BlogmyQuery – BMQ

Redesign. The word itself can send shudders down the spines of any Web designer and developer. For many designers and website owners, the imminent onslaught of endless review cycles, coupled with an infinite number of “stakeholders� and their inevitable “opinions,� would drive them to shave their heads with a cheese grater if given a choice between the two. Despite these realities, redesigns are a fact of any online property’s life cycle. Here are five key indications that it’s time to redesign your website and of how extensive that redesign needs to be.

Metrics Are Down

The first and most important indicator that your website is in need of a rethink is metrics that are beginning to tank. There certainly could be other reasons for this symptom (such as your product not fitting the market), but once those are eliminated or mitigated, a constant downward trend in conversions, sales, engagement activities and general user participation indicates that the efficacy of your current design has worn off. Many people call it “creative fatigue,� but what this really indicates is a disconnect with your audience. The key to solving this in the redesign is to figure out where in the workflow the design is breaking down and then address those areas as top priorities.

The metrics are the most important indicator.

The extent to which you redesign to solve sagging metrics could be limited either to adjusting your conversion funnel, if that’s where the problem resides, or to optimizing the product’s main workflow. It does not necessarily mean having to rethink the entire face that your product presents to the world.

Your Users Tell You It’s Time

Metrics give you immediate insight that something is wrong, but to get to the core of what needs to be addressed in the redesign you need to speak with your customers. Surveys work well, but usability testing is most effective. The fluidity of face-to-face conversation allows you to explore the dynamic threads that surveys restrict. If through these conversations you notice consistent patterns that shed light on the drivers behind your downward-trending metrics (and you will), then it’s time to redesign. In addition, these user conversations will reveal prevalent attitudes towards your brand, which can also be addressed in the redesign. In some instances, negative brand perception should be enough to trigger a redesign — but you’d never know about it unless you talk to your customers.

The final decisions are still up to you. (Image: Kristian Bjornard)

Customer feedback will tell you not only whether to rethink parts of your website, but to what extent. Typically, customer conversations focus on specific elements of your workflow. Those areas are the ones that the redesign should focus on. In most cases, this wouldn’t be the whole website, but if the feedback is broad and far-reaching, then tackling the entire experience may be a priority.

The Tech/UX “Debt� List Is Longer Than Your Forearm

Over the course of building a product or website, an organization begins to accrue tech and UX debt. This debt is made up of all the things you should have done during the initial build but either didn’t get around to or had to cut corners on in order to ship the product on time. Each subsequent iteration inevitably adds more debt to the list, until the list becomes so long that it is almost insurmountable. While there are many ways to tackle tech and UX debt on an incremental level, there comes a point when the website, in essence, becomes “totalled.� Like a car that has sustained damage greater in cost than its value, your website gets to the point where starting over would be cheaper than fixing all of the items on your debt list. This is a perfect time for a redesign.

When the debt list gets this long, taking on “incremental redesigns� is easy, where you knock off bits from the list but not the majority of it. This turns into death by a thousand paper cuts, because as you fix elements on the list, you start to accrue more debt around other features. If the list truly is longer than your forearm, then rethink the website if possible.

It Just “Looks� Old

The website’s aesthetic reflects directly on the perception and trustworthiness of your brand. Even if your design was the hotness when it first launched, aesthetics evolve. An old design will be detrimental to your product, leading to the declining metrics mentioned earlier. How can you tell whether your website’s aesthetic is outdated? Look at your competition. Look at hyped-up newly launched services in other sectors. Compare your aesthetics to those of brands that are performing well. Those factors provide excellent barometers by which to assess the currency of your design. The challenge is to review these other websites objectively. Living with your website day in and day out can amplify the feeling that it’s stale and old. Ensure that your assessment is accurate by reviewing your findings with a cross-section of employees in your company.

Decide on what to lose and what to add. (Image: Kristian Bjornard)

In this case, the redesign would essentially be a facelift, a superficial upgrade of the presentation layer that doesn’t necessarily address the fundamental workflow or conversion funnel — although those aspects will undoubtedly be affected by this aesthetic upgrade.

It’s Been More Than 12 Months Since Your Last Refresh

Even if none of the above indicators apply to your website, the shelf life of an aesthetic in today’s highly iterative online reality is hardly ever more than 12 months. If it’s been a year or longer since you last redesigned your website, then it’s time to redesign. Not only will it refresh the experience for your loyal customers, it will attract new ones. In addition, it will breathe life into the brand and show your user base, the press, your investors and staff that you’re committed to keeping the experience fresh and top of mind.

Again, the focus here is on an aesthetic improvement that keeps the brand current, not necessarily an overhaul.

In Conclusion

These are five simple indicators that it’s likely time to redesign your website, but the list is certainly not exhaustive. The number of them that apply to your situation will determine whether a redesign is imperative. But each indicator on its own is still a strong reason to kick off the next phase of your website’s life. Maintaining a current and fresh face for the online world will yield dividends in customer acquisition, conversion and retention. Also, your staff will stay immersed in the latest technologies, design trends and presentation-layer wizardry if they know that they’ll soon get to exercise their chops in a redesign.

