The User Experience Team of One: A Research and Design Survival Guide

FOREWORD

There are some things you should never do at the same time: Move. Have a baby. Adopt a puppy. Change jobs. Leah did all of this while also writing this book.

And while anyone who knows Leah shouldn’t be surprised by her ability to pull all of this off, this speaks to a tenacity shared by those who find themselves in a UX Team of One. There’s a certain amount of grit, or perhaps it’s foolhardiness, that allows us to plunge into the unknown, the untried, the undiscovered.

My own entry into the user experience world was a solitary one: dot-com boom. Lone visual designer. Surrounded by a team of engineers. Like many others, I had to look around and figure out on my own how to do things. Fifteen years later, I’m delighted to report that’s still the case. Even as a consultant, hired for my expertise, I’m still learning and making stuff up as I go along. We all are! What’s more, this learning is not all solitary—we have the shared experiences of a maturing community to draw upon. What Leah has shared in this book will no doubt add new tips and processes to your own bank of knowledge, as it has mine.

But, beneath all the artifacts and processes, there’s something more that keeps us going, something timeless, something fundamental: grit and curiosity. These traits are what keep us in the game. I suspect most of us aren’t happy to leave well enough alone. And it is this dissatisfaction, this searching for something better, combined with a deep empathy, which defines the UX community. Everything else flows from this core.

I was fortunate to see Leah debut her UX Team of One talk at the 2008 Information Architecture Summit. (I still have my button!) Aside from a stellar presentation to a standing-room-only crowd, I recall Leah’s no-nonsense approach to design. From the hand-sketched slides to the quick exploration of different ways to refresh an aging online service, it all just made sense. Cut the crap, do what needs to be done. No more, no less. Her presentation was at once obvious and inspiring. That was one of the few slide decks I looked for after the conference.

Which is why I was thrilled to find out later that Leah would be sharing these ideas in a book. We need to exchange rigid processes for more flexible ways of responding. Yes, there’s merit to a hardened, repeatable process, or having a team of specialists to work with, but working alone means jumping in there and getting things done, whatever it takes! No nonsense. No formal process. This is better than defined roles and responsibilities. Working alone brings with it a certain amount of freedom and autonomy. We can shape the path before us. For this reason, working alone is something to savor, rather than endure.

Certainly, individuals need a team to pull off great things. But I’ve found that nearly every successful product story can be traced back to one or more devoted mavericks, individuals who pushed forward, against all odds.

And here’s the bigger truth: Whether you find yourself all alone or in a team of like-minded folks, we are all individuals with a unique voice, opinions, and diverse experiences that define us. We are all a UX Team of One. My challenge to you: Draw upon this diversity—magical things happen at the intersection of seemingly unrelated ideas. Don’t let a job title define you. Do what makes sense, not what process dictates. And most of all, never stop playing and learning. If we can all hang on for the ride, there is no limit to the places we’ll go!

—Stephen P. Anderson,

author of Seductive Interaction Design

INTRODUCTION

In June 2011, this message appeared on the Interaction Designers Association (IXDA) discussion list:

I am at a point in my life where I know I want to do UX design after doing Web design for so long and then reading about usability testing, etc., 6 years ago. But my issue is I’m tired of working for orgs who say they care about their customer but don’t do testing to even know what their customers want from them... I’m kind of fed up with working for people who don’t get it.

This frustrated plea perfectly sums up the challenge that many passionate user experience professionals face. Many organizations have only a modest understanding of user experience. Some have none at all. In such an environment, if you are the key person driving for a more user-centered way of working, you are a user experience team of one. (And that’s true whether it’s your official job title or not.)

But this is about more than just professional frustration.

While this book is intended to be a practical resource for people who do user experience design without the support of a large UX team, I’ll tip my hand right here at the beginning and confess that I believe that being a UX team of one is much more than just a job. It’s also an important avenue for doing good in the world. The UX team of one is as much a professional circumstance as a constructive philosophy. And here are its founding principles:

• UX is a force for good. In an increasingly technological world, designing products with real people in mind helps us make sure that technology integrates in our lives in a human way. It’s a voice of reason, arguing that products and technology can support and even enrich our fundamental humanity.

• The world needs more of it. As the boundaries continue to blur between the technological world and the analog world, everything that we buy, use, and do will need this user-centered perspective. Companies that never thought of themselves as being in the user experience business before will realize that they are now. We all are. This field can only grow.

