What is UCD (User Centred Design)?
Context of use would be:
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Identify - who the primary users of the product are, why they will use the product, what their requirements are and under what environment they will use it;
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Specify Requirements - once the context is specified, it is the time to identify the granular requirements of the product. This is an important process which can further facilitate the designers to create storyboards, and set important goals to make the product successful;
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Create Design Solutions and Development - based on product goals and requirements, start an iterative process of product design and development;
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Evaluate Product - usability testing to get users' feedback of the product. Product evaluation is a crucial step in product development which gives critical feedback of the product.
How do you work?
Every job is different and the more the software industry matures, the more of the design process we'll be able to carry out. But here is how it usually goes:
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An initial discovery phase (either on an existing product or a completely new one) defining pain points, opportunities, learning about and sharing knowledge of competitors and the market.
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After collating and consolidating everything found in the discovery phase, we'll define what the exact problems we need to solve are.
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In the third phase, we will begin developing solutions, workshopping and evaluating all possibilities.
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In the final phase we will wireframe and validate to give us at least a hypothesis or at most an MVP. Once the product has been released, we can A/B test to capture a much broader spectrum of data that's more reliable and will help to refine the product once we feed what we learn back into the design process, preparing for an optimised release-2.
How do you work within a team?
The teams I usually work with are made up of product owners, engineers, analysts and various specialists. I work to build strong working relationships with everyone on the team. I like to communicate and collaborate with team members constantly. I like to explore solutions with team members through workshops or Design jams. Because when everyone works together, good work can quickly be reversed.
Do you work in Agile teams?
Yes, most software teams are Agile these days and most teams I've worked with have been Agile at some stage or if they are not they are mostly aware they should be.
How do you integrate the design process into an Agile team?
The design process and Agile methodology can easily coexist. design teams can carry out a single phase of the design process within each sprint.
We organize our tasks in sprints like developers do. A design sprint starts with a design meeting. This meeting has to be attended by the designers and by someone from the business and from the development side as well. It is a good chance to present the early design works and results of the researches. And then the team makes decisions regarding the upcoming questions. At the end of the meetings, they clarify the action points and the tasks for the next sprint. And then the next sprint starts.
In general, I like week-long design sprints. There are some products can do two iteration rounds a week. This means two design and two research rounds per week.
In an agile project, the design process requires continuous, close collaboration with other parts of the team, and the design will be agile only if everyone is involved. For example, when designers hold workshops or have playback meeting, business and developers also need attend. We need developers to tell us if an idea is too difficult to build. And we need business leaders as well to settle clear business goals and to help us focus on them during the design process. We also need them to give us access to existing customers for testing the product. It’s impossible to design a product for people who you haven’t met before. It’s worth inviting sales and support people sometimes for meetings too. Their opinion can be helpful in some situations because they speak to real users every day.
How does UX help to be more agile?
Finding real pain points
Problems can be identified in existing software or in the user’s life as well thanks to the UX research process. So we are going to develop functions that suffice real user demands. Some methods that I used:
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Interviewing
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Jobs to be done
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Guerrilla user testing
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A/B testing
Building prototypes and iterate fast
UX designers have tools for building prototypes from an idea in a short period of time. Prototypes are the best way to try out more ideas simultaneously. And we iterate them. It is easier to make changes on a prototype than a pixel perfect design, or a running code.
Quick feedback from the users
The prototypes are tested before we create the detailed design and send it to the programming phase. Plans are ready to go to the next stages if they worked well for users.
Better communication
We involve the whole team in the process. Designers, are not lonely fighters. We are connectors. Connectors between users, developers and business leaders. We arrange workshops which gives us a great opportunity to gather the whole team together so we can brainstorm or make decisions cooperatively. And last but not at least, the final wireframes are better than any written specification. They show every feature and how they work.
How do you gather user research?
I first check if any has been done before.
Then I carry out a discovery phase myself which should consist of :
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Workshops - 12 people is ideal as this means I can do three workshops. These are great for getting a lot of reliable information in one go;
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Interviews - the most common method as this can be done with anyone, anywhere at any time, I like to record interviews in a customer journey map format using which can then be fed into a higher level service design blueprint format later, this method provides the most depth;
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Surveys - arrive at the truth in the sheer breadth of data we collect.
How do you carry out usability testing?
Testing can be carried out using in a number of ways but the more you can do the better it is. Testing tools include:
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VWO / Optimizely - industry standards for optimising websites and web apps by creating variations from within the app to A/B, multivariate test etc;
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Inspectlet - simply records users' screen activity for you to analyse;
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Usabilla - users can give live feedback on things they like and don’t like, very similar to the way you'd rate an app on the App Store, it's unobtrusive from a user POV and invaluable from a business POV;
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Usabilityhub - five-second test, question test, click test, preference test, navigation test - a super simple tool to begin getting basic but important feedback;
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UserZoom - measures all interactions and also records users' screen activity;
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Hotjar - heatmaps, visitor recordings, conversion funnels, form analysis, feedback polls, surveys, recruit test users.
Examples of goals optimised during testing include:
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Destination - a specific location loads e.g. a "Thank you for registering!" web page or app screen;
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Duration - sessions that last a specific amount of time or longer e.g. 5 minutes or longer spent on an article page which would indicate consumption which would indicate that the content is of a certain quality;
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Pages or Screens per session - a user views a specific number of pages or screens e.g. 5 pages or screens have been loaded, this would depend on the type of product
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Event - an action defined as an Event is triggered e.g. social media recommendation, video play, ad click.
Examples of metrics to measure include:
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Happiness (via a survey) - satisfaction, perceived ease of use, net-promoter score;
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Engagement - number of visits per user per week, number of photos uploaded per user per week, number of shares
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Adoption - upgrades to the latest version, new subscriptions created, purchases made by new users;
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Retention - number of active users remaining present over time, renewal rate or failure to retain (churn), repeat purchases;
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Task success - search result success, time to upload a photo, profile creation complete.
What metrics would you use for measuring fun and satisfaction?
Users generally prefer products that are fast and easy to use but satisfaction isn't 100% correlated with objective usability metrics. These metrics would include satisfaction, perceived ease of use, net-promoter score (willingness of customers to recommend a company's products) all collectable via a survey.
If you had two products and had to ask one question of users to determine which they preferred more, what would you ask?
Which one would you pay for to use every day, and why?
How do you know when a project is 'done'?
A software product is 'done' when there are no more bugs to fix, all requirements have been implemented correctly and there are no more improvements to make (which is never), however, there is such thing as 'good enough'.
How do you make products easy to use?
Good UX is about predictability i.e. if a user takes X action do they know that Y is going to happen? You need to ensure that the design patterns and user journeys are extensible and appear the same on different devices and viewport sizes. Always try and only build what you need, Leonardo Di Vinci said: "a poet knows when he has reached true perfection, not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away".
Someone on the team has a strong opinion about how a certain feature should be, but you disagree. How do you approach the situation?
Provide evidence to back up my claims including test results and data that already exists to keep decision making objective always put the company's interests first and open to being proven wrong.
How would you describe your role in under 10 words?
To efficiently discover, resolve, execute and validate novel ideas.