A reflection on User Experience and Design
Today we had a lecture by an Alumni working in industry. I thought I'd capture my thoughts while they were fresh and also to evidence somewhere these thoughts :) They also made a Star Trek reference in the first few slides so I was won over immediately xd (God bless LCARS)
They work at Microsoft now, but didn't jump straight 'to the top'. They had a very normal programming job at the beginning, despite being interested in UX after graduating. When an opportunity appeared to work on design aspects of projects at their company, they jumped at the opportunity, eventually being given the official title when the company decided a Designer was worth the cost.
During one project they were tasked in building a job listing application for teachers. Do research competing products and existing solutions they visited competitive sites. Not knowing what to search, they put in their own job and discovered salaries were usually twice what they were earning! After a few management meetings they decided to make the switch and ended up at Microsoft.
What is UX?
User Experience looks at... well the user. It trys to understand wants, needs, and so on.
I think my biggest takeaway of this section was my impression of who can thrive in UX related roles. I always saw UX, HCI, UI, and design as the realm of creatives and artists. People who can throw together pretty animations and CSS on a whim. People who can see and structure the exact measurements to centre a box on the page or whether using the golden ration makes an interface just that bit more attractive to look at.
Instead UX is about understanding the user. What they find difficult, what they want to achieve; not just the things a user is conscious of or can share, but delving deeper into hidden accessibility needs, translating the 'I'm hungry' to 'I want X dish'.
This is a human skill. Not strictly a creative skill. Everyone (in theory) uses similar skills throughout their life. When your friend gets stuck on the same math question and you show them a neat formula or trick; When someone shorter is dragging a chair across the room and you just help them take the item off the shelf (or even install a shorter shelf); When someone gets injured and you help figure out an easier way to get to the shops that doesn't involve jumping over a fence (or something).
These are areas I love; mapping systems. I always thought 'managers' had to come from technical backgrounds. Creative or otherwise. But this redefining of UX shows me that I'm probably more interested in UX as a form of 'management'. Bringing my horizontal skillset to understanding a wide range of issues and users, and my T or I skills to translate and refine these into specific, relevant, and achievable targets and plans for others to use.
Australia again?!
They also went over some specific techniques. 2/3 of the diagrams that illustrated the methodologies came from Atlassian, an Australian company :D
...Maybe not a great heading, but lets break down these 3 methodologies and how I have been unintentionally using them before!
Personas
This is a formalisation of a very natural thing people tend to do. Whether thats a specific person (a friend or connection), or a group of people (eg physical accessibility needs when doing event logistics) kept in mind during planning.
Personas should have relevant details like user behaviour, interest, and demographics. Is should be realistic and be supported by some research.
Typically 3-4 personas are sufficient. Larger and more complex systems may have sets of personas for different 'regions', eg '4 for rural India and 4 for metropolitan India'.
I suggested this very thing last year at work. I noticed that staff understood the diversity of our userbase, but often didn't apply them to ideas or feedback. Knowing a service or activity was not as effective or engaging as planned stopped at actually trying to understand things from the user side. It must be a problem with staff capacity, or marketing, or resourcing, or the software we use. Looking at whether it was something users needed or could comfortably engage with was usually an after thought.
I was also very personal and invested in the work I did last year. I knew many of the people that directly used, interacted with, and/or were impacted by the things we did. I listened to them complain, vent, share. I took these to heart, as a more valuable form of data than any survey could produce. I considered what could make the user's experience better, or ways to mitigate the chance of their bad experiences happening again. I also considered the complexity, difficulty, resources, and time that different solutions and changes required. There was no point telling the staff to get better at resolving tickets, or suggest hiring more staff, if we didn't have the resource or capacity, and small tweaks to the types of categories and developing a better culture with students could make as much of a difference for less time, effort, and resource.
User Journey
User Journey is about sitting down with a user and observing what they do. Then translate the observations into a timeline of actions. An important metric (especially when using live users) is to capture their 'mood'. From happy and comfortable, to putting in effort or problem solving what to do next (neutral), and frustrated or annoyed.
User Journeys are useful in understanding how users:
- get to a product
- use the product
- what types of problems they use the product to solve
- how effective the product is at solving those problems.
