Since the beginning of the year we as a team of developers started meeting 1-2 times a month talking about UX design. Urged with a motivation to create better software for our clients and serve them better I started the conversation inside our company. Years ago I read classics like Alan Cooper’s The Inmates and Don Norman’s The Psychology of Everyday Things. They left me with a craving to create something more fitting for users but I had no place where to start. At the turn of the year I focused on learning as much as I can about UX, product design and design in general. Here’s my list of insights I gained in these 6 months (in no particular order):
- doing UX means changing the culture and mindset of the whole company from technology to people
- nothing beats exposure to real users in their contexts (source)
- contextual observation and interviews are key and the most profitable and motivating method to find out more about your users
- analytics and data can tell you more about what user do, interviews why are they doing it
- in the enterprise context where we are it is sometimes difficult if not impossible to gain access to users
- some methods from UX feel a bit squishy and the value of doing them not apparent
- traditional (UX) designers have a hard time talking about the value of UX for the business
- the definition of UX is all including at best and inconsistent at worst, but it doesn’t really matter to me as I want to improve the software we write regardless of what it is called or which responsibility it is
- in order to craft a better user experience our development process has to change drastically
- the creative method (observe, reflect, make) is a way to order my concepts about UX
- users behave differently in different situations, the better way to capture that is jobs to be done not persona
- the UI layer is where experiments are made, therefore it should be changed more easily than other parts
- assumptions are very dangerous, trying to validate or falsify them
- you have to live with assumptions, know their risk
- conversations are the way to spread knowledge, not documentation and not presentations
- let users or stakeholders talk, do not complete thoughts for them, get comfortable with silence
- the user has a whole different view of your UI than you
- I have to learn to suspend judgement
- ask why but not endlessly
- the struggling moments of your users are the best points to start for a better solution
- understand the problem, the context and the user’s motivations better
- requirements are liars
- use whiteboards more, they help me to think spatially
- if you cannot argue for a design, the client overruns you with his taste
- think in systems, systems of people and design systems
- small usability improvements are easy and therefore we often tend to flock to them
- conversations with people are hard therefore we tend to avoid asking the hard and important questions
In future posts I will write in more detail about each of the points.
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