 I'm Lewis Nyman. I work as a UX designer at a small agency called Convivio. In a previous life I used to contribute a lot to Drupal Corr. I was one of the top 30 contributors to Drupal A, but I don't do that anymore. If you want to ask me questions about that then this is the wrong section for it because I absolutely know nothing anymore about that kind of stuff. But I've been with Convivio for about three months. We've just started up. Something that we started out with is that we wanted to focus on just the essential things of running a business, like getting clients and establishing our process and stuff. So we actually don't have a logo yet. Our Twitter avatar is just blank. I said as we were revealing the logo tomorrow I thought it would be cool to show it as a preview in this session. Although it's just as a little sneak peek so there's no one else to see this. That's how the company is. It's kind of like a first time thing. Obviously this talk isn't about Convivio or about why we have a picnic bench as a logo. That's a separate discussion. Anyway, let's talk about design processes and what makes a good design process. What you need from a good design process is consensus based on objectives instead of opinions. So you don't want to get to a subjective point of view where people think oh I want this and someone else wants this. You want to be sharing the same objectives of the team and you want to agree that this is what you want to get towards. You want to have buy-in from stakeholders, people who are paying for the design work. You want them to be able to understand what you're giving them. You want to get buy-in from developers as well because they actually have to take this stuff forward and they have to implement it in the real world. If there isn't a consistency there of understanding, sometimes it ends up being something that's too difficult to implement or it becomes something that doesn't really meet the initial vision. Also you kind of want to have a good design. I mean that in a very subjective way where if you're going home at the end of the day you feel good about the work you've done and you don't feel like oh this thing is going horribly wrong. You just feel good about it yourself. I forgot to ask, I was wondering what roles people do in the audience. Can you put your hand up if you're a product owner or a project manager or something like that? Can you put your hand up if you're a developer, a front-end or a back-end developer? Cool, that's what I expect from Drupalcon. Can you put your hand up if you're a designer or a UX designer? Cool, okay. It's good to have a bit of a mix. I just want to talk a little bit about my old design process. The way I used to work when I was designing is I used to gather information from people. I used to interview the stakeholders about the business, gather any existing research they had from analytics software, go and interview the users that they identified to see what their problems were, and then set the priorities, objectives of what the design is, what it needs to do, what it needs to achieve. Then I used to go into a design cave. This is where I used to sit on my own and try and figure out all the possible design options and then try and figure out what the best one was. I used to come out of that cave and go and present this design concept. This could be like a wireframe or a mock-up or something else depending on the projects. We have to arrange a meeting, I present a design, and then you get feedback from people, product owners, any developers that are working in that phase, and the stakeholders. I ended up doing this quite a few times. I go back and iterate and take the feedback that they gave me in the last meeting, try and come up with something better, arrange another meeting, and then go through that feedback loop again. Does this kind of process sound familiar to anyone at all? It's not just me? Good. As you can imagine, I'm sure you've experienced, I had quite a few problems with this process, especially around the kind of feedback that I used to get. Some of the examples of the feedback I used to get was, can we make it green? I don't have anything against green. Green is a nice colour, but you ask someone who says, let's make it green, and you say, why should we make it green? They say, well, I like green. I like it. I guess this makes it very difficult if you're not aligned on the same objectives to say, green is a nice colour, but does it suit what we're trying to do? Does it meet the objectives? Can we use it in that same way just because we like it? I used to get that a lot. I used to get a kind of feedback that would say, I think it should look like Amazon, Tinder, Uber, anything that is popular, anything that the shareholders or that particular person liked at the time they thought was the best design. Let's just copy that because that's the thing that they like the most. Of course, I'd have to explain the time while the objectives of Tinder or Uber are different to the thing we're designing. The users we're designing for are different as well, but it doesn't always help just to copy the thing that we like the most if it doesn't meet the same objectives. I used to get this, the wall of silence, just no feedback at all. There's ways around this as well, trying to frame the feedback that you want, asking people deeper questions to try and get the right kind of feedback out of them. I used to get people saying that I don't like it. People say they don't like something, but they can't really articulate why, because this is valid feedback, but I found it very difficult to get this into actionable feedback that I could use to actually improve it, because there's nothing you can do just saying I don't like it. Another good one was, hello, I don't like it, goodbye, which is also known as a swoop and poop, when a senior executive comes halfway through the process into a meeting, hasn't really paid attention or read any of the stuff that you've done beforehand or understood any of the reasons why you've got to where you are because I don't like it, I don't get it, I'm not interested, goodbye. This