1. UX 101 sneak peek #3: UX research and the power of empathy

    Just one week left to get “early bird” tickets to UX 101, register online now!.

    Our goal with User Experience 101 is to help you start creating great user experiences.

    We believe that engaging with your users through research is essential to building empathy and designing user-centered applications.

    By thinking about research in terms of empathy, rather than specific methods or approaches, we can keep our focus on what is most important—understanding our users. Some techniques that we’ve found helpful for developing empathy through research…

    • “Be good.” Paul Graham, who has advised many successful startups through Y Combinator, urges designers and developers to “Make something people want.” That’s exactly what user experience designers try to do. Graham notes that this perspective can help inspire and focus: “But the most important advantage of being good is that it acts as a compass… Do whatever’s best for your users. You can hold onto this like a rope in a hurricane, and it will save you if anything can. Follow it and it will take you through everything you need to do.”
    • Design for real people, not abstractions. Many organizations get stuck in a mindset of thinking about their users as abstract categories like “salespeople” or “photographers.” It’s incredibly difficult to design an elegant, effective product for an abstraction. Instead, strive to ground your design process in detailed understanding of real customers. To test how connected you are to real customers, challenge yourself (or your team) to give an example of a real user for your product or service. Not an example of a type of user — but an example of an actual person who uses and cares about your product.
    • Get outside the building. Lean Startup advocates like Steve Blank challenge developers, product managers, and marketers to “get outside the building.” Sadly, most product teams are locked inside the building — speculating about customer needs, instead of actually investigating them. Blank calls for “customer discovery,” a term we like because most design teams need to discover much more detail and context about their users.
    • Embrace qualitative insights. User research is fundamentally qualitative, because we’re interested in understanding people’s needs, goals, tasks, motivations, behaviors, and context. In most cases these can’t be quantified. So one challenge for people new to user experience perspectives is to become comfortable with qualitative research and insights. Qualitative methods include interviews, open-ended survey questions, contextual inquiry, participant observation, and usability testing. Cindy Alvarez, a product manager focused on user experience, gives some nice examples of the types of questions a user experience researcher would ask in an interview, and the insights such an inteview would provide.

    Ready to start engaging with your users through user experience research? Join us.

    Early-bird discounted pricing expires on August 16th!

    Register online today at http://ux101.eventbrite.com/, discounts are available for students, anyone currently looking for work, and others.

    In a future sneak peek, we’ll discuss one more perspectives on user experience we’ve found helpful…

    • Design is about CLARITY.

    Stay tuned!

    jacksonfox  /  1 year ago  /  Notes