Sometimes parts of the User Journey is out of a team's or product's control. Example if google is hard to use, there's not much a small company can do. But if its the result not showing up, then the SEO could be improved.
Likewise some user frustration might be unavoidable. If you're limited to a single page website, popping out a new window to demonstrate context switching isn't an option (at least with today's HTML and CSS ;)), but if there are too many buttons on the screen, a drop down or tab organised design might be more accessible and useful. Or from the lecture, if there needs to be contact details, having a pop-up chat that is static between pages might be better than choosing between phone or email, being bounced back to the website to look at an article or fill in a form, and then back to phone or email to finish the process.
Finally, mapping User Journeys can highlight opportunities. Whether for the current product or a new one; when a user is stuck or frustrated, adding a brand new feature or new product to fulfil their need or help to reduce their frustration is good for the user and good for business!
I've tried to use user stories throughout last year and even this year. Writing out and diagramming the different staff roles and responsibilities, how these link to different services, and how these link to user needs and problems. This is more system mapping, but helped me personally organise my thoughts and understanding.
Sometimes I would do the reverse (still referencing system maps to use consistent terminology) and follow what a user wants to do, and how to get it done. A few times I was able to sit with operational staff and do this with them. Walking them and myself through the theoretical/designed way to book a room (as an example) and asking questions and pointing out contradictive information or actions that intuitively I wouldn't know or do as an untrained user.
One useful insight was the way we handed out and processed card readers (PoS Devices). The finance team showed how difficult it was to interpret and analyse the exported data. Devices had generic names and sometimes the check out forms weren't available or filled out correctly. They had to guess and detective their way to which transaction was for which group based on times, amounts, and their own knowledge of events and activity.
I knew that the device name must come from somewhere and therefore be better tracked (This was with Square, but I knew from Stripe that metadata is likely trackable). We discovered that on of the columns matched the 'device code' name field and this could be changed before handing out a device. We didn't have enough time to fully test edge cases, but it was a huge leap for their efficiency and ease of use and would trickle down to improving student experience via faster payment processing times (as funds were deposited into the central account and needed to be later allocated and transferred to the group's specific/restricted account).
Wireframes and Prototypes
Ah wireframes. A classic. As the guest said, a lot of it is a holdover from graphic design. Using only necessary and specific text (using simple lines to indicate content) or boxes with big crosses for images.
Wireframes are useful in design and planning, but also are valuable for teams and coordination. He talked about how wireframes would be printed and stuck on a board in the shared office and when someone was confused about functionality or integration, someone could physically point out 'what you're working on', 'what I'm working on', 'how they connect' and then have more productive talks about what data (, etc) needed to be shared.
My job was more policy focused so I did less wireframes for that. I did a few mock-ups and visualisations for some feedback and ideas though. I did 2 for reimagining the website, considering radical new ways to present data and information to users and make it more engaging and 'alive'. I also used a 3D home design software to reimagine various spaces. Being able to actually see what a space could look like with a few changes was really useful in onboarding others and proving the plausibility of the idea.
A reflection on this as a guest lecture
It was really cool to have them come in and talk to us. Not just about UX, but I particularly enjoyed their guest lecture because it felt... real. They talked about their career path, one that started where we were, and how they built and worked their way towards where they are. They didn't land a job in a big company, they didn't do a big internship. It made the future a little brighter and within reach.
Often the Alumni or Guests we have come talk to us are indeed from big companies, but they focus more on the things they do currently. It is rare we have the chance to hear from someone who, for lack of a better phrasing, isn't a 'genius' or 'talented'. They had interests and skills, but they got where they were after a long process of learning and experience.
Blender
As a tangent to end the post I thought I'd talk about Blender (the 3D software not the kitchen appliance). The Blender Conference was a few weeks ago and I finally got myself to sit down a watch a few talks (thanks Blender Guru newsletter).
As a quick summary:
- There was a talk by a teenager who was building tools that used Blender as a framework, combining nodes with external tools and data, and python. They worked on 2 major projects, the first was on traffic simulation. It was impressive to see (as traffic simulation usually is), but the fact it was all procedurally generated AND using blender's node system was the cherry on top. For example, because blender nodes provide access to various information about the geometry, they could use that to procedurally generate street markings! They even got invited by a real company to help integrate their work into the company's and was lucky enough to get permission to use the knowledge and solutions from their time at the company for improving their own tool. It improved performance among adding other functionality. Their other project (that was still only quite a recent venture) was on video processing tools. I admit I switched off a bit here, but the chapter thumbnails looked very impressive.