can really disrupt the process, and it's really difficult to deal with this kind of stuff if you're doing a process that takes a long amount of time, and then someone comes in and forces you to start again. Another one I used to get was I brought my own wireframes, people on the client side, people who either have some design knowledge already or they're passionate about design, they want to understand design a bit more and they have their own solutions they're excited about and they want to share and they want to push their ideas through. I found this really difficult to deal with because I was so worried about having the whole design by committee thing and having this mishmash of ideas I couldn't control. I actually found that in some ways I really shut these people down in a way that wasn't very positive, I found that it created a couple of difficult situations and one of the things I realised later on is that when the people I was dealing with who really wanted to submit wireframes they were presenting something on screen and I saw there was a bookmark in their browser and it was a link to the website for the General Assembly which is a school in London for learning user experience. I realised they were learning these things in their own spare time, they're really passionate about it and they really wanted to find their way to contribute and using the things that they'd been learning and I realised at that point that I'd been making a big mistake by just shutting these people down and not giving them an opportunity to contribute. So that was a big turning point I think. Another piece of feedback that I got was oh that's going to be expensive to build which I'm sure some people have said as developers sometimes it's difficult if you don't have a shared understanding about why you're doing what you're doing and I found it's really difficult if you don't bring everyone together and make decisions together it can be quite demotivating if developers don't understand why they're having to do the extra work to change things and if you're working with Drupal changing certain parts of the user experience is really hard because it's the only way it isn't amazing but it's not just about changing the user experience it's about changing the user experience it's really hard because it's the only way it isn't amazing but it's much better than it was before it's still tough to change things completely and to make big UX improvements but the biggest issue I had with this kind of process is it just took ages these feedback loops were super long I used to have to go and work on this on my own arrange meetings, get everyone together in the same time in the same place have a quick half hour discussion about it and go away and have to do that again and again and again so it just took a really long time to get to the point where we finally had something that we were happy with and I was actually curious because I've had a few comments when I've done this session before if anyone else had any ideas of other problems that they had with this kind of process that's okay it's heartbreaking you're saying that it brings out a lot of emotion from people of distress I know what you mean I guess it's like... emotions are difficult because they always play a part and you can't avoid emotion, I guess and finding a way to allow it without letting it disrupt the process letting people get overly frustrated and fed up is really tough so there's lots of different things you can do to improve this process by framing feedback and asking deeper questions and trying to keep the meetings regulated on time and that kind of stuff but I was really thinking to myself, is there a better way is there a better way to do this completely and I started looking into workshops as a way of achieving a consensus in a short space of time I started looking into the design studio and the design sprint methods and they're all about getting through loads of different ideas and getting down to a consensus of one idea to take forward in a very short space of time so the design sprint is a really popular new methodology that's around because it's been promoted by Google Ventures they created the idea and they've been publicising it a lot they wrote a book about it and it's kind of focused towards startups it's about being able to get through an entire process of learning in just five days and I really recommend reading the book because it goes over a lot of these principles and why you should do them and it also goes into loads of detail of the different stages that I won't be able to go into in as much detail in the time I have but the thing I like about these kind of methodologies is you can kind of take the bits that work for you and I kind of like breaking them down into the different parts and then like building your own workshop structure that kind of works for you or the clients that you have another thing that was a big inspiration were the methodologies and the processes behind IDO, the Creativity and Innovation Company the big thing about design thinking is it allows people to build on the ideas of others instead of just having this one thread you think about it, I come up with an idea and then somebody from somewhere else says oh that makes me think we should do this and then we can do that and then you get to a place that you just can't get to in one mind If you follow David Kelly around IDO you can see how he has infused that thinking into the legendary Palo Alto firm he founded more than 20 years ago breakthrough ideas happen every day here the key to unlocking creativity at IDO may be their unorthodox approach to problem solving they throw a bunch of people with different backgrounds together in a room so you're in the business end my background is in software engineering journalism aerospace engineer doctors, opera singers and anthropologists for example and get them to brainstorm you gotta have a certain culture you gotta have collaboration you gotta have diversity you gotta have an anthropologist and a business person and an engineer and a computer scientist all of those kinds of you got it that's the