What indicators have you found work best in your organization to drive a website redesign?

(Cover image: una cierta mirada)

(al)

© Jeff Gothelf for Smashing Magazine, 2011.

This is the first in a three-part series on how to build and grow successful user experience teams in agile environments. It covers challenges related to organization, hiring and integration that plague UX teams in these situations. The perspective is that of a team leader, but the tactics described can be applied to multiple levels in an organization.

Building any kind of agile team is a lengthy and challenging process. Building a user experience team within an agile organization challenges not only traditional design practices but typical design team dynamics. In this first part, we’ll look at the type of culture that would support a strong UX component in the agile process and how to structure the organization so that designers are most effective and are able to thrive.

Organizations Become Supportive Through Dialogue

Teams work together to celebrate their wins at weekly team-wide demos.

Critical to the success of any user experience team is an organization that values its contribution. This is not unique to agile shops, but it becomes even more critical given agile’s rapid cycle and participatory rituals. In a typical resource-allocation scenario, no more than one UX designer is assigned to a cross-functional (i.e. scrum) team. In fact, this scenario is usually optimistic. In some cases, a UX designer will be straddling more than one team. “Team� is the core concept of the agile philosophy, and as such it must include the designer as a core member.

Development managers need to set the expectation with their staff that design is critical to the team’s success. As you begin to build your UX practice in this environment, ensure that you have frequent conversations with these managers to review how their staffs are reacting to the addition of designers to their teams. These conversations will help anticipate issues that may hinder the cohesion of the scrum team. In addition, lessons from fixing one of these issues can be applied pre-emptively on other teams.

By the same token, it is incumbent on the UX designer, their corporate champion and team leader or builder to promote the values of the craft in the organization. Again, this is not unique to agile environments, but it is critical to keeping the team focused on core UX and design issues. Key to this promotion is transparency. Let the team into the designer’s world. Let them see what they do and how they do it, and let them experience the benefits that come from doing UX and design work. When all members of a cross-functional team can articulate the benefits of design activities such as,

• speaking with customers,
• understanding the business and competitive landscapes,
• constructing the information hierarchy,
• assessing visual communication,

then they will be far more inclined to carve out time for those activities in each iteration. Include the team in the actual design exercises. By practicing participatory design, the designer’s contribution will become evident, building their credibility and crystallizing team cohesion.

How To Structure The UX Team

Organizationally, there are essentially two ways to structure the UX team: as an internal agency of shared resources or by using a hub and spoke approach, with designers dedicated to specific teams.

Internal Agency Approach

Using the internal agency approach, incoming work is routed through a central point of contact (typically the UX manager) and then assigned to the designer who is best suited to the work and who has the bandwidth to take it on. The challenge with this approach is two-fold.

First, it promotes a culture of specialization in which designers limit their contribution to particular segments of the craft (for example, mobile, e-commerce, social experience design, etc.). Secondly, with no loyalty to the scrum team, priorities become driven by which product owner can yell the loudest, typically leaving the designer in the middle, awaiting the outcome to know where to focus. Additionally, this approach taxes the UX manager heavily by forcing them to constantly assess bandwidth, availability and applicability of skills to the required tasks, all while helping the product owners manage competing needs among the design staff.

Hub and Spoke Model

The hub and spoke model, on the other hand, is the better practice. Dedicate each designer exclusively to one particular scrum team. They should feel like they are a part of their scrum team and feel connected to that team’s focus. In doing so, the designer’s priorities become clear. Their priorities are synonymous with the team’s, thus enabling them to clearly understand where to expend their energy.

Asking for a designer’s input or effort on a “quick� project or “internal need� is a fairly common occurrence in many companies. It is incumbent on your organization’s leadership to protect the one designer or team structure, so that each team’s designer isn’t peppered with these ad hoc requests. Such requests distract the designer from their team’s mission and inevitably consume already limited capacity. In the eyes of the designer’s teammates, these efforts erode any progress that has been made in confirming the designer’s permanence on the team.

Working With The New Teams

New ways of working for designers will, at first, be uncomfortable. For many design managers, assigning their staff to particular teams brings a new challenge. No longer does the design manager dole out specific work to each person on the team. Instead, the designer’s daily agenda is driven by the prioritized backlog of the scrum team. This is a duty that managers were likely used to doing in the past, and its removal may feel like a reduction in responsibility and authority. To fill this potential void, design managers should work with their staff to understand their team’s priorities and suggest methods of structuring the work in a way that allows the best user experience to get built.

Weekly one-on-one meetings with each designer should reveal any challenges unique to their situation. In addition, regular touch points with each team’s product owner will provide insight into any design challenges on the horizon. And monthly high-level retrospective meetings become a forum for managers to share successful and failed tactics across the organization. With all of these tactics in place, the driving goal should be to solidify the designer’s place on each team.

Dedicating your staff to other teams does not portend the doom of the centralized user experience team. The centralized team is still very much needed for mentorship, professional development and general design support (such as critiques). In addition, a centralized UX practice can bring learning from the individual scrum teams back to the broader group, disseminating lessons that improve the process elsewhere.

