The AYCL Blog

In this seminar, learn how prototyping and getting your product into the hands of early adopters who can share critical feedback will influence your strategy and create a successful product. Amy Jo will show you how to trim the fat from six months of progress into six focused weeks.

This seminar explores an innovative approach that establishes a creative feedback loop with early adopters to get to the heart of a product’s appeal to a broader audience.

It can be challenging to get an organization to agree upon a controlled vocabulary to organize and name content. Abby will share specific tools in the form of diagrams, beyond the ubiquitous sitemap and wireframe, which communicate complex ideas.

If you are looking for techniques to collaborate more successfully and find common ground around language and structure, this is the seminar for you.

Onboarding is the first interaction that our customers have with new products and features, and first impressions are important. Samuel will give us tips on how to communicate to management ways to improve onboarding and increase activation and retention rates.

If you are looking for ways to improve retention rates and signups in your user onboarding, this seminar is for you.

We know as designers that there is a business value to thinking about the user experience. Experience maps, ecosystem maps, and customer journey maps are but a few of the tools that we use to visualize that user data and information. Within teams and especially when we include stakeholders, the act of mapping experiences helps us find a common understanding, says Jim Kalbach. We begin by researching and collecting accurate information grounded in reality before we enter a sense-making phase, when we look for patterns and common themes.

The diagrams that we make are compelling artifacts. But the answers that we seek cannot be found in the diagrams themselves but rather in the process of mapping information and engaging with others in discourse around it.

People support what they help to create and when we map user experiences as teams, including stakeholders, we draw individuals out of their heads, out of organizational silos, and into the room to work collaboratively and develop this shared understanding.

How we provide feedback to others matters as much—or more—as what we say, and ultimately contributes to the success of our work. Ahava Leibtag shares an approach for creating the right environment to give critical feedback without putting people on the defensive.

Watch this seminar if you would like to improve the way you deliver and receive critical feedback.

Information Architecture is a practice of arranging parts to make sense of a whole. Naming and cataloging information in a logical and simple framework is a critical step to creating an understanding between the content and our users, says Abby Covert.

Collaborative Information Architecture is a practice that draws stakeholders out of their respective silos within an organization, helps teams reach clarity on content and goals, and ultimately creates a common ground of understanding between all parties through the use of meeting facilitation, and visual diagrams that communicate complexity and resolve conflicts.

Collaborative IA can alleviate the following problems:

• Internal disputes over what to call things
• Lack of clarity over what things “are” within an organization (people often have a different understanding across departments)
• Overlapping functionality
• Lack of prioritization of audiences or goals
• Arguing about priority through a lens of organizational politics
• “This is how we’ve always done it” thinking
• “Lacksonomy” instead of taxonomy, when language and structure is developed organically and not thought-out

Qualitative and Quantitative research are powerful tools that help us understand our users, their motivations, and how they interact with our products. Laura Klein breaks down the difference between these two methodologies and provides us with a formula for how to use them to test and improve upon a specific experience along the user’s journey: the onboarding process.

Discover a framework for measuring the success of the onboarding process as well as specific tactics for teams to use to problem-solve weaknesses in their own onboarding and optimize products for success.

Which would improve your site more: a defined content strategy, or a redesign? Karen McGrane, in her interview with Jared Spool, “Integrating Content Strategy into Your Design Process,” makes the case that a redesign is not the universal fix-it-all that many companies desire, and that content strategy is often where groups should focus their effort.

“I think some of my love for content strategy in this day and age is, in a sense, acknowledging that in many situations a redesign is not the answer,” says Karen. She says that often times, her clients aren’t seeing the traffic that they expect on their site, and believe that the resources required by a major redesign will lead to gains.

But for many organizations, says Karen, “The effort that they should be putting in should be in their content.” Changing the design in major or minor ways is always an option, but “none of that is going to be worth it if you don’t have the content to back it up.”

Many businesses don’t know how to get to the root of the problem when the customer experience fails. With service design tools, we gain a full understanding of the environment in which our products live and are used by customers.

If you are curious about how service design works, or you are familiar with it and would like to learn more about service design tools, get started here.

There are four techniques, influenced by game thinking and design, which product developers can use to get them to a minimum viable product to test faster, says Amy Jo Kim. The most critical step of the four is finding your Core Loop.

What is the core loop? It’s the heart of your product, a series of actions that engages and delights your users and makes them want to return. A successful core loop drives long-term user engagement with a product.

So, how do you find it? Design your experience to evolve over time. This isn’t about designing how the product looks, but rather systems. Ask yourself what the customer’s experience with your product will be like, and how it will grow and evolve. Define what fun looks like for your audience. (It can mean different things to different people.) Then find and court early, passionate adopters of your product and seek their opinion.

That early feedback will be crucial to your product’s development. If you can nail these early customers, who are not always representative of your ultimate end-market, they become partners and collaborators in your product as it develops.

A common mistake in user onboarding design is an experience that shows complete user engagement with the product right out of the gates. A more successful approach, explains Samuel Hulick, starts where the user starts. In this approach, the onboarding design helps users move incrementally toward their next step, growing and adapting to the experience.

Map your users’ first experience with your product. Imagine what happens in their first sitting. If you use tool tips, don’t throw them at the user all at once. Deliver them one at a time, and make sure they are action-oriented. If you do use tool tips, expect them to be skipped, especially if they are not action-oriented.

People don’t buy products, Samuel explains. They buy better versions of themselves. What is the improvement that your product is providing? And how can you move your users toward that step?

From, “Growing Your User Base with Better Onboarding,” a virtual seminar with Samuel Hulick.

Visual models help us get unstuck when we rely too heavily on linear thinking or logic that ties us to certain assumptions or approaches in our problem solving. When we visually conceptualize ideas, we get out of our heads, arrange, interact, and share information in ways we might not otherwise consider.

You might have some hesitation about creating your own visual models, but Stephen Anderson strongly suggests you give it a try. Models help us see patterns in information, and combinations, that reveal new insights.

Many of use charts and diagrams, models and templates to track data or map a user experience—even visual models as simple as a Venn diagram or XY matrix. These are all highly useful methods to help us solve problems and create a new understanding of the work that we do.