hard part is the cultural thing of having a diverse group of people and having them be good at building on each other's ideas they encourage wild ideas and visualize solutions by making actual prototypes but the main tenant is empathy for the consumer figuring out what humans really want by watching them so a lot of these processes have been around for a long time like IDO is one of the companies that have been really leading in this area but whatever name you call it these different processes or workshops kind of have the same building blocks to them there's about 4 steps to them which is understanding, defining, diverging and then deciding and the important part is that you do this all together as a team so it's about having product owners together stakeholders together developers and designers and you make the most of this really broad range of experiences like David Kelly was saying in the video it's about bringing people together who come from different backgrounds because they're able to build on each other's ideas instead of just coming at it from the same point of view so the stakeholders really understand the business really well and that market the product owners really understand the users and what they're trying to build developers have a good understanding about how it could actually be built and how it could work technically and designers understand the different common patterns of ease of use and usability and modern UI trends so again like you understand the information together you define a problem together you diverge which is all about generating as many ideas as possible and then you decide find a way to boil it down and have one concept that you all agree is a good way to move forward so talking about the first section is about understanding so what you need to do in this stage is share all the information with everyone in the workshop usually the best way to do this is quick lightning round presentations so if you have people there who have done a lot of user research it's about giving a quick 5 minute summary of what they found out during the research if you have people who understand the analytic side of it it's about giving a quick overview to everyone and this is a really important part and I try and get everyone who's listening to take notes on the information they're receiving because the next thing you need to do is kind of take that information and define these problems and what you can find so a problem statement is a really clear and concise definition of the problem that you're trying to solve and that's like the objective of the workshop and this really helps focus the entire team around what one objective is so an example of this would be something like students don't receive enough guidance on how to develop the skills that will enable them to learn and flourish and this really having it in this way in a user focus kind of way kind of keeps the focus on that problem that you're trying to solve and it's really important when you write these in a workshop to put them up on the wall and keep them there all day because they'll be constantly referred back to throughout the entire day and I find that keeping them in people's mind allows them to quickly refer back to oh I wanted to solve this problem in this way the next step is probably the most important step which is diverging and this is about generating as many different ideas as possible and exploring every single possible solution that you could have to solve a problem before moving forward and the author of the design sprint summed up in a way I really like he says remember in the legends of Zelda how the map would light up different rooms when you moved around the dungeons and that's kind of what you're doing is going around all the different possible areas and kind of exploring everywhere you could go before you decide which direction you should go into so I guess it's kind of like just revealing every single possible direction before moving forward so where I like to do this is with sketching because I find that most people in technology don't don't use pen and paper all the time some people do but usually it's it's something that they don't use so much anymore which means that no one really has an advantage over anyone else it's not like we're using Photoshop or Keynote or HTML and CSS to make these ideas so no one really has an advantage over anyone else they can't really make it much better than you can just draw pen on paper but I find that it's quite tough to do this stuff because people don't use pen and paper as much they can be really under confident and really rusty with it so getting people warmed up is probably the first most important thing that I like to do and one of the ways I found that I quite like is called squiggle birds and what you do or you get everyone to do is to get a blank piece of paper and just draw random squiggles all over the page and make them do quite a few and then you give them a beak and eyes and the legs and the tail and they have to try and put these objects or draw them onto their squiggles and try and make it look like a bird and it's just kind of fun because it's really silly and you don't have to really try very hard but it kind of shows people that that you can kind of make anything look like anything if you try hard enough or at least place just the right parts in there to make it recognisable so it's a really fun way just to get started and get people used to drawing with a pen or a pencil another thing that I was recommended to do by another agency when I last gave this presentation is a portrait drawing exercise so you pair people up and you get them to look at each other and try and draw each other in about a minute and it's kind of funny because they're always really bad and you get to laugh about it but it also kind of creates this connection between two people like you actually have to look at someone's face for a minute and no one does that anymore really so it's kind of a fun way to get people to relax just looking at each other and communicating with each other so that's fun like I said, the aim of this part is to get