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User research and diversity
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We’ve been hard at work changing our conference curation process to create more diverse speaker rosters—for Enterprise UX 2018 (June 13-15, San Francisco), and soon for the second DesignOps Summit (New York City). Guess what? It all comes down to user research.
Steve quoted in “Digital Products Flunking User Test”
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I was interviewed by CruxialCIO about how companies can design and redesign digital and mobile products that engage rather than frustrate. The article (Digital Products Flunking User Test) is broken across three tabs (Situation – Solutions – Takeaways) and the quotes from me appear on the second two tabs. FYI, the pages are a bit slow to load.
Remember the precedents. While copying competitors isn’t necessarily advisable, it doesn’t make sense to design, for example, a fly swatter that you use by swinging a string around with the flat swatter piece attached to it. People expect a stick at the end. “You can’t fail to acknowledge that there are precedents out there,” says Portigal.
“There’s some history about how customers are going to expect something to work. Everyone is a consumer so in an enterprise situation, we bring in expectations about how something should work.” If people expect that swiping left or right, double clicking, or other gestures will have a certain outcome, the lack of that outcome will be confusing. After Apple came out with the iPhone, for example, it became quickly clear that when consumers wanted a smartphone, they expected something fairly similar in form factor and function to the iPhone.
What does this have to do with User Experience Design?
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Or, for that matter, with creating software?
These are two, common questions I get and they’re important ones–that has several answers:
• First, one of the most important design strategies for sustainability is to make things useful, usable, clear, and meaningful. UX people are already oriented to doing this, though in the book we describe some elements (like Meaning) that are fairly new to most. As such, UX folks are already increasing sustainability because when we do our jobs correctly, we meet peoples’ needs without requiring more and more solutions to be developed.
• Next, even though many of us are typically only responsible for the software side of the experience, these are still completely intertwined with devices since all software has to run through some kind of physical, sensorial interface. This means that in order to design a complete solution, we need to get involved or (at least) consider the physical side as well. This gives us an opening to champion sustainability design strategies to our peers working in products and other physical device.
• In addition, we often need to make our case to peers, customers, and bosses in their language and to their issues. Understanding sustainability across the domains or social, environmental, and financial impacts helps us make our case more convincingly. It also requires us to understand a broader perspective than only the things we happen to touch and it allows us, ultimately, to better coordinate with our peers in delivering more successful, enjoyable solutions as well a more sustainable ones.
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