UX Camp Brighton 2016

Notes from UX Camp Brighton 2016 sessions

The First 30 Seconds: Let’s Talk User Onboarding

By Andrea Saez @dreasaez{:target="_blank"}

Onboarding

  • Not a perfect artform
  • Goal to create a successful product + engaged user
  • Fails when the user didn’t understand the value of the product
  • Design the behavior
  • Commit early
  • Figure out the blockers
  • Examine the outcomes
  • Slack as an example as success … but you’re not Slack and your app does more than that

Give them something to focus on

  • Shopify{:target="_blank"} e.g. - numbered steps to engage the user
  • Prodpad{:target="_blank"} case study
    • cohort analysis (time form trial to conversion)
    • conversion times 6-10 weeks » 4-6 weeks with onboarding changes
    • drip flow emails to increase product engagement
    • start with the first 30 seconds
    • understanding the why of the tasks (user)
  • 3 click rule: no more than that results in difficult to learn the IA

Open discussion

  • Anchor.fm - short audio messaging
  • Users are impatient
  • Tictail{:target="_blank"} onboarding: tasks - suggested text + t+c to move the user through the onboarding process quicker
  • Adding friction: increase commitment and value by adding friction where it makes sense
  • Feature bloat: Appcues{:target="_blank"} case study.
    • aggressive onboarding
    • understanding tasks
    • through this you gain a better understanding what features your users actually need
    • what problem are you trying solve?
  • Help mechanisms:
    • videos
    • demos
    • text
    • lots of different solutions
    • you are not your market!
    • assume the user always knows less
    • users don’t read
  • Pace of onboarding: it depends on the user e.g. service provider/consumer contexts might require slower/quicker more/less speed or friction

View Andrea’s slides{:target="_blank"}

Initiating UX Through Resistance

By Gultekin Irengun @mgirengun{:target="_blank"}

How to integrate UX into an established product?

Friction and blockers

  • Legacy code
  • CEO doesn’t know/understand UX
  • Budgets
  • Delays
  • Methods for CEO buy-in
  • UX != visual design
  • Testing iterations = time
  • Business time and customer barriers
  • You can be the only UX team member - cross over skills

Three opportunities and resources

  • Usability tests
  • Product research
  • Business priorities
  1. Customer snapshot: survey with Google Docs - leveraging customer service knowledge
  2. Company meetings: presenting UX standpoint - achieve shared understanding across the team and company
  3. Customer service: collaborative design - different customer touchpoint - what about conflict with marketing? less so with software design but might occur with the marketing site
  • UX team is the 1st to understand the customers goals are
  • Different objectives
  • Feed back into the business
  • Goal design - feature requests

Legacy code

  • Roadblocks to improvements
  • Need of a product owner
  • Utilize the scrum master and project manager
  • Start a conversation with the the project owner - get them to engage with UX
  • UX into scrum - UX sprint 2 weeks prior to any development
  • Mock ups and mid-fidelity (axure etc) prototypes to help understand the workings
  • Angular templating framework to inject new code and UX into a legacy UI

Flowcharts, Personas and a Love Story

By Natalia Rey @mikitcha{:target="_blank"}

  • Use consistent patterns
  • Reviewing the overall interaction design: highlights user goals - justify the changes
  • Problem based on customer complaints: direct

Users have different motives

  • Motivation - Feelings
  • Framing - Thinking
  • Behaviour - Doing

Questions

  • Development engagement and buy-in
  • Think into the situations
  • Appropriate user persona e.g. motivations etc? Aligned with the business and collaborative process
  • Testing the motivation? Done during the user research stage

View Natalia’s slides{:target="_blank"}

Iterative Personas

By Adrian Howard @adrianh{:target="_blank"}

How do we understand out customers?

  • Twitter for cats: point of reference different for all teams - no shared understanding = a bad customer experience
  • UX solution is the persona: deliverable - helps with empathy - good for generating ideas - shared understanding + happy customer

Persona Problems

  • Presented as truth: customer’s needs change over time
  • Large investment of time and money and people
  • Good understanding of customer base
  • Out of date persona deliverable
  • Products change over time and outgrow the personas

“Personas are to Persona Descriptions as Vacations are to Souvenir Picture Albums” - Jared Spool

The photo album is not the same as the holiday experience.

