 Let's get started. More talk this session on UX, UX and the Fire. Can everyone hear me? Okay, good. So the other room I was in the microphone was really bad, so I'm just joking. Right, so if you wait for the last stragglers, you have to show up. So what made before we start? So the topic here is UX and the Fire. It's essentially a lot of criticism that UX comes under due to a lot of mis-conceptions that exit to our UX. So my name is Jacob. You may know me as one of the people behind Node 1. I was one of its founders. Nowadays I'm actually working, I'm actually on my own again and I'm building a company called Strait, which is a distributed digital agency. And here are my complex details. So it's a strategic digital agency, a distributed agency. And we do things differently from other companies because it's something I'm actually working on right now. All right, so you can check out the website in case you're interested. So UX is a lot of bad rap from a lot of people, because they don't understand it. And there are a lot of myths. So I think it's time to bust it. And one of the things of a network UX is that it's just like this kind of dialogue. Like what engineer made, can you please let them color and make it pretty? I even have a friend that was called in to approach like this and he declined. They were like, yeah, we're working this, this looks good. So we just want to make it present to both of our CEOs. It's like, oh, that's not the way you should do it. So to understand why there's a problem, why this is wrong, let's go back to the roots of why UX was invented in the first place. So I'm going to take some famous examples of porting to UX. So in Europe, we have an airline called Ryanair, maybe you heard of it. And Ryanair, they have tried to, they're basically a bad cop of Southwest. So they, essentially, they're cheap, but they're not good in any way, including their usability. I don't fly Ryanair as a one principle, but that's mostly because they treat their cabin crew, you know, badly and I think that's the way it's suggested. But something to do is when you actually buy a ticket to the website, you get the option of choosing insurance. And there's no option that says, I don't want, I don't want any insurance. Instead you have to hit it in the list of countries you can live in. So there, don't cover me, it's a country apparently. It's a new member of the European Union, yeah, according to Ryanair. Here's an elevator somewhere in Mexico or Spain. And those of you who speak Spanish understand why this is very confusing. This is a very much a weird world example, but still. I would, I would have any idea, you know, which button to push if I was in the elevator. And then there's, I don't know how the subway menus look here, but these would look very sweet. And the first time I saw this menu, I'm like, what? Like, do they have a menu with just a, with just a sob and one with a, one with a soda and one with a chips? No. You're supposed to read them, like, you're supposed to read them like, this looks good on everyone and then just read these parts. But those of you that know, like Gestalt psychology, and other things that are lined up and grouped are seen as belonging together, that's what your brain sees. And here's a really famous example from XKCD. The Venn diagram of what people look for at a university website and the information that usually is there. And like I said, full name of school, check. But in e-commerce, poor usability is not just a nuisance. It's actually, it means loss of revenue. I like, Jacob Nielsen once said, like, increase sales by 100% by fixing usability, small fixes on the e-commerce side. So if your customers are vendors, online vendors, running from our sites, then they have a lot of good reasons to actually pay you to do some e-commerce work for them. So do you think these are problems that can be resolved just by some colorites? Well, of course not. So what is Ux? If it's not a Muslim colorite, it's not one thing. For me, Ux is a number of practices and methods. So in UX, you are to understand the user needs, translate the needs into requirements, design, integrate solutions, and evaluate those solutions intuitively. But I would like to see it as an umbrella expression. So in the user experience, we have a number of activities. We have information design, usability engineering, interaction design, information architecture, experience design, graph design, which we use it with these phones here, you know. They will come back later in presentation. So this is how I see what UX is about. So let's ask Google, you know, like, what do other people think? Apparently this guy, Patrick Marseille, UX includes HTML, Excel, slash JSON. So what are you doing? What are you doing? I want to raise... Well, according to the Japanese information architect, which I would honestly doubt the information architecture efficiency with all this stuff, like... Yeah, it's pretty, but, you know, it doesn't make me an advisor. And apparently at this company, you also did customer service. So if you're looking for a job somewhere, ask them to draw the kind of BIN diagram of the UX specificity that might evolve. And at this company, you're not the only one doing human computer direction. There's someone else having SA2. And chances are, this is what looks like your office. So there's clearly a lot of confusion here. So let's find this. For these things here, they are the activities. We do. These are the sets of tools that we do carry out in our work. And then there's the qualities that we achieve that we produce in the products. So how do these things relate? Well, at the core, we have the usability goals. Things like efficiency, you know, easy to learn, have good utility. And those in turn lead to probably having other things, like