as many ideas as possible and this can be really difficult to do so I try and reinforce the rules of brainstorming so all ideas are equal you're not allowed to judge any idea you're not allowed to analyse any idea and they shouldn't be realistic or feasible or even good at this stage so you have to be really careful if you're running this workshop if you see someone starting to analyse someone else's idea to stop that because you don't want to have people hold back the ideas that they have and it's also really common for people to criticise their own ideas you can kind of see it sometimes in people's heads where they're about to say something and then they think no that's stupid you've got to watch that and try and get them to say it anyway because this is the area where you really want to get every single idea out of people's heads so there's loads of different ways and techniques of doing it 685 is a pretty common one this is where you have to create 6-8 concepts in 5 minutes which is really not enough time to do it well and that's kind of the idea is that people can't spend too much time on one concept they have to do it really roughly, really quickly and it means that they don't get too connected to any one idea that they spend a long time on trying to make it really detailed and it makes them feel like it's easy for them to throw away and that is really important because you don't want people to get too attached to one idea so they usually look a bit like this it's really easy to do something like crazy 8s by folding the paper in half, in half again in half again you end up with 8 different sections you can draw in I found this, some people really struggle with this end up doing one or two really detailed and then not doing the rest in enough time and sometimes I just said it so you have to do one in a minute and then we'll move on and do another one in a minute but this is really important because you need to get everyone past this first idea hump and what this is is there's always someone there who has this idea that's been in their head for a couple of days it's been brewing in there and they've kind of thought about it for a while and they convinced themselves that this is the best idea this is going to solve all the problems and this can be really dangerous in this situation where you want all ideas to be equal and you want to explore all these different ones and they also end up being quite attached to that idea and they end up arguing for it a lot and shooting down other people's ideas so you need to keep doing this process and keep repeating this idea generation step until you get everyone past this first idea that they're really attached to and they just realise that it's just one idea of many and then the next thing you need to do is present the ideas you have back to everyone so you put them up on the wall you put them up next to your problem statements because then it's really easy to point between the two and show how you're trying to solve the different problems and you just get people to talk through their thinking and their intent and what they're trying to solve it helps to kind of show people how can they improve better and sometimes it helps for people to maybe say I solved this in this way, I like it but I don't like this aspect of it so much so it kind of opens up a little bit more and it allows people to feel like they can start to give feedback, start thinking about feedback and it won't be a big problem because none of the ideas at this stage are perfect so after everyone has had a chance to present you can discuss what aspects you like which aspects you think could be better this is another tricky area because people do get naturally attached to some ideas that they found they like more than others so sometimes it helps to try and ask people to phrase feedback in a certain way like asking how might we do this instead of I don't like this part of it and sometimes you just have to catch people at that point and say maybe you can phrase it in a slightly different way because I found that if you have people who are very senior and then other people throughout the team, egos get involved very quickly and you kind of have to be careful to watch people who are very protective of their egos and feel like they are being attacked quite easily so one of the other things I forgot to mention is that because you are putting all these on the wall it means that when you are critiquing them everyone is standing together on the other side of the wall facing it which is different to having someone present and then at that point asking people to critique them as they are standing up there because it feels like they are being attacked against the wall along with their idea if you get people to step away from the wall and then look at it together then it feels a little bit less intimidating one thing that I am a big fan of is silent critique and this is a way of making sure that everyone has a chance to say something before someone comes in who tends to dominate the conversation and I say this in a way that I say this because I used to be that kind of person who used to dominate all the conversations just because I was too enthusiastic to speak so this is a good way to work you give people stickers maybe five or so stickers and get them to go around and put the stickers on the points that they think are interesting or things that they want to talk about and then it gives you a priority list of things that are important and worth talking about and it's a really good way to visualise the things that are really tricky or difficult or need discussion and it's a great way to make sure that everyone has had some input at some point at that point probably need to generate even more ideas people tend to see another idea and want to build off of that or try it in a different way and it's useful to encourage people to take someone else's idea and change it in another way so there's always a rule that you can steal if you make it your own you have to change it in some way and kind of build on that idea so it's kind of down to your judgement on how much you want to