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The UX team of one

Nov - 2020

Chapter 1 - UX 101

  • To be a UX Designer means to practice a set of methods and techniques for researching what users want and need, and to design products and services for them.
  • UX is the overall effect created by using the interactions and perceptions that someone has when using a product or service.
  • Most UX teams of one act as generalists, blending some or all of the most commons roles together.

Chapter 2 - Getting started

Typical UX process:

  • Discovery: Figuring out where you stand and what you need to do.
  • Stakeholder Interviews: Spending time with key decision makers to understand their expectations.
  • SWOT Analysis: Strengths, Weakness, Opportunities, Threats.
  • Requirements Gathering: The process of working with business to determine what must go in the product and how it must be implemented.
  • Strategy: Establishing a vision for the target user experience in order to design coherent and unified products.
  • Design Principle: A handful of characteristics of how the product design should be experienced by user.
  • Vision Artifacts: It gives a taste of how a person might experience a product. It might be in form of Diagrams, Schematics, Storyboards, Vision Movies.
  • Roadmaps: An analysis of what need to be built first, next and last.
  • User research: Learning about who your users are and what motivates them.
  • Primary User Research: Various methods for learning from users firsthand.
  • Secondary User Research: Publicly available research or research that's been conducted by other parts.
  • Personas, Mental Models and User Stories: What you've learned about user through primary and secondary research.
  • Design: Specifying how a user will encounter a product or service.
  • Information Architecture / Sitemap: Documentation of how the system is organized.
  • Process and Task Diagrams: How users will interact with the system step-by-step and how the system will adapt or respond.
  • Wireframes: Schematic diagrams of each page or state in the system.
  • Design Comps: A page exactly as it should look when implemented.
  • Detailed Specifications: Documentation of how the system should function.
  • Style and Pattern Guides: Documentation of standard conventions for repeatable patterns.
  • Prototypes: Functioning os semi-functioning examples.
  • Implementation: Ensuring that the design works for users.
  • Usability Testing: How easily people can use the design to accomplish anticipated tasks.
  • Implementation Oversight: Involvement between user experience designers and the engineering team.
  • Metrics / Analytics Tracking: Monitoring how people are using the product or service to identify opportunities.

You don't really need permission to be a UX team of one. You can infuse the UX philosophy into work that you're currently doing.

  • Find the parts of the product that everyone knows need improvement.
  • If you want people to get to buy into the concept of UX, you've got to be offering them something of value.
  • The negotiation should be how, instead of if.

Get to know your users - They are the core of user experience - Focus on getting started with user research.

  • Good products eventually becomes somewhat invisible.
  • Design products for and with users.
  • Data are people too.
  • A well-designed product enables a user to accomplish his goal efficiently and without confusion or disruption.
  • Real UX teams of one are committed to knowing not just "users" in the abstract, but the people who really use their products.
  • Figure out what you know and what you don't.
  • Do guerrilla research.
  • The challenge for UX professionals is to understand user needs well enough to look past the prosaic solutions to discover the elegant ones.
  • Sketch your ideas - It takes a lot of work to make something simple.
  • Enlist colleagues to generate design ideas.
  • Learn from other successful products - "What makes a particular design work?" When something doesn't work try to pinpoint why.
  • Design improvements often happen gradually, over time.

Chapter 3 - Building support for your work

  • Principles over process
  • Principles can keep the work anchored.
  • Principles can apply to not just what you make, but also how you make.
  • Invite people in - The more you can facilitate a cross-functional team, the more you will empower others to feel ownership and involvement in the process.
  • Make things together - How to accomplish that goal can become a battlefield of differing opinions.
  • Foster a constructive evolution of shared vision
  • Simply sketching out things is a great starting point. You can get even more creative and have a cross-functional team participate in collaborative design exercises, which are great for loosening people up and getting the ideas rolling.
  • Truly listen - Once all the information and viewpoints are understood, is to create a design solution that cleverly reconciles those tensions and produces a satisfying experience for users.
  • Letting the other guy do more of the talking and asking why whenever the opportunity arises.
  • Know when it's good enough - The work is never really done.
  • Committing yourself to the idea that it will be imperfect and that others will have good ideas fow how to improve it.
  • Dealing with people issues - Relationships are the most important means by which you can establish a foundation for UX.
  • Assume that everyone has good intentions and they try to see the situation from other people's perspectives rather than just their own.
  • It's only by working with others that we build unofficial and official support for UX
  • You must work with the resources that are available.
  • Pull the UX enthusiasts out of the woodwork and promote broader UX uptake within the company.
  • Invite them into your process and yourself into theirs so they get a better sense of what UX means and what value it provides.
  • Hone your sketching skills so you can turn any meeting into a design session.
  • Pre-meetings help you get people to commit their support for your approach prior to going in for the big reveal.
  • Find plain-English way to describe what you're attempting to do and speak to the outcome not just the process.
  • UX practioners, due to their focus on both user needs and business need, can provide a holistic view.
  • Suggest in a friendly fashion that the user experience of the product often benefits down the road from having UX involved in early stage efforts.
  • Help other see how UX impacts the process - Make it clear how UX changes the established process.
  • Position yourself as someone who can share internal knowledge.
  • See it as an opportunity to learn.
  • Work with them rather than against them.
  • Stay actively involved so you can own and direct how the work gets executed.
  • Treat this as a teachable moment to expose others to what user-centered design really entails.
  • Give the team an understanding of what needs to be improved.
  • People love stories, case studies and stories give people a memorable narrative that they can envision themselves in.
  • Shared experiences (even minor ones) turn co-workers into allies.

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