The AYCL Blog

Picture a massive pile of LEGO bricks dumped out on a table. Now imagine those same bricks separated, organized by color or size or function. How much easier is it to build when the components you need are right at hand?

Pattern libraries are a great way to start “sorting the pile,” but they don’t always go far enough.

You don’t really see how these things get used. You don’t see these things in context. You don’t see how these basic LEGO blocks combine together to form the final interface.

With atomic design, you can see how the components fit together—how they interact with each other. You can create consistent, cohesive experiences. And ultimately, you end up with a robust system that the client can use in the future, versus a handful of page templates that only work with the current use case.

How to make a website: discover, define, design, develop, deploy. It's a familiar framework for most of our project processes. In this seminar, Kristina Halvorson walks us through a typical website project to demonstrate why, how, where, and when content strategy happens—and how you can do it in your organization, too.

Watch to see what kind of content is useful and usable, and how content already influences your user and business goals.

Startups come and startups go. But have you ever stopped to think about why they go, why they weren’t successful enough to stick around? The vast majority of projects fail not because people couldn’t build a great product using the latest technology. They failed because we built something nobody wanted.

Lean UX is the perfect disaster-avoidance technique.

1. You start with one customer—your end user.
2. You do your research and figure out the number one problem they have with your product or service.
3. You take a guess at what you could do to solve that problem.
4. You run your “hypothesis” through the “think, make, check” cycle to see if your guess was right.

If it was, congratulate yourself. If it wasn’t, go back and start over.

You know that accessibility is important, but somewhere along the way it got an undeserved reputation for being ugly, costly, and driven only by technical-compliance requirements.

Derek Featherstone is going to show you how beautiful, inexpensive, and user-experience-driven accessibility truly is when it's addressed early.

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.

If your team has been practicing some form of Agile or Scrum, it likely has a very loose definition of an MVP, a Minimal Viable Product.  If your iteration planning tends to focus on timelines, feature sets, and estimates--rather than on the value to the customer of whatever you’re building - then it’s time to spend 90 minutes with Will Evans.

If your team is more focused on “ship date” than creating real customer value, watch this seminar.

Great UX design influences one video game becoming a cultural icon while another lands in the $5 bin at GameStop. So what cues can we take from these popular games—and from this technology-driven industry that so closely parallels our own?

Watch Steph Hay's seminar to see how to apply content-first UX design and contextual learning.

Great designs connect us emotionally to a product. Within milliseconds, we form opinions that influence our engagement and understanding of what we see. The longer we are exposed to something, the more we grow to like it and the farther we move away from our original gut reaction. It’s called the “Mere Exposure Effect.”

As designers, we often look to the user for answers. Leah Buley argues that relying on customer data alone, “squanders [an] opportunity to foster an environment where we talk about the design together and we put forth strong points of view about what good looks like.”

This is the point when we need to get back to our gut instincts. Leah has an approach that she uses called “The Blink Test” to harness that initial impression we have and to observe what it tells us.

Close your eyes, step back, and take a moment. Then open your eyes and listen to what you are feeling. Observe that first moment and ask yourself the following questions:

• What do I notice?
• How does this feel?
• Is this prototypical?
• What can I do?

Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) are a powerful management strategy that companies as large as Alphabet (Google) and Intel use to align their efforts across teams to reach business goals.

So, what are they? Begin by defining a qualitative objective. The objective is your big idea, the brass ring. Your key results are the quantitative measures you need to reach to support your objective. Key results are not tasks. They are signs and metrics that place you on the right track. Focus on only one objective and attach no more than three key results to reach each quarter. Unite the company around them, and let the results define your success.

Do fewer things and do them better:

• Meet each week with your team to review if the group is taking care of what matters.
• Schedule how you'll meet your goals, and help teams prepare for what you are doing.
• Build dedication to goals and the team.
• Celebrate on Fridays with demos and check-ins. Let teams share their progress, from business development and sales to design and engineering.
• Communicate your goal and the OKRs each week with team status emails.

Aviva Rosenstein will show you how to clarify roles and responsibilities, and more effectively track and estimate UX work. You’ll also hear case studies of companies that brought teams together to work more collaboratively, iteratively, and harmoniously in an Agile process.

If your product discussions feel more like territorial battles than progressive UX design, you'll want your team watching this seminar.

In this expanded version of the presentation voted most informative at ProductCamp DC 2014, Bruce McCarthy explores 12 common roadmap roadblocks and their sensible solutions.

If your progress journey has been slow and rough, spend an hour with Bruce and get the insight you need to clear the way.

We’ve all sat through our share of interminable, unproductive meetings. If we’re lucky, we’ve also experienced the opposite, meetings where our team is completely in synch and getting things done.

According to Kevin Hoffman, the difference between those two types of meetings is the ability to practice what he calls co-design. Co-design can happen whether you’re working remotely or in the same physical space. What matters is that your team is thinking and functioning collaboratively.

Kevin uses The Marshmallow Challenge to demonstrate the power of co-design. The challenge involves building a freestanding tower out of uncooked pasta that can bear the weight of a marshmallow.

In his challenges, the winning teams are the ones that exhibit the key facets of co-design: jump in, take risks, learn from failures, consider the input and perspectives of everyone on the team, and work as fast as they can to build the “minimum viable product.”