The centralized UX team also serves as a “safe haven� for designers to vent their frustrations with the agile process, commiserate a bit with their colleagues and reassure themselves that they’re not alone in their agile UX challenges. Weekly UX team meetings are the building blocks of this community. Outings to design events, talks and recreational events help solidify the bond between distributed designers. A UX-only email distribution list or other forum could also provide this safe haven on an as-needed basis and supplement discussion outside of the regular meetings.

Conclusion

Company culture and staff organization are the two fundamental building blocks of agile and UX integration. By creating an environment that values design, promotes its benefits and spreads this gospel through the allocation of UX resources across individual teams, companies will lay the foundation for successful team-building and adoption of the agile process down the road.

In part 2 of the series, we’ll discuss why hiring is such a critical part of the agile UX team’s success and how to maximize your chances of hiring the most appropriate staff.

(al)

© Jeff Gothelf for Smashing Magazine, 2011.

Anyone designing Web-based properties today requires a basic understanding of interaction design principles. Even if your training is not formally in human-computer interaction, user experience design or human factors, knowing the fundamentals of these disciplines greatly enhances the chances of your design’s success. This is especially true for visual designers. Many visual designers are formally trained in art school and informally trained at interactive agencies.

While these institutions focus on designing communications, neither typically provides a strong interaction design foundation. Having a broader skill set not only makes your designs more successful but makes you more valuable and employable (i.e. you become the unicorn). While in no way exhaustive, to get you started, here are five key tactics to understand and implement in your next project.

Image credit: Kristian Bjornard

1. Talk To Your Customers

The most important thing to understand when designing an online experience is your audience. Understanding who they are, what they do for a living, how old they are, how they work, what they know about the Web, how they use it, on what devices, where and so on provides invaluable insight into their pain points that you are out to solve.

Setting clear constraints on your design also helps. For example, if your audience will predominantly be using mobile devices to access the Web in hospitals, then your design must be responsive to those devices and be compatible with the environments where the devices will be used. In addition, understanding your audience builds on a communication design foundation by revealing your users’ sensitivities (physical or cultural, for example) to things like color and typography.

Understanding your audience requires conversation with target users. These conversations can happen in a variety of forums. While impersonal approaches such as surveys work well enough, nothing beats face-to-face conversations with your customers. Depending on who you’re targeting with your work, finding your target audience may be as simple as going down to the local coffee shop, buying a handful of $5 gift cards and striking up conversations with the patrons there. Most people will gladly exchange 10 to 15 minutes of sharing their opinion for a coffee shop gift card. Other ways to find users are to post ads on websites like Craigslist, pull names off your customer lists, reach out to trade organizations (for specific user types, like nurses) and spend time in locations where your audience spends time (for example, music fans at a concert).

The initial conversations will be awkward, but as more and more take place, a rhythm develops to the questions. Also, patterns begin to emerge, allowing you to tailor the questions more appropriately with each interview. The lessons you take away from these activities can be used to create personas — i.e. aggregate representations of typical users of your design — that can help provide context to future design decisions.

A persona document. (Image: Todd Zaki Warfel)

2. Orient The User

Now that you’ve got an understanding of who your user is, orienting them when they use your design is important. Orienting your users gives them a sense of place in a non-static experience. To effectively provide that sense, your design should tell users three things:

1. Where they are
   Critical to any online experience is understanding where, in the broader context of the website, the user is currently transacting. If it’s clear to the user where they are, then there is a greater chance they’ll understand what you need them to do on that page. For example, if the user is aware they are on a “product page,� they should expect to see a purchase link and perhaps some other product options.
2. How they got there
   If providing clarity on the user’s current location provides context for expected actions, then showing them the path they took to get there provides a safety net. That safety net is the comfort of knowing that if the user has wound up in the wrong place, they can back out and try again.
3. Where they can go from here
   You’ve made it clear where they are and how they got there; if they are in the wrong spot they can backtrack and try another path. But if they’re ready to move forward or they believe the path back won’t provide the content they desire, then letting your users know what options are available from this point on is imperative. Never leave a user in a dead end. There should always be an option to proceed. A perfect example of this is a search results page that yields no results. While you should let the user know that nothing matches their search query, there should be options that lead them to the answers they seek (for example, related search terms). Ways forward can be manifested in your website’s navigation but can also be implemented as affordances. Affordances are elements in the interface that are obviously clickable, such as buttons and sliders.

Amazon does a good job with its no-results page.

(For a great primer on affordances, pick up Don Norman’s The Design of Everyday Things. While a bit dated, it lays a solid foundation for how product designers should think about their products.)

Clear website orientation provides comfort to users. It also reduces the chances that users will make mistakes and increases the chances that, when they do, they’ll be able to recover quickly.

3. Simpler Is Better

Visual designers are driven to add elements to a layout that may be aesthetically pleasing but don’t necessarily serve an interaction purpose. While certainly much is to be said for aesthetics adding to the polish and feel of an experience, when designing an interactive experience, consider opting for simpler design. Simplification means reducing the elements on the screen down to the most basic ones, the ones that will facilitate the task that the user has to complete. Start with that as a baseline, and then add ornamentation sparingly. Consider the brand of the website. The brand is a reflection not only of the aesthetic but of the experience. If a website is gorgeous, but its beauty makes completing a transaction impossible, then the website (and brand) will ultimately fail.

