Summary: Hiring UX managers, like hiring UX designers, requires a careful diligence to understanding the role, its functions and its business value. Managing UX requires a deep understanding of how design is delivering value. UX managers require a seat at the table, equal to a Dev or Marketing manager. Senior managers also require strategic placement, including 'C level' authority.
The holy grail of maximizing return on investment in UX is to understand customer value. Engineering teams often define MVP based on an internally focused set of priorities. Marketing and business teams often use market research to focus group customer perceptions. Both of these approaches miss a major innovation in UX methodology.
If you dissect UX, it has two sides: “Ease of use” vs. “Do I even want your feature?”. Most teams chase ease of use, because it seems to be the goal of reducing complexity, and it is. However, desirability or, “Are you solving core customer problems?” is more important.
In this webinar we will learn how to ground your UX efforts with a Desirability First approach. We will see how this essential aspect of your UX/UI process is critical to business and design innovation. We will discuss this single most important element of your UX strategy and how to bring tangible business value to your UX efforts from user research.
UX teams only work as well as they are managed. Many organizations have UX Designers and don't truly know what UX Designers are supposed to be doing. Hint: Creating gorgeous UI's is not the answer. Delivering value with UX is critical to achieving the results a good UX team ought to bring. Yet, many an organization is faltering on managing UX Design to full capacity.
In this webinar, we will discuss the elements that help you maximize success in your organization. We'll focus on UX managment when it fails, but more importantly how to fix it!
Topics we will cover in this webinar:
Summary: UX managers are increasingly in high demand, in fact reports indicate there are currently not enough UX managers to fill the need. For the industry, this is good news as Senior UX Designers or UX Leads look to help their organizations build UX maturity.
Understanding the driving forces behind the wave of UX manager hiring can help senior management hire or promote the right person for the job.
Summary: Fitness tracking is nuanced and even slightly controversial: Do users want to monitor and track (quantify) their behavior and activity? More importantly, does it work to increase motivation and reach health and wellness goals? Our research over the past 5 years has shown some clear user experience needs that most apps and fitness trackers completely miss in their UX strategy. We have been conducting studies in gamification, social UX, competitor feature adoption and efficacy (motivational success) with far-reaching implications for mobile wellness and health apps. Here we cover 7 research-based heuristic rules of thumb for designing mobile "e-health" experiences.
A "killer feature" is a concept software developers use to describe a high value or money-making aspect of a site, app or experience. Typically, these are either a) identified by experienced UX teams in advance of launch, or b) discovered or appreciated by customers as evidenced through sales, engagement or adoption.
Summary: Many organizations and individuals continue to use market research, equating it to, or substituting it for usability research. UX and marketing or brand insights, are completely different and should be considered as such. UX research is behavior-driven, while market research is opinion-driven. Therefore, market research is not appropriate as a way to gain insight into user behavior.
Summary: Personas are used routinely in design organizations. Beyond a tool to socialize customer profiles throughout the company, quality persona development is extremely important for bringing high impact results to your design efforts. Functional personas help bring vital empathy and data-based decision-making to teams.
Personas need to be made functional for better product development. Using associating adjectives to capture role-based activities within a persona, can improve the usefulness and functional benefits of personas.
Persona means "mask" in Latin. Personas are commonly found on the desks of Product Managers, Business Analysts and UX teams. They are considered an essential of UX, but oftentimes their value and utility are often diminished due to a lack of clarity of the functional UX purpose of a persona.
Summary: Hiring UX Designers and UX managers or UX consultants can be difficult especially for product, marketing, engineering or HR folks who are unfamiliar with what a UX designer ought to be doing to generate real value. Know what you are shopping for, so you get what your organization needs! Better yet avoid these mistakes made by those before you. Good UX hiring contributes to reinforcing an Outside-In Design organization.
Summary: Testing with 5 users has become a commandment in UX research. Worse yet, a sample of 5 has become the rule, for any type of user research (field studies or diary studies). Sample size is a big deal in UX because it impacts your learning and decision-making. Skimp on sample size and you will likely cut yourself short of valuable insights.
For Usability Testing: If you follow Jakob Nielsen's advice: test with 5 users or less (2 users for low-fidelity prototypes) and do many iterations of testing (at least 3 rounds of testing). Our advice: if you have multiple user segments and you don't have time to play with 3-5 iterations, test with 8-10 users for prototypes, and 15-20 users for finished products. If you can, or need to iterate then a second round of testing should suffice.