• You can make that happen. Yes, you. The person reading this book right now, whatever your job title, whatever your career aspirations, you have it in your power to spark an awareness of the user’s perspective in the work that you do and with the people that you work with.

This book can help you spread the growth of a new and exciting field, one person, team, and company at a time.

PART I

Philosophy

What makes a team of one special is that you find yourself in situations where you not only see an opportunity for a more user-centered approach, but you also need to lead the charge, bringing others along with you. A team of one challenges the mighty forces of the status quo, inertia, and other people’s way of doing things. That’s brave and ambitious work, and it requires not only technical know-how but also vision, conviction, and a soft touch. This part of the book will arm you with all of the above. The approach outlined here can help you spread the growth of a new and exciting field, one person at a time.

PHOTO BY ANGELO AMBOLDI (FLICKR)

CHAPTER 1

UX 101

Defining User Experience

An Example

Where UX Comes From

Where UX Professionals Come From

If You Only Do One Thing...

Talking about user experience (UX) can be a bit like looking at an inkblot test: whatever matters the most to you ends up being what you see. People find their way to the field of user experience through a variety of pathways, and they naturally apply their own lenses in how they think about and describe the work of UX. This chapter will attempt to balance out the picture by giving you a simple definition of user experience to work with, a little more information about where it comes from, and an understanding of how it’s different from other fields.

Defining User Experience

User experience is a famously messy thing to describe. Many people have offered their own definition, and yet no single one has prevailed as the clear favorite. UX, it turns out, is a controversial concept. This is probably because user experience is a general term that describes not only a professional practice, but also a resulting outcome. To be a user experience designer means to practice a set of methods and techniques for researching what users want and need, and to design products and services for them. Through good UX, you are trying to reduce the friction between the task someone wants to accomplish and the tool that they are using to complete that task. The resulting user experience that someone has is determined by a multitude of factors so vast that no one person, team, or even technology can claim to be responsible for it (see Figure 1.1).

FIGURE 1.1

Often, the term user experience refers to the encounters that people have with digital products, like software or a Web app.

In a simple working definition, you might say that a user experience is the overall effect created by the interactions and perceptions that someone has when using a product or service (see Figure 1.2). User experience is a fancy term for what people often describe with words like love or hate; or phrases such as, it’s easy to use, or a pain in the butt. You may recognize user friendly as a term that has worked its way into popular usage. For example, when someone says a product is user friendly, he is basically referring to the user experience. Given that we transact so much of our lives through technology, how easy or difficult it is to use is what really matters. And that’s what user experience is all about.

FIGURE 1.2

User experience is not just restricted to what you do on your phone or your laptop. This shopping mall directory has an interactive user experience, which impacts how easily shoppers can find what they are looking for in their physical environment.

As a field of professional practice, user experience encompasses several disciplines. The main contributors are user research and user experience design. User research is about understanding users and their needs, and user experience design is about designing a user’s interactions with a product from moment to moment. Lots of user experience professionals have one of those titles, but it’s also common to see people mixing and matching these terms into inventive but nonstandard titles like user experience architect or user interaction designer.

What’s in a Name?

An alphabet soup of acronyms has been adopted as shorthand for user experience. Which one you use depends largely on what term your organization or professional community has adopted to talk about user experience. Although they vary quite a bit, all terms tend to be variations on the theme of experience. Among them, you’ll find: UX (user experience), XD (experience design), and UE (user experience, again). Although the acronyms differ, they pretty much mean the same thing.

Things get a little trickier when you start talking about the subdisciplines that make up UX. Being a somewhat new field, the user experience community hasn’t done a great job of standardizing its job titles yet. A quick scan of user experience job postings will unearth a grab bag of titles: UX designer, UI designer, user researcher, customer experience researcher, interaction designer, information architect, user experience architect, usability engineer, graphic designer, visual designer, Web designer, copywriter, tech writer, content strategist, design strategist—and infinite permutations on all of the above. Ultimately, these roles fall into one of just a few categories:

• Interaction Design or Information Architecture. Someone who designs the structure and detailed interactions of an application or product, similar to an architect. This person decides which rooms need to be in a building, how people get from room to room, and where the windows and doors are placed. Note that some people see the two roles as distinct. You could argue that interaction designers focus on screens, detailed interactions, and workflows, whereas information architects focus on information structures, controlled and uncontrolled metadata, and ultimately, findability. However, both roles share a fundamental goal: designing how a user moves through a complex information system from moment to moment. So, for simplicity’s sake, I have placed them here together.