Aesthetics will always have a place and powerful purpose in any experience, yet ensuring that the experience is usable first is critical.

4. Design For A Dialog

Where visual design training focuses primarily on communication, interaction design puts a heavy focus on feedback loops — in essence, a conversation between the user and the website. As you work out an experience, provide ways for the system to communicate back to the user when they’ve done something right or wrong. Ensure that your experience makes clear when the user has succeeded and when an action is required to complete a transaction. Use your visual design and communication skills to build a visual language for this feedback dialogue. Ensure that no matter where the user is in the experience, any information that is coming from the website is consistent in design and presentation method. Different types of information will require different treatments. The user will learn the system quickly, and a dialogue with the website will begin to occur. In essence, you’re humanizing the experience (and the company behind it) by proactively predicting your users’ needs and presenting information and actions that mitigate user frustration.

Think Vitamin keeps the conversation going with its readers.

5. Workflow: Understanding The Before And After

Visual design is beautiful. It’s also static. Interaction design builds a workflow from page to page and from state to state. As you design each page, consider what the user can do on this page and how the next step in the process fits into the workflow. If you’ve just added a sign-up form to the page, think about what will happen when the user presses the “Submit� button. Will the page refresh? Will there be a confirmation page? What if there are errors in the form? What if the user hits the “Back� button? These are all components of the workflow of the experience. Each page or state is just one small component in the user’s click stream. The challenge is that each user might have a relatively unique click stream, depending on how they got to your website and why they came. You’ve used your knowledge of the user to orient them, and you’ve provided a simple interface that creates a successful dialogue with them: now ensure that each interaction has a logical next step. That next step should fit into the experience and visual language that you’ve created, so that the experience feels whole and consistent. These elements are what add credibility to the brand and increase users’ trust in your design.

Bonus Tip: Understand Your “Materials�

Jonathan Ive, designer of the iPod (among other things), promotes the idea that designers of all types must understand the material they’re working with. This hold true for interaction design as well. Understanding the “materials� that make up the Web is critical. A cursory education in HTML, CSS, JavaScript and related technologies will only enhance your understanding of the medium and provide a realistic perspective on your designs. A great resource for this is the group of developers who will be implementing your work. Strike up regular conversations with them about your design, and get a taste of whether your proposals are feasible given the technologies they employ. Even better, start learning the basics yourself. You don’t have to become a star coder, but knowing enough about how the medium in which you work behaves can greatly shape the interactions you design.

Summary

Interaction design is a multi-faceted discipline that links static communications together to form an experience. Understanding the basic principles of this discipline is core to designing websites that are not only aesthetically pleasing but that actually solve business problems and bring delight to their users. This article just scratches the surface of interaction design. For Web designers of any kind, considering these fundamentals when designing any transaction or interaction is imperative.

(al)

© Jeff Gothelf for Smashing Magazine, 2011.

User experience design for the Web (and its siblings, interaction design, UI design, et al) has traditionally been a deliverables-based practice. Wireframes, site maps, flow diagrams, content inventories, taxonomies, mockups and the ever-sacred specifications document (aka “The Spec�) helped define the practice in its infancy. These deliverables crystallized the value that the UX discipline brought to an organization.

Over time, though, this deliverables-heavy process has put UX designers in the deliverables business — measured and compensated for the depth and breadth of their deliverables instead of the quality and success of the experiences they design. Designers have become documentation subject matter experts, known for the quality of the documents they create instead of the end-state experiences being designed and developed.

When combined with serial waterfall development methodologies, these design deliverables end up consuming an enormous amount of time and creating a tremendous amount of waste. Waste is defined as anything that is ultimately not used in the development of the working product.

Engaging in long drawn-out design cycles risks paralysis by internal indecision as well as missed windows of market opportunity. Image by opensourceway.

As organizations struggle to stay nimble in the face of an ever-changing marketplace that is disrupted constantly by incumbents as well as start-ups, getting to market fast becomes top priority. Engaging in long drawn-out design cycles risks paralysis by internal indecision as well as missed windows of market opportunity. In other words, by the time the company decides internally how the product should be designed, the needs of the marketplace have changed.

Waterfall software development looks something like this:

Define → Design → Develop → Test → Deploy

The design phase typically breaks down like this:

Wait for requirements definition to take place and get approved →
Consume requirements documents →
Develop high-level site maps and workflows →
Gain consensus and approval →
Develop screen-level wireframes for each section of the experience →
Present to stakeholders and gain consensus and approval →
Create visual designs for each wireframe →
Present to stakeholders and gain approval (after repeated cycles of review) →
Write The Spec, detailing every pixel and interaction →
Usability test for future improvements →
Hand off to development for review, approval and start of implementation

This phase can take anywhere from one to six months depending on the scope of the project, leaving many wasted hours and much designer frustration in its wake.

Enter Lean UX.

