The AYCL Blog

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.

Demand for UX talent is huge. You can wait around for the supply to catch up, or you can be proactive and play Sensei to the next generation of UX unicorns. But now that everyone wants to tack “UX” onto their job title, how can you separate the wannabe’s from the gonna-be’s?

Fred Beecher , who nurtures fledgling UX designers at The Nerdery, recommends looking for folks who are:

Intrinsically motivated: These folks are dying to break into UX. They seek you out. By email. At conferences. During the work day. They’re always hanging around, asking questions, and showing an interest in the UX team’s work. They read books about it and participate in community on their own. They’re going to pursue their UX dreams, with or without you.

People-centered: They understand that great design solves users’ problems, so they seek input and feedback from people at every stage of the process. They’re sensitive to the needs of all of their users and stakeholders, and they balance them judiciously.

Curious: Great UX’ers are full of questions. “What if we tried it this way instead?” “Wouldn’t it be cool if we could use X to solve for Y?” “Why isn’t this working?” They’re curious about people, about technology, and about how to bring them together to make life less frustrating.

Criticism-tolerant: Learning a new skills usually involves a decent number of fails and misfires. You want someone who can take criticism without being defensive. Someone who see negative feedback as a tool to make the work better.

adapted from “Teaching UX,” a Virtual Seminar by Fred Beecher.

You can fail from lack of trying or you can fail trying to make big things happen. When failures come with hard work and learning—they're the kind worth celebrating. Christina Wodtke has been using Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) to build teams that enjoy a shared purpose and phenomenal success.

Objectives and Key Results is a system that causes little disruption and has a huge positive impact. OKRs were developed by Intel and adopted by Google, and are currently utilized by a growing number of successful Silicon Valley companies. It’s your turn!

Bruce McCarthy delves into big-picture business goals and fast, low-risk ways to test ideas--such as prototyping--that might achieve your goals. After all, there’s no quicker way to learn if you’ve got a winner than to show something to a customer and ask them if it solves their problem.

If you feel like you’re being asked for an endless list of features--or designing those features without the context of “why,” then watch Bruce’s seminar.

Intranets have five purposes: Content, communication, collaboration, culture, and activity. At their worst, they’re cluttered “employee bulletin boards.” At their best, they’re well-organized compendia of information — tools that boost connection and collaboration, linking people, insights, and experience.

Intranet teams should focus on delivering business value. Organizations are made of people who work with other people. So maybe content isn't king -- maybe people are king. Don’t just give your people a static repository of news, forms, policies, and procedures. Make your intranet an essential part of their day-to-day work life. Make it integral to getting the job done.

Your intranet has to serve your business. Defining that core business is your first step. Then, sit down with stakeholders and ask, “What does our intranet need to be? What key activities does it have to support? How can we help the people who do the actual work to work together?”

adapted from “Bringing Order to Your Intranet,” a Virtual Seminar by James Robertson

Listen to Ben Callahan to hear his tips and techniques—from giving and receiving design critiques to pitching ideas before they’re fully baked—to establish a responsive workflow that’s focused on the end product. You’ll learn to bridge communication gaps, establish clear design goals, and build trust between management and project teams.

If you feel like you’re in an endless cycle of making design deliverables and sitting in exhausting meetings, then it’s time to get responsive with Ben.

How many times have you gone to a conference and come home with a shiny new research tool you’re just dying to use? It might be the newest tool in your box but that doesn’t make it the right one for the job. And, you might actually be using the wrong toolbox altogether.

Most user research is Qualitative, Evaluative, and Solution-framed.

• We look at why users do certain things, taking note of patterns, regularity, and differences.
• We look at how well things are working, whether or not they’re supporting the needs of our users.
• We ask questions about offerings and solutions that already exist.

Coming at your user research from a different perspective may yield richer insights.

In this seminar, Noah Iliinsky helps you identify the value in your data and showcase it through user-friendly designs tailored to your audience. Draw from the science of cognitive perception to make design decisions based on user behavior.

Ever wish someone could teach you best practices for data visualizations so you could talk about them with your organization? Watch Noah's recording.

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,” says Will Evans.

Lean UX is the perfect disaster-avoidance technique.

• You start with one customer—your end user.
• You do your research and figure out the number one problem they have with your product or service.
• You take a guess at what you could do to solve that problem.
• 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.