Lean Iterative Persona

  1. Define: initial alignment - who are we building it for - customer touch - empathy maps Dave Gray - shared understanding
  • Apply a “made shit up” «» “true” scale - have conversations - surface the details - get stability - push “true” point of reference
  • Add structure - sift through the details - used with empathy maps
  • Visualizing the customer - supporting details to further the character and motives of the customer - e.g. gender - more research
  1. Define rules - visualizing ongoing research - leads to product decisions and prototypes - prompts further questions
  2. Realign - split and merge personas
  • Communicates risk and confidence, not truth - start with the simpler routes and decisions
  • Whole team commits
  • Buy-in

Summing Up

  • Early alignment
  • Scale up with truth
  • Add rules
  • Step back

Questions

  • Hypothisis about users, customere and product features
  • Go for the truth straight away

View Adrian’s slides{:target="_blank"}

Practical Analytics Tips

By Luke Hay @hayluke{:target="_blank"}

  1. Reasons to use google Analytics
  • easy to setup
  • documented
  • free
  1. gachecker.com{:target="_blank"} - checks whole website for tracking
  2. Filter out spam/bots traffic
  • google doing well to filter this out
  • filter out unwanted spam
  • link to follow see slides
  1. Find out about your users
  • international visits
  • demographics (newish)
  • from adword data
  • interesting when combined with other data e.g. gender split of visitors
  • analyze changes
  1. Most visited pages - quality vs quantity
  2. Bounce vs Exits - see diagram - don]t confuse the touchpoint
  3. Analyze the user/behavior flow - better ways to view bigger sites
  4. Tracking in-page elements - what visitors do on the page - carrousels
  5. Goals:
  • What is a goal - e.g. signing up for a newsletter
  • Goal reports - device analysis
  • Goal values
  1. Page value - calculate the value of each page see slide
  2. Page value formula
  3. Calculate leakage
  • sum see slide
  • prompt changes to user journey
  1. Device specific issues
  • page performance
  • testing page
  1. Heat mapping - user behavior and intent e.g. unclickable links = more information needed
  2. Scroll mapping - where the focus is on the page
  3. Compare the competition - benchmarking against other sites
  4. How users arrive - e.g. social, email, direct etc
  5. Prove your hypothesis - back up the ideas … or not.
  6. A/B testing
  7. Identify user groups - e.g. segment age groups
  8. Automate some of your reports - automated email
  9. Customise your reports - easy access
  10. Use it often - better insight

View Luke’s slides{:target="_blank"}

Organizational Culture and UX Design

speaker unknown

  • Each culture is different
  • Communication map

Workshop objectives

  • 4 company culture types based on Competing Values Framework by Cameron & Quinn
  • (see slide diagram)
  • xy axis =
    • Adhocracy - values are to create something new - shy away from processes
    • Clan - create a good community - all-in meeting - avoid conflict - very slow
    • Hierarchy - focused on processes - top down
    • Market - externally focused - stable - e.g. Google, need to be iterative want to be first and best - need proof to validate this

Questions and discussion

  • We change our behavior when dealing with one of the above
  • Further Reading: Kim Goodwin’s presentation - competing values framework - communication techniques

The Project Pre-Mortem

By Tom Prior @tomprior{:target="_blank"}

  • Hindsight is a great things

  • How to avoid making the same mistakes?

  • Post-mortom - mitigate pitfalls

    • everyone benefits apart from the patient (project)
    • Inner-team conflict - uncomfotable -
    • Flushes out potential other problems (company culture)

  • Pre-mortem - from Gamestorming book - Gary Klein

    • Harnesses predicted faluire - improves 30%
    • Project is already a disaster

How it runs

  • All present involved in the Project
  • Include the client
  1. Frame the project
  2. Image complete disaster
  3. Generate reasons for failure - competition to find unfound ways of failure
  4. Theme and prioritise - focus on showstoppers or frequent problems - vote on themes (priority dot voting)
  5. Brainstorm solutions
  6. Agree actions - owner scrum master

Recap

  1. Image compelte failure
  2. Generate reasons for failure
  3. Themes and prioritise
  4. BrainstormAgree actions

Making course corrections - use retrospectives to route check and change tack

Benefits

  • Improves the odds of success
  • Encourages team work
  • Starts the project with a win

Questions & discussion

  • Client billing? Yes. More to maintain afterward.

View Tom’s slides{:target="_blank"}

How To Ask Better Questions From Asking Better Questions

By Chris How @chrishow{:target="_blank"}

What makes a good question?

Better questions move things forward - Einstein quote Questions are scary - senior

  1. Ends in a question mark
  • who?
  • why?
  • what?
  • when?
  • how?
  1. Has a purpose
  • what do they want to get out of the session?
  • what’s the hypothesis?
  1. Gives insight that is actionable - cash for answers
  2. Opens up a conversation
  • closed questions - yes or no answers
  • clarification if fine
  • don’t constrain the answers
  1. Neutral and free of bias
  • charged words e.g. “do you think”, “would you agree”, “tell me about about our new and exciting designs”
  1. It’s interesting
  • it’s a tiring process
  • omit useless questions
  1. Is short
  • avoid “and”, commas, to many words >12 words should be trimmed lesses understanding of question
  1. Can be answered
  • “what do you do…” rather than “what would you do…”

View Chris’ slides{:target="_blank"}

View all the UX Camp Brighton 2016 sessions{:target="_blank"}