UX on the Go

A Flexible Guide to User Experience Design

Andrew Mara

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000164015
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Commerce
• Subtopic: Comptabilité financière

Designed with flexibility and readers' needs in mind, this purpose driven book offers new UX practitioners succinct and complete intructions on how to conduct user research and rapidly design interfaces and products in the classroom or the office.

With 16 challenges to learn from, this comprehensive guide outlines the process of a User Experience project cycle from assembling a team to researching user needs to creating and veryifying a prototype. Practice developing a prototype in as little as a week or build your skills in two-, four-, eight-, or sixteen-week stretches. Gain insight into individual motivations, connections, and interactions; learn the three guiding principles of the design system; and discover how to shape a user's experience to achieve goals and improve overall immediate experience, satisfaction, and well-being.

Written for professionals looking to learn or expand their skills in user experience design and students studying technical communication, information technology, web and product design, business, or engingeering alike, this accessible book provides a foundational knowledge of this diverse and evolving field.

A companion website will include examples of contemporary UX projects, material to illustrate key techniques, and other resources for students and instructors. Access the material at uxonthego.com.

1 Take an Active User Experience Stance

For the things we have to learn before we can do them, we learn by doing them, for example, men become builders by building and lyre players by playing the lyre; so too we become just by doing just acts, temperate by doing temperate acts, brave by doing brave acts. Aristotle, Book II, Nicomachean Ethics.

Do, Observe, Think

The most critical shift for conducting UX research on the go is an attention shift from words to action. A working assumption in conducting UX research is that people are engaged in meaningful activity, even if the people you are observing and conversing with aren’t aware of what that activity explicitly means to others. Many human subjects researchers believe that cognition, cogitation, and meaning are the most important things to collect human data about, but UX researchers need to challenge these assumptions and to take an action-first approach so that whatever data presents itself is considered and collected before researchers or user participants interfere with their own prescriptive thoughts about what should happen. To put action first, UX researchers should immediately look for ways to invite users into the research, and pay particular attention to the way that users act and react to their environment. In order to get to user actions quickly, we are going to borrow Dave Gray’s 3D (Do, Discover, Design) method,¹ and turn it into our heuristic to uncover patterns of user interactions. Rather than wait for an ideal scenario to interact with users, UX designers either precipitate action with willing users or find where users are already interacting in public spaces (or willingly and conspicuously sharing their interactions in semipublic spaces) (Figure 1.1).

Figure 1.1 Do, Observe, Think.

UX Researchers shouldn’t wait for a grand invitation from their employers or the convening of a user research convention. Instead, you are going to earn your own UX Research Merit Badge by venturing out and finding where your users are already willing to share insights to make their interactions better, or communicate with users who want to share their insights to make their interfaces and world better. From these user and researcher interactions, we can then observe the shifts that occur. When people respond (or don’t), UX researchers carefully note and document even seemingly insignificant changes. The interact-and-learn method necessitates careful intervention, alertness after the initial activity, and a commitment to quick and action-oriented documentation to plan out your next move—documentation is really just a form of reflection and preparation for the next action.

Fortunately, User Experience (UX) Researchers and Designers have a wide range of design and documentation forms—like heuristic markups, personas, and findings reports—to capture what is happening and to plan next steps. Furthermore, UX Researchers and Designers have workarounds to simplify complex user research practices through contextual observation, research hunts, and usability testing in order to rapidly sharpen the focus of the research team and bring definition to what can initially seem very vague. The wide range of UX documentation genres and research practices can help UX Teams immerse themselves in the social practices that might bridge data to people who can do something with that data. At the core of UX is observation of patterns, and UX can lend a hand in quickly capturing what emerges from the provocations. Once the researcher captures a set of interactions that were either initiated or affected by our participation, the UX team can think about what has happened, and make more advised future actions. From the first cycle of Doing/Observing/Thinking, the researcher scan continue to clarify where in the larger insights the UX project might be most effectively built into potential interfaces. The researchers will participate in, observe, and document several cycles of activity to create a more intuitive, felt sense of what kind of user groups might coalesce around, and better craft a project interface (or set of interfaces) that will help the users accomplish goals that matter to them.

Just Temperate Brave Action

Aristotle’s statement in Book II of the Nicomachean Ethics about becoming “just by doing just acts, temperate by doing temperate acts, brave by doing brave acts” can help you plot your UX Design Cycle. An action-first plan necessitates that each action forward be steeped in right action. As you design a better world one interface at a time, you need to understand both the good and the harm that each action can precipitate, and to take precautions to ensure that each action contributes to the good and minimizes the harm. You are not designing to solve a static problem for everyone and for all time, but are instead trying to help particular users in particular contexts. As a consequence, each time you formulate a next action, the community and context should help dictate what you decide. For UX professionals, it can seem like a contradiction to base your action on shifting notions of justice, temperance, and bravery; however, because each interface you design has the potential to magnify actions by many multiples over time, the actions that lead up to these interfaces should be saturated with a just, temperate, and brave approach. The courage you show in approaching user communities with an openness will result in truer responses from users. The temperance you act with in gaining and maintaining consent from the individuals and communities you seek to interact with will magnify the needs and thoughts of those who will ultimately implement the solutions that emerge. The justice you enact in your interactions and interfaces will help your users build the better world that we all live in.

