The AYCL Blog

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.”

In this seminar, Josh Seiden shows you that Lean UX does scale, and can be just as effective in those larger organizations. Attend this seminar and be sure your work is making a difference.

Josh Seiden will show you how to apply Lean UX in organizations of any size.

In this seminar, Jonathon Colman shares a framework that anyone can use to build useful, usable content experiences for products. You'll learn the principles of content strategy for interfaces by looking at several real-world examples.

If you want to learn how to build better product experiences, this seminar is for you.

With a little care and some tough love, you can improve the form completion rates on your site. You might even make them fun.

How? Start by humanizing the language in your forms. Approach the content as a conversation you would like to have with your audience, and use language they would use.

Eliminate the clutter and noise of multiple fields and focus your user’s attention on the information you need to gather. Make every field fight for its existence.

This can be hard, as forms often represent an amalgamation of “asks” across an organization. You’ll need to fight the good fight and argue for clarity, precision, and laser-like focus. Pare-down fields to the bare minimum and remove anything that isn’t required.

Make sure it’s clear to users what they need to be doing, and why it benefits them to share their information with you.

Design challenges are becoming more complex as services are more interconnected across channels both digital and physical—and more importantly across time and space. In this seminar, Chris Risdon shows us how to make sense of all the moving parts of this increasingly complex system. Discover how to unite customer experience, service design, and user experience teams for a holistic approach.

If you want to design less for features and screens and more for holistic experiences, this seminar is for you.

How do you find and mentor user experience talent either within your design team or while interviewing candidates? What will make the next generation of UX All-Stars? Fred Beecher has some tips.

Fred believes UX professionals possess four traits that make them good at what they do. These aren’t the kind of traits you find in actual designs. These traits are reflected in the designer’s approach to work, what motivates them, and the way that they think.

Fred suggests we look for the following in UX design candidates:

• Is this person intrinsically motivated?
• Are they people-centered? A good designer always has the user in mind.
• Are they curious, specifically about technology and people?
• Do they have thick skin to handle critical feedback?

Even the most talented UX designers make mistakes, but the best of them know that mistakes can come with the territory and it’s our desire to remain curious, accept criticism, and move forward, using the methods we have at hand to improve our work.

Imagine moving effortlessly from device to device without interruption, throwing content from one to another, or shaking a transaction from your phone to your laptop. The technology we need to build tomorrow's interactions is already here in our pockets, on our desks, and in our homes.

Step away from desktop and mobile screens and explore the ever-expanding world of off-screen digital interactions. A world that sets users free from the "tyranny of the screen" and pushes the limits of what we think is possible.

This exercise will help teams develop a shared understanding of their product’s purpose, and the phases of the user life cycle.

Ask everyone on the team to answer each of the following six questions—quietly— on individual sticky notes. If they don’t know the answers, challenge them to get creative.

1. Awareness​: How will people hear about your product?
2. Education​: How will people learn what your product does?
3. Engagement​: How will you predict a visitor will become active?
4. Conversion​: How will you get contact data from visitors?
5. Revenue​: How will you make money?
6. Recurrence​: What makes someone a repeated user?

When they are finished, have the team place their notes on the whiteboard under each category. Arrange the order of the categories as they relate to the user journeys of your target audience groups. While all of your users won’t make it through the life cycle as you’ve defined it, quantitative metrics will help you identify where they are getting stuck.

adapted from “Planning Your User’s Path Together,” a virtual seminar by Laura Klein.

Cyd Harrell has the insider's scoop on how to design and execute mobile research that gets you the most usable data for your money—in the lab or out in the field. Great mobile research gets you more than just the A's to your Q's. It tells you whether the site, app, or product you're building will actually solve the real-life problems your users face.

If you’ve got the basics down, but want to uplevel your mobile research, spend an hour with Cyd Harrell and you’ll be well on your way.