The AYCL Blog

UIE's All You Can Learn Library is loaded with 317 UX seminars from the best experts in the world.  They solve your design problems, teach you new techniques, and inspire new ideas.  Here are the most watched videos in the first six months of 2017.

On personas: Give Your Users a Seat at the Table: The Characteristics of Effective Personas - Whitney Quesenbery

On IA: Collaborative Information Architecture - Abby Covert

On mapping experiences: Mapping Experiences: It’s the Destination and the Journey - Jim Kalbach

On defining the problem you’re solving: Discovery: The First Step of the Design Process - Dan Brown

On research: Making Sense of Research Findings - Abby Covert

On service design: Service Design Thinking - Marc Stickdorn

On research: Demystifying Usability Tests: Learning the Basics - Christine Perfetti

On design systems: And You Thought Designing Buttons Was Easy - Nathan Curtis

On product management: The Experience Is The Product - Peter Merholz

On analytics: From UI21: Is Design Metrically Opposed? - Jared Spool

On stakeholders: Preventing the Swoop-and-Poop with Successful Stakeholder Engagement - Kim Goodwin

On MVPs: Designing To Learn: Testing Your Minimum Viable Product - Melissa Peri

On taxonomy: How To Make Sense of Any Mess - Abby Covert

On simplicity: Simplifying Designs - Giles Colborne

On research: Infectious Research - Cindy Alvarez

On onboarding: Onboarding for Behavior Change - Samuel Hulick

On research data: Combining Qualitative and Quantitative Research - Laura Klein

On collaboration: So… what do I make? Exploring the World of Modern UX Design  - Dan Mall

On design systems: Design Tokens: Scaling Design with a Single Source of Truth - Jina Bolton

On strategy: Defining a UX Design Strategy - Jim Kalbach

Of course, there are 297 other great seminars to watch. Which ones make the list next time?

16 minutes
 

There’s a stigma surrounding meetings. They’re often seen as unproductive wastes of time. But in Kevin Hoffman’s view, meetings are actually a design problem. In his upcoming book, Meeting Design for Managers, Makers, and Everyone, Kevin lays out strategies to make meetings better for all those involved, making them gateways to success. In this podcast, Adam Churchill and Jared Spool discuss some of the highlights from Kevin’s book.

Listen Now

Want more from Kevin Hoffman? You can see all of his recordings here.

Kim asks,“what makes stakeholders so difficult to pin-down, and how can you satisfy them?”

Stakeholders get a bad wrap for coming into projects late and upending them. They tend to be busy, time-strapped people who bring expertise to projects, but are not always around to share feedback or ideas. It’s up to teams to gain the trust of stakeholders, and a keen understanding of their desires, despite these challenges.

To mitigate the threat of the executive swoop and poop, start your projects with a RACI exercise to define team roles: who is responsible, accountable, consulted, and informed. Create project plans with milestone dates and specific points where stakeholders can provide critical feedback. Adapt to the ways of your stakeholders and proactively communicate with them to ease any anxiety they might have about the project. Make sure stakeholders know when they’ll have an opportunity to provide feedback. Listen to them, parrot back what you’ve heard, and communicate your next steps. The more stakeholders hear you reflecting their concerns and wishes, the more likely they’ll accept your solutions.

Our mindset—the attitudes and assumptions we hold—influences how we work with others, how we receive criticism, and communicate. To a large degree, it can determine success.

Dan Brown shares three mindsets that he believes designers need to cultivate to work successfully in collaborative environments.

Adaptable
An adaptable mindset allows you to roll with the punches. You are comfortable giving the client options and adapting your techniques to the unique needs of the client and environment.

Collective
A collective mindset allows you to accept perspectives and contributions from other people on a team. You understand that other perspectives can improve your work, and that more heads are better than one.

Assertive
An assertive mindset is confident without being arrogant. You can be comfortable in a situation where not all of the answers are available, but decisions need to be made based on where you are at and what you know in the moment.

Melissa knows that not all experts agree over the nature of a Minimum Viable Product (MVP). Is it a first release, a product rushed to market, or part of an iterative product approach? Product Manager and UX Designer Melissa Perri explains that MVPs are part of a process. They are an experiment to learn more about our customers: the problems they have and the solutions we can offer.

Before you get started on a product solution, and to minimize the risk of creating something that won't find a foothold with your target audience, Perri recommends asking the following questions:

• Do our customers really have this problem?
• What do our customers expect to gain in the end?
• What are our customers doing to solve their problems now?
• What do they care about in a solution?
• Where will they use the solution?

Kim Goodwin says that stakeholder interviews are a critical step to setting the foundation for a project and establishing clear expectations and goals. These interviews are an opportunity to understand the perspective of the stakeholder: what they want to accomplish and why, and what ideas and expertise they bring. Interviews are also an opportunity to identify discrepancies in the goals and expectations shared by stakeholders.