Lean UX

Inspired by Lean and Agile development theories, Lean UX is the practice of bringing the true nature of our work to light faster, with less emphasis on deliverables and greater focus on the actual experience being designed.

Traditional documents are discarded or, at the very least, stripped down to their bare components, providing the minimum amount of information necessary to get started on implementation. Long detailed design cycles are eschewed in favor of very short, iterative, low-fidelity cycles, with feedback coming from all members of the implementation team early and often. Collaboration with the entire team becomes critical to the success of the product.

Interestingly and not surprisingly, one of the immediate casualties of Lean UX is the stereotypical solitary designer, working silently in a corner for a period of time, inviting only occasional peeks at their work before it’s “done.� This mindset is also the biggest obstacle to wider adoption of this practice.

Let’s take a look at the Lean UX process:

Stay lean and focus on the experience, not the paperwork.

Looks familiar? It should if you’re familiar with Agile or its derivatives. Lightweight concepting kicks off the process. This can be done on a whiteboard, a napkin or a quick wireframe. The goal is to get the core components of the idea or workflow visualized quickly and in front of your team.

The team begins to provide their insights on the direction of the design as well as its feasibility. Changes are then made to the original idea, or perhaps it’s scrapped entirely and a new idea proposed. The initial investment in sketching is so minimal that there is no significant cost to completely rethinking the direction. Once a direction is agreed upon internally, a rough prototype helps to validate the idea with customers. That learning helps to refine the idea, and the cycle repeats.

What’s most important to recognize here is that Lean UX is focused strictly on the design phase of the software development process. Whatever your organization’s chosen methodology (waterfall, Agile, etc.), these concepts can be applied to your design tasks.

Isn’t This Just Design-By-Committee?

Lean UX encourages you, the designer, to show your work early and often to the team, collect their insights and build that into the next iteration of the design. To many folks, this sounds like the dreaded “design by committee� approach, which has killed many designs in years past.

In fact, the designer is still driving the design by aggregating all of that feedback, assessing what works best for the business and the user, and iterating the design forward. By providing insight into the design work to your teammates sooner rather than further down the design road, you accomplish the following:

1. Ensure that you’re aligned with the broader team and the business vision;
2. Give developers a sneak peek at the direction of the application (speeding up development and surfacing challenges earlier);
3. Further flesh out your thinking, since verbalizing your concepts to others forces you to focus on areas that you didn’t think of when you were pushing the pixels.

The trick is to stay lean: keep the deliverables light and editable. Eliminate waste by not spending hours getting the pixels exactly right and the annotations perfect. Got an idea for a flow? Throw it up on the whiteboard, and grab the product owner or project leader to tell them about it. Ready to design? Rough out the first page of the flow in your sketchpad. How does it feel? Is the flow already evident? Post it in a visible place at the office and invite passers-by to comment on it.

In the Lean UX methodology spending time on realistic goals and informed design decisions is crucial. It helps to effectively match expectations and reality for your clients. Image by Kristian Bjørnard

As you iterate, suggestions and feedback from various team members will inevitably start to manifest themselves in the experience. The team members who suggested these ideas will begin to feel a sense of ownership in the design and notice it in others. It has now become something they had a hand in creating. This sense of ownership will equip the designer with new allies to defend the work when it comes under criticism from external forces. The team ultimately becomes more invested in the success of the experience.

Lean UX Is Not Lazy UX

It may seem at first that this is a lazy approach to UX, that the goal is simply to do less work. On the contrary, you’re actually using all of the tools in your UX toolkit. Sketching, presenting, critiquing, researching, testing, prototyping, even wireframing — these all get a solid workout in each cycle of the process. The trick is to use these tools when appropriate and, more importantly, to use them at the depth appropriate for the immediate problem you’re trying to solve for the business.

Designers Need to Feel in Control of Their Work

“But I’m giving up control of my design!� is one of the most often-heard complaints from designers who try out Lean UX. Their concern is that by collecting feedback from non-designers, they will be less valuable to the team and be relegated to the role of menial pixel-pusher.

Holding on to the concept and avoiding the unnecessary is vital in Lean UX. Image by Kristian Bjørnard

By staying lean, however, the frequent collection of team-wide feedback actually minimizes the time spent heading down the wrong path. The designer continues to drive the design, but the guardrails (i.e. constraints) become more visible with each iteration and review. Basically, if you spend three months perfecting a design only to find out after launch that it fails to meet customers’ needs, then you’ve just wasted three months of your life, not to mention your team’s.

Lean UX also speeds up development time. By giving the team early insight into the design’s direction, it can begin to lay the groundwork for that experience. This foundational coding phase helps to expose feasibility challenges in the proposed solution. The time, material and resources available then help to prioritize the product’s elements, separating the parts that get built from those that get pushed out or reduced in scope. All of this affects where the designer focuses their energy, thus minimizing waste.

Prototyping: The Fastest Way Between You and Your Customers

Lean UX is where prototyping shines. As with the initial sketches, focusing the prototype on critical components of the experience is essential. Pick the core user flow (or two), and prototype only those screens. The fidelity of the prototype ultimately doesn’t matter, so create it the way you know best. Once created, it will be immediately testable by any and all users.