run that part of the workshop for it feels like people have been exhausted of ideas and sometimes you need to push them just a little bit more to make sure they've explored all the areas but at some point you have to get to the point where you need to decide you need to reduce the ideas you need to come down to an idea that everyone agrees is the best one to take forward even if it's not necessarily the perfect one and that's just down to your judgement so there's different ways of boiling it down into one concept some of the things I do is identifying conflicts or doing 312.3 which is like a longer version of the 685 so you actually ask people to just do a few more detailed ideas so they have more time to spend on the ideas they really think of the best ones and then work with those and set and they end up being a bit of a combination of some of the other ideas that you came up with in a quicker way and it also allows you to add a little bit more detail about how it actually could work in practice so if you haven't really figured out how this could work on different devices it gives you a bit more time to explore how that would work you can also use voting again using stickers if you're really stuck and you can't decide between different concepts and just giving people a chance to vote really helps and this is an example of identifying different conflicts so if you see two design concepts that try and solve the same thing in different ways like for example, signing up with Facebook Facebook or Twitter or email you can only choose one of those things you can't have two of those options so identifying those conflicts and seeing where they are really helps you reduce the number of ideas and forces people to pick which one they think is the best one so in general I found this process this process really helped me achieve what I wanted to achieve so it helped me get the consensus based on objectives because you have those problem statements defined out of all the research people have done and you have them up on the wall the whole day you have buying from stakeholders because they've been through this entire process and they understand all the decisions you've made because you've done it all together I think you have more buying from developers as well because they've been through this process and they understand why you're doing what you're doing and they're not just being handed these designs and being told to do them without really understanding the context around it and I do really believe that you end up with better design concepts because having a diverse set of people in the room with different backgrounds and different ideas it really does help generate the best possible designs that you can come up with and I found as well that it's about two weeks worth of work coming up with a design going back getting feedback iterating and going around again something that could take two weeks you can actually do in about six hours in one day by doing it all together and that's everything I have to say thank you I usually when I've done this session I usually get loads of questions from people or loads of comments about ways they've solved those kind of problems so I left loads of time for discussion or questions Does anyone have any questions they have or any suggestions or advice about ways they've handled those problems in different ways? Yes Oh, do you mind using the mic? Yeah, I've just got a question Do you have any issues with you know, the sort of hippos the highest paid people's opinions because I mean I've done similar types of concepts with these kind of workshops and you know, you spend a day with people and everyone comes up with ideas but you get one person that's just absolutely fixed that their opinion is you know, by far and away you know, it's their project and I've heard people describe projects in that way that it's like their personal project and it's like eight people in a room I mean do you have any sort of advice on how to shift those kind of opinions and how to break those people down? Yeah, right Yeah, the hippo the highest paid person's opinion it's a problem in all kinds of workshops you get it all the time I guess it's more of a question of skill of being able to communicate with that person than it is about you know any quick tip that you can give someone but I've often found that people who tend to keep repeating their opinion again and again it's because they don't really feel like they're being listened to they feel like people just want to move on and do something else so they feel like they have to keep repeating it so something I've found is that even if it takes like five or ten or fifteen minutes just to focus on that person and give them the chance to get all that stuff out and maybe get it written down or try and get it up on the wall because then they feel like they've been listened to and sometimes they tend to take a bit more of a bank seat after that that helps in some situations but if people are really insistent on their opinion on making their decision and everyone following what they think is the best idea I usually find that you have to kind of take your role as the facilitator and try and be firm because at the end of the day that is your role there that is your job and usually I use it as a thing I'm just doing my job the rules of the workshop are that we have to give other people a chance to give their opinions as well and it's less of an attack on them because you're just saying oh I'm just doing my job this is part of my role at the moment this isn't an attack on your ideas or your role and that helps a bit as well but like I said it's a tricky thing really I think you can probably spend years learning how to communicate with those people maybe not even get anywhere but yeah it's more about learning like life skills and communication I think there is any workshop technique How do you get buy-in from clients to have that many people in a room for a whole day when they're busy people they do want to be involved they want to have their opinion but they're giving up a full day for maybe a group of six, eight, ten I don't