When preparing for your stakeholder interviews, put together a set of basic questions. These questions may even seem dumb, but it’s important to encourage stakeholders to explain in their own words the challenges that may (or may not) seem self-evident.

Some of those basic questions may look like the following:

• What do you think this project is about?
• Who is it for?
• When do you need it completed, and why?
• What’s the worst thing that could happen?
• What should it accomplish for the business?
• How will YOU define success?
• How do you want to be involved, and what’s the best way to involve you?
• Who else will influence the outcome?

Dan Mall knows that users are not in the habit of sticking around while a site takes nine seconds to load—and even nine seconds is a stretch. There are a few culprits behind heavy pages, like typography, code, and images that haven’t been optimized. If we develop a performance budget, and test our page load times, we can identify the fat that needs to be trimmed and improve load times. We can also use a performance budget to make content and feature decisions, such as how many images we use on a page.

Create a spreadsheet and run your website through a free webpage test tool. Note your page times for start render, visually complete, and fully loaded. Now list your competitors and compare their times against yours. Tools such as webpagetest.org will generate a report that can help you make the decisions you need to improve your site’s performance.

In discovery, we embark on a set of research activities to gain knowledge and make decisions. As Dan Brown explains, discovery is not so much a phase of a project as it is a mindset that we bring to the work. A discovery mindset involves asking questions and making decisions – a creative back and forth between inquiry and action.

There are three qualities , or mindsets, that Dan Brown believes are essential to the discovery process.

Curiosity

A curious mindset understands that there are gaps in one’s knowledge. When we are curious, we ask questions, follow hunches, and give ourselves permission to explore ideas. We find excitement in the process of learning new information.

Skepticism

A skeptical mindset does not accept all of the assumptions it sees at face value. When we bring a skeptical mindset to a project, we are able to assess ideas, play devil’s advocate to challenge assumptions, and approach a problem from different angles.

Humility

Humility reminds us that we don’t have all of the answers; regardless of the experience and knowledge we bring to a situation. Cultivating humility allows us to listen to the opinions of others, and be okay when we don’t know what we don’t know.

Kim tells us that organizations vary in the way they are structured, and in the way they make decisions. While some organizations are hierarchical and process-driven, others may rely less on formal structures and processes. Understanding the mindset of an organization will help you tailor your approach to working with them to get the best results—and to find creative ways to introduce best practices that an organization has traditionally ignored.

Adhocracy: This organization is comfortable with change and finds wisdom in information gathered outside of it. It values external data like user interviews and research. It tends to have a lean, startup atmosphere that is iterative and creative, loose on process but high on invention. Employee roles and responsibilities might be unclear.

Clan: This organization values change, but believes wisdom can be found within the company. It invests in employees and makes everyone feel like a stakeholder. Collaboration is a necessity.

Hierarchy: This organization values internal expertise over external research. It is risk-averse, structured, and values stability. It is heavy on process and structure and responds well to templates and process.

Market: A market-oriented business likes stability and risk reduction, and tends to value external data and research. It loves data analytics, A/B testing, and anything that can tie design to metrics. Google is a classic example of this structure.

1. Each prototype should take less than an hour to make.
2. The first prototype you create for a product should be so simple that anyone can build it.
3. Build ugly.

Dan Mall believes that every prototype you make should solve one problem with one solution. Don’t build something that is complete. Use your prototypes as an opportunity to explore creative problem solving, and typography. What will an infinite scroll look like on this site? Explore the pieces of your project in creative and inventive ways.

Developing prototypes and element collages are all part of the skill set of a great designer. Sketch more. Write more. Make something.

Melissa Perri tells us that minimum Viable Products are an answer to a question, a solution to a perceived problem that users have. Product teams experiment with solutions to learn more about their customers and the feasibility of their proposed solutions. They experiment, explains Product Manager and UX Designer, Melissa Perri, to solve two things before they build:

Problem-Solution Fit: Does this problem exist and can I solve it?

Product-Market Fit: Is my product desirable in the market?

Product teams learn through experimentation, and though these experiments may result in more failures than successes, the process of questioning, experimenting, and testing will hone the final product vision and strategy.

When in the thick of a project, the small, day-to-day decisions we make as designers can get away from us. Dan Mall knows that that’s when an interface inventory can make a difference.

If you take an inventory of button styles, for example, on your project or site, you may find a variety of styles, typography, and subtle design variations that were not intentional. Design teams can review an inventory, and all of the decisions that were made, and use that information to create an overall style guide that streamlines design decisions and can be applied in the future. This approach will result in cleaner code, and reduce the cognitive load on users.