Articles of Note
“The benefits of Lean UX are not limited to next-generation product teams. The drive to reduce both technical and design debt, transfer knowledge across teams, improve performance, and ship user-centered products has become a shared value across our organization. By broadening the application of Lean principles to disciplines that in the past might have been seen as bottlenecks — such as UX design — our team-wide collaborative approach has helped drive Lean outcomes.”
by Sarah McGuyer (@sara_mc)
“Graffiti walls are a great method to try if you have existing events that bring your audience together. For example, I once used this method at homecoming events for a university who wanted to gather research about alumni perspectives. It’s also helpful in places that might be difficult to observe or directly interact with people, like in health care settings … It can also be helpful when you want to stretch your research budget. Because it’s so simple and cost effective, you can reach additional people without breaking the bank.”
by Tomer Sharon (@tsharon)
“You only have one chance to make a great first impression. Adoption metrics provide you with solid data and wisdom about that first impression from the perspective of your audience. Adoption metrics are behavioral, unbiased, and actionable. They are extremely helpful for large-scale data analysis and uncover an important aspect of the user experience.”
“It’s hard to make time for critical strategic work, including live user/customer interviews. Today’s dumpster fires distract us from investments in tomorrow. But building the wrong thing is 100% waste, and picking product direction without objective research invites us to build the wrong things.”
by Jake Knapp (@jakek)
“Decide in advance whether the goal is launching or practicing. And be honest, because it’s very hard to keep hackathon projects alive, and very frustrating to be told something has a chance to launch only to watch it go nowhere. If you decide to make it practice, do what Laura did and be very clear at the beginning, and remind people over and over: This is practice. The point is to flex our experimentation muscles.”
Worth Another Read
“Writing reports is a part of what we do as designers, but it’s not an end to itself — just as an architect’s job isn’t complete when the blueprints are finalized. The exciting part is realizing that just as an architect’s job doesn’t start when the blueprints are being drafted, there is far more to an interaction designer’s job than writing specifications. What can we do as designers to achieve results that are better—faster, more vivid, more malleable, more effective — than pounding out a 279-page specification?”
Conference Redux
UX Scotland had its usual mix of great speakers and interesting sessions this year. We think you may find these of especial interest:
We’d recommend you take a look at the other sessions too.
Something for You To Watch
(Lukas Vermeer, 25 mins)
“It’s a little bit ironic that this idea of no higher value opinions and no centralised decision making is actually made possible by having this centralised experimentation system. By centralising the data flows, by centralising where these decisions are gathered, it is possible to then empower people to make those decisions independently because everyone can see what data was gathered. Everyone trusts that that data is correct and everyone can see what decisions were made and so it’s actually the centralisation of all of this information that helps us decentralise the decision making itself.”
(Mariah Hay, 25 mins)
“It might be obvious as to why ethics are important in the medical industry and engineering … the whole life / death thing is kind of a no brainer … but what about when the consequences aren’t so black and white? What happens when we problem finders and problem solvers start to create problems for the consumers of our solutions? What are our ethical responsibilities?”
(Brad Cooper, 23 mins)
“When companies don’t take the time to define what they mean by innovation they end up running programs that don’t have a clear direction or sense of what they are trying to achieve … The problem in managing innovation arises because companies don’t understand the differences in levels of uncertainty at different time horizons of the product lifecycle. To innovate effectively, you have to be able to differentiate between the known and unknown problems you are trying to solve, and adjust your operations accordingly.”
Upcoming Events
Responsive Conference 2018, 24-25 September, New York
Lean Startup Basics - How To Compile a Lean Canvas, 25 September, London
Leading Innovation & the Silence Experiment, 27 September, New York
Product Innovation Summit, 27-28 September, Boston
EuroIA, 27-29 September, Dublin
Industry, 1-3 October, Ohio
Business of Software USA, 1-3 October, Boston
Global Scrum Gathering, 8-10 October, London
The Advanced Lean Startup Workshop, 11-12 October, Paris
MWUX, 11-13 October, Chicago
Agilia Budapest, 15-17 October, Budapest
World Usability Congress, 17-18 October, Graz
Leading the Product, 18 October, Melbourne
Mind the Product, 18-19 October, London
Leading the Product, 23 October, Sydney
How to Achieve Product-Market Fit, 24 October, San Francisco
Agile in the City: Bristol, 7-9 November, Bristol (10% off with code Adrian)
DesignOps Summit, 7-9 November, New York
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