How can you enact these broad and sometimes difficult-to-define concepts of justice, temperance, and courage? Karla Holloway provides three additional measures of these in her book Private Bodies, Public Texts: Race,² Gender, and a Cultural Bioethics to locate a beginning of justice.

• Beneficence—benefitting those you are interacting with
• Nonmaleficence—doing no harm to those who are participating
• Autonomy—recognizing the independent right of users and others participants to exercise control over their choices

A UX action-first approach demands recognition that the research and design be based on benefit of those it involves, avoiding harm to those same people, and interactions that recognize the rights of all participants. Justice comes from the recognition of these, and gets layered into the context that you are trying to change with your design. Justice goes beyond these three concepts, which focus largely on the individual—to recognize that the context you and your Team are operating in has its own history of inequality and injustice. Fortunately, you are in the business of making things better, so center yourself in the immediate context of what you are doing to those around you, and learn the history of the groups and communities you will be impacting as you go through the UX Cycle.

UX Team Justice Manifesto

One of the exercises that you can use to make sure your Team’s approach to UX does more than merely avoid evil is to create your own Justice Manifesto. As you get ready to build your UX Team, it is important to investigate ways of articulating what you believe and will do to make the world a better place for others. A good place to start would be to investigate what your company or organization already believes and declares as their set of values. If you are at a school, do they have a charter or set of guiding principles? Is there an Institutional Research Board that reviews all research protocols? Where do these policies or values come from? It is likely that some of the principals that you find emerged from the Belmont Report,³ which was published in 1979 to codify the principles of respect for persons, beneficence, and justice. This report helped shine a spotlight on some of the harmful research that was carried out on vulnerable populations like minors, prisoners, and communities of color. Withholding beneficial medicine from patients with painful diseases without their knowledge and inflicting psychological and physical harm upon unsuspecting individuals were among the studies that were approved by respected industrial, governmental, medical, and educational institutions. These practices—which can more easily be carried out today with the use of DIY DNA testing, mail-order inexpensive lab equipment, and the fast pace of innovation—make it all the more important that you create your own Justice map and compass. Take some time on the front end to articulate what you will do to ensure that your work makes the world more just. Point to other statements that articulate what you believe make up the constituent parts of this manifesto. Are there passages in sacred texts? Are there organizations that embody these principles? Do characters from fiction or history best articulate these principles? Write these down, boil them down, and post them where you can always see them at work (Figure 1.2).

Figure 1.2 A University Charter is a type of Justice Manifesto.

UX Project Plan

Every journey can benefit from a map. Before you can map your user’s journey, it’s important for you to create a map for you and your team to meet users, learn from their actions and thoughts, get to know their history and perspective, and to collaborate with them as a way of improving their experience with products. While it may be tempting to just start on the journey and see where it takes you, it’s important to prepare yourself for the time care it will take to meet your users, get to understand their history and community, to carefully observe them, and to work with your team to ascertain potential interface improvements. A UX Project Plan is a written record of where you plan to go, who is going on the journey with you, and what you believe will happen on that journey. The plan is necessarily speculative, but shouldn’t be a wild fantasy. You are going to take best guesses, while trying to be as pessimistic as possible about the amount of effort and time it will take. It is much easier to get permission on the front end to take time and care (and ask for resources) than it is to go back to your supervisor and ask for more time and money over and over. It is typical for people to frame plans around best-case scenarios, so don’t be surprised when it takes twice or three times as long to perform particular activities. Even Nobel-winning psychologist and behavioral economist Daniel Kahneman wildly underestimated the time it would take to create projects (and he was one of the researchers who uncovered just how often we do this). For this reason, it is extra important to be the adult in the room and build contingencies and slip dates into your plans.

In order to host a UX Project Plan, you will need something to write on and with, and some time to think about contingencies. Involve as many members of the team as you feel comfortable with, but don’t feel like you have to have anyone beyond the core of people you trust (or yourself). This is a map for the process, and it should be useful to everyone who is participating.

Participants: One–four people (can be more)
Time: 90+ synchronous minutes
Materials:

• Something to individually write with (word processing software, or an online sketch tool like Google Jamboard, Sketchpad, or mural.co)
• Something to write on (word processing software)

Group Roles: Group Scribe, Group Leader, Group Sketcher

Step 1: Write Down the Goals of the Project (Five Minutes)

Before you can map out the project, take five minutes to articulate the goal(s) for the project. These goals should be user-focused. Be as specific as practica...