know how many people you tend to have in these things but quite a few people in terms of stakeholders and product owners and how can you actually sell that to them when they say we've only got an hour or we've only got two hours Yeah you're right it's very difficult to be able to convince them that they can use their time like that because it's such a tough resource to get from stakeholders Usually the other thing that's quite restricted is the budget so we tend to advise it in that way saying if you spend this day with us we can get through something that you could pay us to do in about two weeks instead and that helps a bit that usually does convince people a little bit because usually the budget is saying that they can't be moved at all but their time is a little bit more flexible than that Apart from that we've tried doing things like just selling them a workshop like this or just selling them the idea of doing a week-long sprint instead of selling a contract to do like a months and months long project to kind of get a taster for how this process works and then the risk in that case financially is quite low so sometimes it's easier to convince them to start with that and if they feel like it's making good progress and they feel like it's more productive then they can choose to move forward and take a little bit more financial risk and that works quite well just being a good introduction and a good taster to how we work because it's hard to... people are quite used to the ways that we use the design where you just do a mock-up and show them and they'll be like, yeah, okay, we'll buy this now we'll figure out how to build it later a lot of clients are used to that process still so it helps to have something small something that you can do hopefully not for free but for a very low risk to them to give them an introduction to why it's better to do it in this way Thanks, I've got another question No one minds It seems like at the end of that process you're coming up with mainly wireframes and a kind of agreed direction on wireframes of particular UX issues or journeys through that what happens next and how quickly do you get into colours, fonts, actual design are you going to the visual design level next or is it mainly about getting agreement on the UX issues? So what you do next to this design concept once you're out of the workshop really depends on the context of the project if you follow the design sprint methodology and if you read that book that is focused on solving really big high-level problems like is this even a thing that people want to buy and it's not really focusing on the small details it's kind of about getting to something you can use and prototype and learn with really quickly but that's not true of every project some clients have something that exists already they have a stable business they understand the needs of the users more or less in that situation it's about taking that solution that you've come up with out of the workshop and getting it to a point where you can learn from it really quickly so it really does depend I probably would use it like at the very earliest stage when you're probably not going to move to visual design straight away you're going to maybe do some testing with the concept you've come out with and have a chance to learn with it and I think it's better at that stage because you're just exploring every possible solution you can probably have and going straight to the point where you're polishing that and assuming it's good it's probably a bit too early in that stage so I think we probably take it through to testing after that just to make sure that the things that we assume are right are actually correct it strikes me that there's potentially still a bit of going into your cave and doing some more detailed higher fidelity designs to then actually get approval from the stakeholders and sign off and so there's still a bit of that process after that just less because they've had more involvement in the beginning that's right so the visual design process there isn't a way I've found to do that in a collaborative way like you would drawing and sketching because it is pretty subjective but I found that if you make the big decisions early on like how this is actually going to work how is this going to flow together what's going to appear on the page then you've removed a lot of the conversation that comes afterwards and I found that I still have to go back to the old techniques of introducing and reminding people of the objectives you have for visual design this is what we're going for this is what we did last meeting and keeping that flowing and reminding people about what the objectives of the visual design was and what we've already agreed upon Does anyone else have any questions or you can talk to me afterwards it's fine I'm a firm believer in data driven design and using as much data beforehand and gathering as much data beforehand and using those to inform design decisions and development decisions do you use that in the workshop space and how do you incorporate that into the workshop idea or do you just spitball without looking at data beforehand oh no you definitely would in that situation that's something that you would present to people right at the beginning the understanding phase of it so if you have it helps to prepare the information that you have the data that you've collected into something that's really digestible so when I do that with user testing then you summarise the main problems that were found and you pull out some highlights from the videos if you need to it will be the same thing with the data you've collected so just being able to give people a really quick summary and doing their preparation in advance of the workshop to kind of communicate the key issues you've found to people and that's a really important part to do right at the beginning they have the same assumptions and they have the same knowledge so they kind of understand where everyone else is coming from okay okay well like I said you can come chat to me at any point drawing Drupalcon or somewhere or right now but thanks for listening