Successful lean prototypes have been created with code, with design software such as Adobe Fireworks and even with PowerPoint. At times, your client (internal or external) will demand a level of fidelity that helps them better visualize the experience. Work with the tool that is most comfortable and fastest for you and that delivers just enough fidelity for the client.

Next, get that prototype in front of everyone who matters internally, and validate whether you’re meeting the needs of the business.

Diagram of the iterative design and critique process. Warfel, Todd Zaki. 2009. Prototyping: A Practitioner’s Guide. New York: Rosenfeld Media.

Most importantly, get the prototype in front of customers. Bring them in regularly to test the workflows, ideally once a week. You don’t need to test with many customers. Jakob Nielsen found out that after five participants, the odds of finding new roadblocks in the experience were low. If you test regularly, you can cut the number of participants per week to three. This will also cut costs.

Collect feedback. Figure out what worked and what didn’t. Tweak the prototype. Hell, gut it if you have to: that’s the beauty of Lean UX. The investment you’ve put in at each phase is so minimal that rethinking, reconfiguring or redesigning isn’t crushing in workload or ego-bruising.

Once validated, demo your updated prototype to the team. Explain the flows, the user motivations and why you designed it the way you did. The prototype has now become your documentation. It is “The Spec.� Very little (if anything) more is needed. Regardless, you’re there to answer any questions that come up. The strength of Lean UX here is that, with the design validated, the designer is now freed to move on to the next core component of the experience, instead of spending six weeks creating a design-requirements document and pixel-perfect specs.

Prototyping puts the power of validating the design’s direction much more quickly in the hands of the ultimate decider: your customers. They are the ones with whom the design will speak for itself, and in the environment where it will ultimately have to succeed.

Maintaining a Holistic Vision

“But what about my vision? By chopping the design up and delivering it piecemeal to the team and, ultimately, customers, I’m compromising on my vision of the product and putting out a sub-standard experience!�

Lean and Agile Development are called for! Image by Kristian Bjørnard

UX designers have traditionally worn many hats. You now have another to add to the hall tree: keeper of the vision. In this new role, your responsibility is to keep an eye on the big picture. Lean UX forces you to think of the experience in prioritized chunks. Ultimately, those chunks all have to roll up into one cohesive product. That cohesive product is your vision. Even as the design shifts and morphs through iterations and customer feedback, you are always designing towards that greater goal. “Increasing time on site for returning customers� could be a vision. “Deliver content faster and in a more contextual manner� could be another. Regardless of how the design shifts, these goals drive your work.

It won’t be easy. In the past, those hard-won, comprehensive, approved deliverables authorized you to design in a specific direction. With Lean UX, the iterative cycle and the frequent varying opinions will inevitably create conflicts with your vision. This is where you push back. Use the stated vision to help sort out conflicting feedback and focus your efforts on the end goal.

Deliverables For Maintenance Don’t Make Sense Anymore

Documentation has long served as a way for organizations to maintain their software. It becomes a reference tool to understand the decisions of the past, which inform the decisions of the present. While this may make sense for complex business rules, it doesn’t make sense for design. The final product is the documentation. It is the experience. Thick deliverables created simply for future reference regarding the user experience become obsolete almost as soon as they are completed. When a question arises about how something should behave in the UX, going through that workflow in the product to see what happens is easy enough. The old kind of documentation is waste and draws effort away from solving current design problems.

How Does Content Strategy and Planning Fit In?

Websites and applications that are focused on heavy content delivery (as opposed to task- or function-based websites) will need some up-front planning and documentation. Getting right down to the level of the page and article may not be necessary, but getting enough of an idea of the type of content that will be delivered and a sense of its hierarchy is essential to getting to that first sketch and prototype. Once the team grasps the scope and type of content needed for the experience, work can begin as the experience is refined.

Can It Be Done At My Organization?

At the risk of oversimplifying, let’s look at two types of organizations: the internal software/design shop and the interactive agency.

For internal software/design organizations, the transition to Lean UX is well within reach. You are in the problem-solving business, and you don’t solve problems with design documentation. You solve them with elegant, efficient and sophisticated software. Working in these new attributes should ultimately be an easy sell internally because you are advocating for more collaboration, more conversation and earlier delivery to customers. Yes, the culture will have to shift — shipping what amounts to the minimum desirable product can be a tough pill to swallow for those used to big-bang releases. However, the ability to make quicker decisions along the way, informed by regular customer feedback, should ultimately trump these concerns.

Interactive agencies have it a bit tougher because they are in the deliverables business. They get paid for their documentation and spend a lot of time creating it. A specialist creates each document, and they charge for that time. Reducing those efforts means reducing revenue.

Lean UX proposes that the shortfall in up-front revenue generated by deliverables can easily be made up, and then some, by delivering higher-quality work, faster, to the client. The process has to be modified slightly, though:

Lean UX process for an interactive agency.

The core difference with the agency’s process is the regular and frequent involvement of the client. Set up twice- or thrice-weekly 30-minute reviews with them. Set the expectation that you’ll be showing rough, directional work and that you’ll want their feedback. Each time you review a directional sketch with your client, they’ll notice the evolution and progress. Their feedback will work its way in and, like an internal stakeholder, they’ll gain that sense of ownership.