being supportive of creativity, meaning and helpful in motivating. So the one great use experience requires good usability. So if it's easy to remember how to use, which means it's probably motivating and satisfying at the same time. Can you think of a product that is not easy to use but still motivating? Well, so aren't. Games are hard. We play them because they're hard. But they're hard in the right way. If you struggle with the user interface or for a game to watch, you will use it. Now, you want to be beaten by the gorilla, like throwing logs at you, not by the button. You don't like doing what you think it should. So we have all these tools, and they allow us to do disability and great use experiences. So here comes that. We also implement solutions to solve this problem. We also give the design work, we actually build prototypes, and we do user interfaces. So, you know, like, what does it matter? It's going to work anyway. Well, use doesn't concern or something looks. It concerns how it works. And that's why in Sweden, we have the expression for an evening, which means a given form or a shape or something. People use it to change the way we design. What I like about design is that you design a solution. You just don't give something an appearance or something. You actually, you design how it works. And this is critical, that you can get enormous business value by making sure something works in a pleasing way. And one way to do this is to look at this pyramid here. So, ranging from tasks to experiences, you can look at different solutions. They were from functional to meaningful. So let's map some products here to see how they, this is just my subjective understanding of things. These here is where you start. And some companies actually cast by this line here, the cast in here. And some actually are meaningful. These are meaningful and just pleasurable to use. Things to use just because they're fun to use them. Like you can imagine the flicking emotion on your phone when you flick that less than your iPhone or Android and it keeps the momentum. It also keeps rolling. Or the way that I can roll over the screen that in fact it's entirely flawless. There's no slowness or anything. And I remember I said this to a friend. He had an Android phone, an early generation, he said, look how they look at stuttering, you know, when you're scrolling the screen. Look at my iPhone, it goes smoothly. That's just the same thing. It doesn't matter. But it does indeed. Because the way you perceive something to work is how you think it works. So if it seems to work well, you believe it works well and you're going to trust it more. So look at some companies here. I would say they end up somewhere here between useful and reliable products. Ubuntu, the books products, they're actually getting better and better. The latest version of Ubuntu is actually on as you cross the class, you might say. Microsoft, even better. Not really great, but they're really spending a lot of time doing UI. Google, I like Google. They are, I mean, look as fancy as some stuff, but it works. And of course, Apple. But that's the brand. They made the design, which was meaningful and useful, one for design to be their brand. So let's just apply these tools we have. So let's look at an example. Google Analytics. So when they built this product, they applied a lot of these tools in a way. So let's look at which of the tools actually had an impact on design. So information design is a skill and practice that prepares information people understand, like graphs and diagrams. All about traffic to the site. Experience design is how it feels, like what kind of emotions do you give the rights to the user in the usage? And it also has to do with using colors and things that engage the user. Information architecture, it's about how you stretch information, how you tag content, text, on-race, navigation, menus. Here's build engineering. It has to be the small details. And use build engineering is often about what we call user research, when you actually move with something pixel or you change the order of something and you look at what the impact has in this experience. Interaction design has to do with behavior. They probably thread a lot of different versions. These are dropped down or tapped before they decided to go with exactly that kind of solution. And graphic design, the overall look and feel, the gradient here and the colors and so on. But there are many that still, despite all these tools, don't make it. 82% of all the products are by their buyers, considered unsuccessful. So let's break those down and have a look at what it is that way. So 33% of the products are casted for completion. They're gone so out of the wrong that they give up trying to finish them. And 25% are delivered on time budget, but the result's not what's expected. I'm going to argue that results is not a matter of whether the project is exactly to scope or requirements where they're actually delivered to the business market. I'm going to do that in a bit. And 25% exceeded the budget. But they got everything they wanted. And the reasons for this won't, they may. Very often lack of user input involvement, it builds something to actually solve people's problems in a way that can help them. Requirements being incomplete. Requirements being clarified later on over the course of the project. I don't really see expectations. The customer, you know, like the customer having an idea of what they were buying, but it was not what you were able to deliver. So it's a massive waste. I mean, but we can fix this. You know, we have the tools, and we have the tools to identify problems. We did find the needs and design for them, but we also need to have the tools to understand. And I'm going to show you this tool. And this