• Visual Design. Someone who focuses on the visual layer of an application or product (color palette, typography, hierarchy of information, and visual elements). Although layout of screens and pages is typically considered to be the interaction designer’s job, a good visual designer will also have a point of view on layout. If the interaction designer is like the architect, the visual designer is like the interior designer.

• User Research. Someone who conducts research into user needs and behavior. This could be qualitative (for example, one-on-one interviews with a handful of people to gain a rich understanding of their motivations and experiences). This could also be quantitative (for example, sampling large pools of people to uncover broad trends in attitudes, behaviors, pain points, and the like). The research usually spans up-front discovery of user needs all the way through to product validation and usability testing. If the interaction designer is like the architect and the visual designer is like the interior designer, the researcher is like the demographer that uncovers who really lives in this place and what important factors characterize them.

• Content Strategy or Copywriting. Someone who thinks strategically about the role of content across the entire product. This person considers what messages are being delivered to users, how the language should be framed, what the voice and tone of the product is, and how and when the content will be created (and by whom). This person makes sure that all in-product content is consistent, on-brand, and contributes to a unified experience. Basically, the content strategist sets the tone for the tenor of conversations that take place here. What topics do people talk about? What’s the local dialect? What stories get told? How do the people who live here ultimately communicate with each other?

Most UX teams of one act as generalists, blending some or all of the above roles together. If you see the title user experience designer, it’s usually one of those catchall roles.

But there are other disciplines that certainly contribute to the resulting experience that a user has with a product, even if they may not fit as snugly into the job description of a user experience designer. These disciplines include visual design, content strategy, copywriting, business analysis, product management, project management, analytics, search engine marketing and optimization, brand marketing, and even engineering. In this field, there are lots of heated discussions about who gets to claim ownership of the user experience. Without fueling the flames, let’s just say that for the purposes of this book, if you do any of these things, you’re contributing to the user experience of your product, and this book is for you.

An Example

Personally, I think it’s easier to understand UX when you think about what it’s like to actually use a product. For example, right now I’m sitting in front of my computer, hopping around within the operating system and keying from my word processing program to my email program to my music program. My perception of each of those programs is impacted by how it looks, how it functions, and how well it serves its purpose in the personal need that it satisfies. (Helping me write a book; managing my personal and professional communications; and listening to some tunes that keep me tapping my feet as I work, respectively). In any of these programs, a thousand little decisions were made by someone—or more probably, many someones—to create what I experience as the flowing, seamless experience of working (see Figure 1.3).

And that’s just the software. My user experience is also impacted by the physical hardware of my computer: How big and bright the screen is, and whether it feels like enough to help me effectively use the hodgepodge of programs for which this laptop is intended. The tactile feel of the touchpad as I scroll down long Web pages. The satisfying clickety-clack of fingers tapping their way across the keys. These are all user experiences, too.

And what about the products and services that are connected to my laptop? Recently, I set up an in-home music system that integrates wirelessly with software that I run on my computer and my mobile phone. I can control the volume from an app on my phone and watch the volume level change on my computer while I hear the music get quieter or louder on the speakers in the other room. This is great execution on the part of the music system manufacturer. But it also casts a warm glow back on my laptop and my mobile phone, for being well designed to support such integration. Sometimes, a user’s perception of the product is beyond the control of any one manufacturer. It’s the cumulative effect of many (see Figure 1.4).

FIGURE 1.3

A user’s experience is the cumulative effect of many factors, some that you can control, and some that you can’t.

FIGURE 1.4

In the absence of better alternatives, users will try to hack together their own solutions, as this baseball fan has. But the companies who make the products that we love do a better-than-average job thinking about the complexities of the user experience.

Where UX Comes From

As a team of one, knowing the history of user experience helps you reassure people that it’s not just something that you dreamed up in your cubicle. If I were to sum up the history of UX in a few short sentences, it might go something like this: villains of industry seek to deprive us of our humanity. Scientists, scholars, and designers prevail, and a new profession flourishes, turning man’s submission to technology into technology’s submission to man (see Figure 1.5). Pretty exciting stuff.

FIGURE 1.5

UX has a long and storied history that intersects with other business, design, and technology developments that your colleagues may be familiar with.

Now here’s the longer version. User experience is a modern field, but it’s been in the making for about a century. To see its beginnings, you can look all the way back to the machine age of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. At that time, corporations were growing, skilled labor was declining, and advances in machine technology were inspiring industry to push the boundaries of what human labor could make possible. The machine age philosophy was best exemplified by people