By involving the client in the process, by iterating the design quickly and by testing the iterations with real customers, you will reach an optimal solution in less time than before.

In agency-land, less time typically means less revenue, which could potentially be the death knell for Lean UX. But while the output took less billable time to create, it will likely be more effective and will bring the customer back to your shop more frequently than in the past. In addition, you’ve made the client part of the process. This is empowering, and clients like that feeling.

This is not an easy change because agency culture has been the same for many decades. Only the boldest agencies will take this on. But those that do will find greater success from it and will quickly be imitated. These ideas are worth piloting on an internal project; perhaps the redesign of the agency’s website. Prove that they work, and then branch out to actual clients.

I’m a Consultant/Freelancer. Does This Make Sense for Me?

Consultants are, in essence, an agency of one. It stands to reason that the agency process could work in this situation as well. Constant feedback and iteration with the client will engender the same feelings of trust and co-ownership. The challenge for the consultant/freelancer is the amount of time they can dedicate to each client. Assuming they can handle multiple projects or clients simultaneously, providing the level of attention and communication necessary to maintain a true Lean UX process becomes difficult. In this case, falling back on a slightly deeper level of documentation makes sense to keep concurrent projects moving forward.

Optimize your workflow and win time. Image by Kristian Bjørnard

It’s worth mentioning that one big challenge for Lean UX to be successful in any of these settings is the use of offshore development vendors. One of the fundamental principles needed for Lean UX to succeed is collaboration — ideally in real time and place it can even work via Skype or other virtual meeting technology. When a vendor has minimal contact with your design group and requires a certain level of documentation in order to produce work, Lean UX may not work in its entirety.

Lean UX is being actively used by a growing number of organizations. The way TheLadders has implemented it in a recent effort is an example of keeping deliverables light, fostering greater collaboration and achieving goals successfully.

Conclusion

Lean UX is an evolution, not a revolution. UX designers need to evolve and stay relevant as the practice evolves. Lean UX gets designers out of the deliverables business and back into the experience design business. This is where we excel and do our best work. Let’s become experts at delivering great results through these experiences and forgo the hefty spec documents. It won’t be an easy road. Culture and tradition will push back, yet the ultimate return on this investment will be more rewarding work and more successful businesses.

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© Jeff Gothelf for Smashing Magazine, 2011. | Permalink | Post a comment | Smashing Shop | Smashing Network | About Us
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A strong personal brand is beneficial on many levels. At the core it differentiates the designer, developer, marketer, etc, from the rest of the pack within crowded disciplines. It functions as a self-promotion agent that works for the practitioner 24/7/365 ultimately ensuring this person becomes a magnet for new and interesting work opportunities.

The foundation of a personal brand is initially created by consistently doing good work. From there, commenting, interacting and reacting in public discussion forums, blogging, Twitter, Facebook and the publication of articles and even books further solidify an individual as a thought leader.

However, “the idea of personal brand is often associated with independent practitioners�, as David Armano puts it. And for independents there are typically no conflicts as they are in the business of promoting themselves, their skills and knowledge. However, for practitioners working within corporations and interactive agencies, the challenge becomes balancing their personal brands with the corporate brand.

Many opportunities for friction

As a corporate employee you don’t represent “youâ€� out in public — you represent the company. The opinions, theories and expertise you present publicly all get attributed to your employer. If you say something controversial, the story that will propagate is not “John Smith said…â€� but “John Smith, Lead Developer for Company X, said…â€�  Add to this the risk of disclosing proprietary or sensitive financial information and it’s no surprise many corporations aren’t interested in promoting individuals (outside of C-level executives) externally.

These same corporations are only now beginning to comprehend the power of the social web and don’t understand the need for external “corporate ambassadors�. Colleagues within the organization can also be points of friction as they begin to question whether the now-public practitioner is actually a “work horse or a show horse�, as Christian Crumlish, Director of Consumer Experience at AOL, puts it. If it’s not clear that the company is getting more benefit than the individual, resentment can build causing the individual to start defending their activities.

Crumlish also suggests some companies are concerned that making their star employees visible exposes them to competitive employers looking to poach talent. This alone may make an organization reticent to promote individuals externally.

Finally, if the practitioner works for a less-established brand, there is a risk the personal brand will ultimately outshine the corporate brand. While this is certainly not an issue for global corporations, start-ups who have one or two star employees could face this challenge.

Overcoming these hurdles

The challenges may seem risky but there are some specific ways to mitigate these risks. By following the guidelines featured below, you will be able to convince your employer to not feel insecure or threatened about you strengthening your personal brand and encourage you to participate in public events.

Make your employer the star

To alleviate any concerns that you are attempting to promote your brand more than your employer’s, make it obvious who that employer is and that you’re speaking on their behalf. Any public facing documents you present must have company branding. This includes white papers, conference posters and slide decks. In addition to branding your thought leadership, all online profiles (Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, et al) and blogs should clearly disclose where you work. Finally, all client associations should also be disclosed to minimize the risk of perceived conflicts of interest or favoritism.