tool is called Effect Mapping. Effect Mapping relies on two different assumptions. First was that every site website is built for a reason, and to meet a goal. There are certain business values related to building this website or system. The goals can only be achieved if people are using the websites. If they're not being used, there's no effect coming out of it. It has the advantage of providing a map of very much a helicopter view of the different of the goals and of the stakeholders involved. It's called an Effect Mapping. It looks like this. So we're going to break down the map now and see where it consists in parts. But the core here is the actual effect. And finding that effect is the first thing you need to do. And it can be kind of hard because it needs to be a lot of thinking and the customer to think differently about like the products that you should do. And I call this the walk of why. So because it comes to you and say, hey, we need a better website. Or like, okay. But why? Well, it's really hard to find out who we are and there's no way to post comments and feel involved. Like, post a comment, okay, but why do you need that? Well, a big share of our customers want to feel involved, okay? Well, we need to reach those customers in order to challenge more sales to our site. Uh-huh. That's what they actually hope to achieve. They want to challenge more sales to their site. That was not what they told us. They wanted a better website. But what better meant? That's what you find out actually by asking why, why, why repeatedly. I'm not recommending you to ask why, why, why. I'm asking you to involve in a more meaningful dialogue with your customer. But the core is to understand the motivation and the person holding money, why they're actually giving you that money to build this site. So, okay. So we know what, what do we have to do to reach those customers in order to challenge more sales to our site? Well, we're going to write that as an effect. An effect needs to be precise. Should be more than a few sentences. Um, it needs to be measurable and it should be long-term. So if this is not something that's going to happen overnight, it's going to happen over a month or even longer. Alright, so we formulate the effect and then we write the number of ways to measure it. And as you can see, these are all highly quantified. It's not opinion. It's actually, if you see this effect in your patterns, in your boom and lift count, then we have succeeded. Um, and there's also a limiter and that allows you to basically look back of six months and see what's working, what's not. Let's revise, let's improve, let's change. And here it goes, in the blue box. And right and left of it, you have the goals specified. Alright, so we have the effect, we have the goals. We need to understand that users are. But these are the ones, if they're not using websites, just not going to get an effect out of it. Do you need to understand what motivates them and what do they expect from your faculty? So, first of all, who are they? Well, to find out who they are, you can use these for engineering. Um, again we start with the observation and interviews to establish personas. Are you familiar with personas? Can you use maths? Okay, good. So, alright, you're going to deal with personas. So personas are, personas are really good, not just for you, but for the designers and for developers too, because they can actually relate to what it says in the persona. They're not designing for nobody, they're actually designing for a person. You can give a person a name, you can call him James, because he's 20 years old, because his work is in the account, for example. You know that, you know, in spread time, we're two sports, we can bear with friends. Okay, kind of stereotypical, but still like, you're like, would James ever like this? Would he actually think this button was sort of like, would I help him? And you can start involving a dialogue with that person. I would even recommend you to print out these personas and tap into the walls in your office. And that allows us to answer these questions. What goals do they have? What tasks do they need to carry out? And what are these issues? And then we can melt you. I've done a very, sort of, a lot of research on how to divide people into these roles, because these roles are often not about where they work in the company, but what kind of behavior they have. What's it like, information seekers, information retrievers, information publishers, the curious ones, and so on. Try to think more about what kind of behavior, how they are as people, more than where they happen to work. So the next step here is to figure out how they conceptualize information they need. How will they be able to find the information? And here's where information architecture comes in place. And using card sorting and tree testing, you can actually, you can see, you can find the most logical way to divide your content, the way to present it, you know, in terms of menus, and doing interviews and sit-ups and so on. And that in turn lets us answer even more questions about these users now. Okay, so we know a bit about who they are and what kind of information they're looking for and how they expect that information to be provided and organized. So the next thing we need to know is, what are the goals? Like why do they need this information? And here's where experience design, experience design, interaction design, and graphic design come in. We can do wireframes, we can do stifle hard to catch a feel on the racial structure of the site. We can do mock-ups, storyboards, and journeymaps, build scenarios. Are you familiar with journeymaps? So something that's really exciting recently is a discipline of design called service design. So regularly in the business, you