicate something you want”
In this episode of Plastic Grass Square, Aaron talks to Richard about the importance of good microcopy, how to build good teams that work well together and what Richard is looking forward to in 2019.
Richard is the User Experience Lead at PreviousNext; an agency specialising in user experience design and developing large-scale Drupal websites for clients such as ServiceNSW, Transport for NSW, Amaysim and UTS.
He’s an interaction and user experience designer with a focus on the product and ecommerce space. On the side he also runs a blog which showcases effective examples of Good Microcopy – goodmicrocopy.com
Listen to our podcast – Plastic Grass Square – on Apple Podcasts
Thanks for listening to Plastic Grass Square. Can you help us by answering a few questions? Thanks!