Luke Wroblewski, former Chief Design Architect at Yahoo! and Lead Designer at Ebay, who is a popular speaker at many design conferences, ensured all his presentations were branded with the Yahoo! and Ebay logos. Like Wroblewski, Crumlish, a mainstay on the design conference circuit, also made sure he was seen as a “Yahoo! Person� in all of his public efforts.

Participation in conferences is a good way to strengthen your personal brand and solidify yourself as a thought leader. Image source: Fronteers conference

Make your colleagues smarter, bring back learnings

Conferences, meetups and other professional extra-curricular activities provide tremendous learning opportunities. As much as you are a presenter at these events, you must also be an attendee. The opportunities for learning and growth are tremendous. It’s important to capture that knowledge and bring it back to your organization to share with your colleagues.

This shared learning can take two forms. The first is sharing the specific things you learned while at the event. What did the other presenters discuss? How does it relate to the challenges you face as a team? How can it be applied? These are the domain-specific elements you picked up from the other presenters.

The second is sharing with your colleagues how to become more successful and active within these external communities. You’re likely not the only person in your organization who is interested in furthering their personal brand. Bringing this education to your colleagues who did not attend the conference and sharing your techniques on how to become more active on that front helps minimize any jealousy that may develop in your colleagues and positions you as a mentor.

Your employer is now a thought leader

When attempting to convince your superiors to allow you to participate in public forums on behalf of the company, it’s imperative to remind the organization the benefits the corporate brand gets from this exposure. Active engagement in industry-specific forums and conferences gives the company the chance to stand in front of peers as a thought leader and, in many cases, frame the conversation on a particular topic. Brand perception of your employer improves as adjectives like cutting-edge, innovative and supportive (of new thinking) are associated with it.

In addition, both your business development and talent acquisition departments benefit from the corporate brand enhancement you’re facilitating. Every interaction that is publicly available from the employees of a company provides an opportunity to strengthen that company’s public persona. Tweets and blog posts about the kind of work or processes taking place there humanize the company and increase the attraction of higher caliber employees as well as potential new customers.

This may not be obvious at first to your employer. It’s imperative that you showcase these successes internally. Positive mentions for the company in tweets, blogs and post-conference meetings should be forwarded to the organization’s management. When employment candidates express interest in the company, try to make sure that they are asked how they heard of the company. Each time a candidate mentions a public appearance or some thought leadership showcased in an industry forum, make sure your superiors are aware. If possible, quantifying (in dollars) the value of these appearances should further your cause.

High-level talent that is acquired through word of mouth is significantly less expensive than talent acquired through staffing agencies. Also, have your business development team assess the source of new leads and customers to see how many were driven by the company’s public presence. Each one of those leads and customers has a monetary value which, when tallied, can justify the expense of sending you to the next event to present.

Be bold, yet humble

In some companies, your superiors may not see the immediate value of your personal brand. In these situations it may prove more successful to ask for forgiveness rather than permission.  Write a blog post on an industry or domain-specific topic and share it publicly. If it drives discussion and positive perception of your employer, tell someone.

Attend the next local meetup and present a quick deck on your latest thinking.  Did someone tweet about it? Share that with your boss. Was there a strong discussion on your blog that reflected well on your employer? Point your PR person to it. Showcasing the success of a low-profile activities or blog posts should engender some level of support from your boss. One word of caution though: ensure that you’ve consulted your company’s policies on such activities, as Crumlish advises. You don’t want to end up violating corporate policies that could put your job at risk.

Choose the right employer

If creating and maintaining a personal brand is something you value then it’s imperative to view your employer through that lens to understand if your goals align. As your personal brand has been developing and growing, has your employer been supportive? Is there a broad corporate understanding of the benefits you can bring through promoting your thought leadership externally? If the answer is ‘No’ then it may be time to evaluate new opportunities.

Becoming an independent practitioner is the easiest option but may not be viable for everyone. In that case, how much do prospective employers “get� the concept of employee empowerment? This is a discussion that should be clear from the outset with a potential new employer. Set the right expectations in your interviews and, if possible, have public-facing activities that grow both your personal brand and the corporate brand written into your job description. There’s no more effective way to balance your personal brand as a corporate employee than to actually have it as one of your position’s responsibilities.

Conclusion

Ultimately, for the personal brand to grow, the “company should get more value than the individual”, as David Armano said. If that balance is off, then you should consider becoming independent. That doesn’t mean that you cannot create, cultivate and curate a personal brand within a corporation. In fact, a personal brand can be crucial to your continued success and career progression. Be respectful of your employer and their policies but find creative ways to promote yourself while promoting your company at the same time. Personal branding enhances corporate branding. It makes the company appear more “humanâ€� and approachable. It makes people want to work there and it attracts good press. If balanced correctly, this is a win-win for all parties involved.

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© Jeff Gothelf for Smashing Magazine, 2010. | Permalink | Post a comment | Add to del.icio.us | Digg this | Stumble on StumbleUpon! | Tweet it! | Submit to Reddit | Forum Smashing Magazine
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