UX Camp Brighton 2016

The First 30 Seconds: Let’s Talk User Onboarding

By Andrea Saez @dreasaez

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 e.g. - numbered steps to engage the user
• Prodpad 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 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 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

Initiating UX Through Resistance

By Gultekin Irengun @mgirengun

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

0. Customer snapshot: survey with Google Docs - leveraging customer service knowledge
1. Company meetings: presenting UX standpoint - achieve shared understanding across the team and company
2. 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

• 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

Iterative Personas

By Adrian Howard @adrianh

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

0. 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

0. Define rules - visualizing ongoing research - leads to product decisions and prototypes - prompts further questions
1. 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

Practical Analytics Tips

By Luke Hay @hayluke

0. Reasons to use google Analytics

• easy to setup
• documented
• free

0. gachecker.com - checks whole website for tracking
1. Filter out spam/bots traffic

• google doing well to filter this out
• filter out unwanted spam
• link to follow see slides

0. 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

0. Most visited pages - quality vs quantity
1. Bounce vs Exits - see diagram - don]t confuse the touchpoint
2. Analyze the user/behavior flow - better ways to view bigger sites
3. Tracking in-page elements - what visitors do on the page - carrousels
4. Goals:

• What is a goal - e.g. signing up for a newsletter
• Goal reports - device analysis
• Goal values

0. Page value - calculate the value of each page see slide
1. Page value formula
2. Calculate leakage

• sum see slide
• prompt changes to user journey

0. Device specific issues

• page performance
• testing page

0. Heat mapping - user behavior and intent e.g. unclickable links = more information needed
1. Scroll mapping - where the focus is on the page
2. Compare the competition - benchmarking against other sites
3. How users arrive - e.g. social, email, direct etc
4. Prove your hypothesis - back up the ideas … or not.
5. A/B testing
6. Identify user groups - e.g. segment age groups
7. Automate some of your reports - automated email
8. Customise your reports - easy access
9. Use it often - better insight

View Luke’s slides

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

• 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

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

Recap

0. Image compelte failure
1. Generate reasons for failure
2. Themes and prioritise
3. 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

How To Ask Better Questions From Asking Better Questions

By Chris How @chrishow

What makes a good question?

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

0. Ends in a question mark

• who?
• why?
• what?
• when?
• how?

0. Has a purpose

• what do they want to get out of the session?
• what’s the hypothesis?

0. Gives insight that is actionable - cash for answers
1. Opens up a conversation

• closed questions - yes or no answers
• clarification if fine
• don’t constrain the answers

0. Neutral and free of bias

• charged words e.g. “do you think”, “would you agree”, “tell me about about our new and exciting designs”

0. It’s interesting

• it’s a tiring process
• omit useless questions

0. Is short

• avoid “and”, commas, to many words >12 words should be trimmed lesses understanding of question

0. Can be answered

• “what do you do…” rather than “what would you do…”

View Chris’ slides

View all the UX Camp Brighton 2016 sessions