Get Into UX

While external consultants and designers can empathise by bringing people into workshops, nothing beats the combination of strategic workshops and deep-rooted insights from appropriate user research efforts

Design Thinking

Great for: jam-packed workshops to get ideas flowing, driving a human-centred approach and employing empathy to advocate for the end-user needs. Design thinking workshops build momentum around rapid innovation and solution-oriented delivery.

Google Design Sprints
Google’s design sprint method can be good for a jam packed workshop that only allows a few days to outline and quickly test potential innovative solutions

7-8. In this case, you could test your prototype remotely or in person. Let’s say that you ran an ethnographic deep dive in person. Then you’d want to continue by running the tests in a similar way

6. You can probably already think of ways to ideate and solve those three issues we’ve uncovered. That’s exactly what you should do next, given you and your team know enough to proceed. Once you ideate, prioritise, design and come up with a prototype, you’d want to test it.

3-5. In my experience almost all businesses looking for UX help will think that the issue is with the tool usability and/or its look and feel. They will even go to depths to unpack the underlying quantitative data, make significant assumptions and ultimately end up at the point they started. That’s because they look at the data but don’t understand the why’s.

2. From there, you might want to outline the variance in general usage of the app by uncovering more insights about users’ attitudes. For the sake of an example, let’s imagine that those hundreds of lab technicians are located in various countries around the world, and you decide to gather their input via an email survey. This is where you’d want to craft good enough questions to cover as much ground as possible so it can inform the next steps

1. As a designer, you might start by looking at existing quantitative data. In this case, it could be the data that business stakeholders have already captured through the Google Analytics they had connected to the app. They also might have some unstructured anecdotes, qualitative (but often incomplete) insights, and assumption-driven hypotheses from before

Happy paths are user journeys that outline the ideal steps users would take to fulfil their tasks without issues. Unhappy paths cover the exceptions, errors, unexpected issues in your product. For example, a happy path for a user could be to buy postage stamps using an online app, and unhappy path in this case might be the steps user would have to take if they couldn’t access the app (no internet or the servers are down) so they have to go to the post office or use an alternative service to buy stamps. Another example is if they needed a special stamp that they can’t purchase through your app. It is important for UX designers to focus on the unhappy paths as much as the happy ones

Goals: Always identify the goal of the project before diving in. Why does the business need a user-centric approach and the deep insights that only user research can uncover?
Evidence: Given the grand goals that the business has, what is presumed right now? What evidence do stakeholders have? What are the high-level hypotheses that can inform your research plan? What sounds right and what does not? Take anything the business states as a given with a massive spoonful of salt as businesses are rarely right about their customers or users – that’s precisely why they need your UX help.
Cost & timeframe: While you want to research the product or service space continuously and endlessly, you often need to determine the minimum amount of research needed to inform the next steps due to costs and timeframes. While time and cost awareness deserves its own book, I usually advise juniors to work backwards from the goals and outcomes in order to pick the appropriate methods, activities and otherwise set pace for the research effort.
Users: Target the right audience involved in the current experience and outline who the new user experience will be for. Consider who the users are and how you will find them– you wouldn’t want to design without research or to do the research on the wrong subjects. The availability of said users – admin and planning to get access to them – can be time-consuming so it’s important that it’s not overlooked.
People behaviours vs attitudes: the division here does not mean that you must pick one or the other. You need to cover both. Business stakeholders usually have some notion of their users’ attitudes and only a hunch about their real-life behaviours.
Quant vs qual: as with the previous point, the “vs” represents division, not a choice between the two. A lot of designers start with quant and follow up with qual. In practice, that’s a good enough general approach for beginners. Still, as you grow into authentic UX specialist shoes, you’ll need to be able to both drive with quantitative measures (where necessary), as well as do research for qualitative insights to truly understand the depth of issues.