think in channels, someone does a print channel, someone does the web channel. When you service a sign, you go above that and you look at the customer's experience through all these different channels. You need to sign, regardless of channel, find solutions which are the best. You need to visualize the way a customer would interface with their company because of gold and journeymap. All right. So how do we measure this? We try the goals that the users have and then we put up a way to measure them. So we do the overall effect. But now we can look at each target group, what they expect, and how well we meet their expectations or sort of that need. And this is the most... Now, what you have now is that you have to find what the customer expects. You have to find who they need to engage and what they are expected from the website. There's just one more component now in order to actually have a full, complete... Basically, they basically have the foundation for a project, for the requirements list, and that is actually tasks. That's the next step. So, like you see it, now we'll put the goals out here and we also made them measurable. We also translated them into tasks. So in order to... I want to, for example, this user here wants to replace paper forms with online forms. What to do that needs to be able to create forms of communication requests to make it possible for users to digital sign forms. So you know what functions it's expecting. Now you can design the user interface, the mock-ups and everything to serve that need, given its personas, given this person's expectations. So, as you can see, using research, user research and design, we can actually convert business, we can actually create business value and make requirements that help deliver that business value. This is not at all about slapping color on something. It's actually about making sure what we're building actually serves its purpose. Without this work, we're shutting blind. So how can we help people understand this, that this is actually what you're just about? That criticism of UX is misplaced. But now I understand what you're just about to do. The pivotal role that UX has in modeling art. I dare say that many of the failures of IT projects can be avoided. And I think we have to do this. I mean, we can't actually get away from the consistent failure of actually building solutions that meet people's needs without actually thinking this way. The resistance to UX as a practice is a resistance to working or my dissolution generally. Companies are hiring people, companies are hiring more and more UX people. It's evident even the big ones that deliver all the systems that big corporations use in order to do all the internal stuff that you're doing, from accounting to all the modeling, all the process everything, can understand that poor usability is really stopping them from getting the results they expected. So it's better money. It's basically, you're a bad business person and you're not using UX. Well, one way to do this also is usually called the UX value proposition. And this is a way to visualize the impact of some UX work. It's highly subjective though, so it's not objective anyway it means, but it gives you a visual idea of where you basically, where it's worthwhile to put your efforts. So it works such a way that you break down your project in the number of goals. You want to migrate users from big and modest stores to online self-service. These are customers that have big and modest store amounts to convert to billing. You can recite to reach more customers and maybe eventually shut down the physical store. Then when we release those, then we actually break them down into the UX attributes of influencers. So what influencers will use the ability to have, for example, on this goal, for example. What we then do is that we map them out in this list. This can be used in a regular spreadsheet. And then we rate the current state of it and then we rate the potential state of it. So when it may be suffered, what could experience potential be like? This should be conserved to guests in your park. What could it potentially help them? Great. So gain potential costs investment. Essentially gain potential costs investment. In the end, you'll have a sheet where you can pretty visually see where here's where I can actually make an impact video. So it's all good, right? But then I'll say, oh, yeah, this isn't going to pay, you know. But do you know in the real case where this really made a difference? And yes, I do. So here comes the $300 million button. I mean, yeah, that's the right amount of serial, yeah. And this is actually something Jerry Explode wrote for him. This guy was actually a keynote speaker at the last Rupert County in the U.S. I wasn't attending that one. His name is the primary right now. But he's written an entire book about web forms. And he wanted to start a shop where bad web forms can really have an impact. So it's a lot to the e- retailer. And they have a ticket form. It looks like this. You can buy Hodgepodge. You can say how much you want. And you can see the mantle and how fine. All right, nothing fancy. The problem is they try to be smart. So they add this function. You have to register before you can take out. And then I get the service, you know, like, wow, it takes so much time, you know. It's a big gift in a year, so it just takes a few minutes. All right, good, they think. So Susie, she wants some Hodgepodge. And she's inside, and she's ordered some Hodgepodge. And she's like, seriously, what do I have to fill this in? I don't know. I don't want to get involved in a relationship with these guys. And she's like, I might have ordered it before, you know. Let me go back and check. In fact, she has ordered tons of times. She's a big fan of iPodder, so