- There was a talk on one studio's approach to stylised rendering. Using the Goo Engine (a crazy Blender spin off that focuses on improving the experience and available features for 2D style rendering, but still using the 3D tools and renderer) they showed how they solved many of the technical challenges presented by their stylistic choices. From the usual joys of camera framing and replicating anime style expressions and exaggerations (often with comical or creepy results when shown from the 3D/non-camera side) to rocks. They talked about the challenges of lighting, shading, and shadows. How some things can be solved with tools or in production, and others are easier to fix by exporting various render passes separately and adding 'traditional' post processing to create effects or improve the feel.
- This tied nicely into another great showcase (though not from Blender Con xd) called Project Gold. It was the recently cancelled Blender Studio project. It was a brave attempt to use (pure guessing here) procedural material generation, the latest grease pencil tools and features, and 3D tools to produce a completely 'hand drawn' animation. The 3D models only provided structure and motion. All the materials were drawn on with grease pencil or procedurally generated. You never really saw anything rendered (purely) by the 3D engine. There was a particularly cool segment where the power of procedural materials (probably using the geometry and shader node pipeline) and grease pencil combined to quickly and easily produce a fragment effect (like cracked porcelain). It was very cool and a shame that they couldn't continue and realise it into a complete release.
- Finally there was Ton's talk. He is just an incredible person and continues to make Blender a shining star in the face of so many other competing solutions and businesses (and even within the sector/industry generally). Blender (Foundation) continues towards an organisational model that can thrive even without Ton. The new structure did give me OpenAI vibes... but I know the software's open source nature, and success and innovation stemming from the open community, should protect it from the greedy tendrils of capitalism. Its interesting to see Blender's donation and income be compared to other similar organisations and projects, hopefully their new efforts and strategies to be polite but firm will increase the number of people supporting their work.
UI
There is actually still one last thing that was really cool (and connects neatly into the lecture) and thats the UI talk by both the Blender team and Blender Guru.
It was that time again where the euphoria of a new and improved UI fades. Blender Guru talked about accessibility and usability, presenting 3 problems and potential solutions that could subtly improve the experience, but save individuals, teams, and the community many many hours of frustration or save time on common simple, repetitive, tasks. He also referenced/mentioned talking to the UI team about all of this and how open they were to the feedback. It was less about disagreeing these were problems or valid solutions and more just not having the capacity to fully assess, implement, and test them. There was a callout at the end for the UI, UX, and graphic design skilled people to contribute to the project with mockups using Figma or applying to work for, or be paid for contributions to, blender.
Thus the next stop was the UI team's talk, breaking down all the changes and work achieved over the past year. From a unified and public SVG icon library (it used to all just sit on one big file!) to tweaks to various components (including a revision of possible modals) and a big overhaul of how pop-out and split view windows behave and are managed. They also talked about community input and the big shift in thinking this year was writing up and publishing Blender's Human Computer Interaction guidelines. Now every developer can make their plugin, extension, and app feel native and seamless. To useish their words 'why make plugins and extensions from the community feel so out of place in the Blender ecosystem when we can empower developers with the tools and knowledge to make the experience better for the user' creating one big unified Blender experience and community (rather than a mess of different interfaces and design principles).
Concluding Remarks
Listening to the lecture I realised a connection between the work the guest was describing they did at Microsoft, the methodologies anyone can use to practice and implement better UX, and Blender's own journey to develop and improve its UI.
Putting the user first, being open to new ideas and novel solutions, being aware of opportunities and easy wins, recognising a team's resource or control limits, were all things that Microsoft, Blender, and even the industry were doing or moving towards.
There was a world not even a decade and a half ago where designers were underpaid, undervalued, and often an afterthought. Today teams and organisations understand how these principles of design feed into and improve outcomes across departments. From better feature descriptions, to more usable products (and therefore increased sales); UX is a vital part of any process software or not and something I will have to spend more time considering as part of where I want to go in life.
Sorry for the long post. I'll be back soon with more life related updates! Exciting projects to come too.