she has all these iPodder in spite of email addresses. The thing is she has constantly forgotten her name and she has changed email address. So it has like four entries in the database. Eventually she's like, never mind. It's not worth it. Somehow they actually find out. The people run and say, oh, right, this is a problem. So like, maybe it wasn't so smart to put that registration form there anyway. Maybe it was so smart to force people to register. So let's try and remove it and see what happens. So they remove the register button and replace it with S. You can continue without, or you can log in. And results were pretty massive. And the 5% registry in sales by that simple change. But that was not a change in engineer realized. That was not a change that the designer saw was something that built a professional, analyzed the workflow, and talked to users, and analyzed the result. So there's massive games to be made in the UX. And UX isn't important. So a takeaway is, well, UX isn't just iMac and other Sonicay peers, it deals with how something works. And UX links business goals to requirements requirements in a way very few of these things can. It offers toolbox and methods to help us do these translation business goals to requirements, and it's proven, and there are 300,000 cases. Why does? So if you like the session, please say evaluated. I would appreciate your feedback, and thank you so much. All right. Sorry. Any questions? Do you have any hands here? Yeah. Hi. Sorry. So I work at post-secondary in Lethbridge, Alberta. And I am curious how you would deal with people who have gathered data, but you have a set of your own. But there might be conflicts because some of it may be biased, especially people who have worked with the audience for quite some time, but they may not have noticed some of the trends that you've been gathering on your own, which is an unfortunate case of miscommunication. But so I guess my question is, how would you deal with my data versus your data? And if there was bias there, how would you deal with that? Okay. So the customer has been doing user research on their own? Yeah. It's not a case of recruitment, but I find they're not asking the why. It's more like a therapy session, I guess. Well, I guess, sorry. I just find that they're not asking the why is behind some of the reasons for why people do things. They're just, it's more like a case of how do you feel, but they don't really explore that. And you get handed this information as some kind of something you could use as sort of like a... Like usually a survey or if they're in a focus room. I see. All right. And they handed you and like, yeah, look at this. You're going to help you make a better design, for example. Yeah. But I would go back to those users and maybe I'll talk to all them but talk to some that are representative and try and have interviews with them. You usually need to speak to so many people. And the interesting thing is that if you read Steve Krug's book, I think it's not the one... Don't make me think it's another one about useful testing. And it's like, most of the useful mistakes, the biggest ones can be discovered by anyone. You don't need to have someone who's a perfect, you know, target group you can find. And it's the same in this case. You don't need to talk all the way. You need to talk to a few that do think are representative of the group. And that will help you validate your ideas regarding what they are, actually, the motivations for feeling and thinking the way they do. Okay. That's great. Thanks. Any more questions? Hi. I was wondering how do you handle feature creep in projects when it comes to UX design? If you have clients that through the mock-up process or the wireframe process keep adding things, wouldn't it be nice if our users could save their favorite something, try and handle that in the mock-up phase and then say no more features? Could you comment on that? Well, feature creep usually was a problem. Later on, we're trying to build the project and fix the line and you actually had a fixed scope. I previously, just before this session, which I have a test on the PMBuff, which I recommend you guys to attend after this one, where we're going to discuss these things even more. So I think feature creep is the biggest problem is during the implementation process. That's when it's really scary. But even as a designer, when it comes to changing it, you have to, design is holistic. Like, you have to sign one thing in detail in isolation. And even though it's good to try and achieve modular design, it's not always realistic. I would try and discuss things with customers relevant to the customer. Basically, trying to get these things up is to change like in the wireframe stage and try to get all this feedback out in the wireframe stage and have them understand if they're going to change, make changes later, it's going to look good. It's going to take time. And try to have some meaningful dialogue and not just go from basically what they say to read the mock-up and try to increase the... You can actually go from a very rough wireframe that once you can make for the tool called mockingbird.com or things called GoMockingbird. It's called... So it's an online mock-up tool. It makes very rough wireframes. And then you can take one of those and maybe move it into Illustrator and make it even find the add fonts and the colors so you can collect feedback over several stages. And then maybe you can catch some of those requests much sooner when the change is much easier. Great, thank you. More questions? We have plenty of time, so... All right, well, if you have more questions, you can just ask them on Twitter or you can come look me up. I'll be around here tomorrow too. So thank you for attending. Very good questions, right?