Brian Dys

Category: User Experience Design

  • UX Workshop with Elizabeth Baylor – Day 1

    The design team at PayMaya had the opportunity to have a two-day workshop with Elizabeth Baylor—a senior UX researcher at Google.

    Day 1 topics covered the following:

    • UX Process
    • Usability and Usefulness
    • Generative and Confirmatory Research

    The Curse of Knowledge

    We assume that others think like we do but that is only an assumptions. Here is where research comes in handy—to test our assumptions.

    UX Process

    Two keywords in UX: effective and delightful. People’s experiences in using a product or service must be effective (doesn’t waste time while achieving their goals) and delightful (makes them feel good while doing it).

    In UX Research, the effectiveness and delightfulness of solutions must be backed by insights and data. Success metrics is measured.

    1. Discover
    What’s the problem?    		2. Explore
    Conceptualize on the possible solutions
    4. Iterate
    Polish the solution    		3. Design
    Implement solution based on a concept that works

    When you’ve invested time in discovery and exploration and the solutions failed during implementation, it is easier to look into the implementation phase for improvements rather than attributing the failure due to a bad concept.

    During the design and iteration phase, you’re already testing for usability and polishing the solution.

    Usability and Usefulness

    During the Discovery and Exploration phases, it is better to test for usefulness, then during the Design and Iteration, the usefulness and usability. Test them separately in order to easily attribute where the problem lies

    1. Discover
    Usefulness    		2. Explore
    Usefulness
    4. Iterate
    Usefulness and usability    		3. Design
    Usefulness and usability

    Usability (Problem)

    Imagine an ice cream dropped and melting on the group—generally inedible and it’s a problem when the goal is ice cream consumption.

    Can users successfully reach their goals while using the product or service?

    Six to eight users (anyone) could be recruited to test the product—enough to uncover 85% of usability problems.

    Usefulness (Preference)

    Imagine your favorite ice cream flavor—each person has his/her own. Flavor, in this example, is a preference.

    In testing for usefulness, sampling matters. Recruit who’s in scope and know who’s out of scope. Identify your primary and secondary target users.

    Generative and Confirmatory Research

    Generative: Discovering new ideas

    • Literature review
    • Contextual inquiry (observation)
    • User interviews (open-ended, ethnographic)
    • Focus groups
    • Free listing
    • Card sorting (open, unconstrained)
    • Photovoice
    • Diary studies

    Confirmatory: Selecting right idea

    • Behavioral observations (quantitative)
    • Structured interviews
    • Rating and ranking tasks
    • Card sorting (closed, constrained)
    • Usability studies
    • A/B testing
    • Surveys

    Conclusion

    Test your assumptions.

    Put pain points to a test.

    Avoid self-centered design.

    You are not the user.

    Your solution is only as good as your understanding of the problem.

    Research’s effectiveness lies in the right sample and the right method.

  • Uncoordinated Stream of Design Deliverables

    I have often seen UX designers present bewildered development teams with an uncoordinated stream of design deliverables that define what they need to build—for example, Adobe Photoshop or XD screen designs, Figma prototypes, Confluence documents, and Excel spreadsheets, along with some hand-coded HTML and JavaScript. Plus, UX teams often seem oblivious or uncaring about the problems their use of multiple, disparate tools causes development teams. Indeed, development teams themselves are sometimes unaware that their job could be so much easier if UX teams used fewer tools and used their tools in a more coordinated manner.

    Ritch Macefield in User Experience and the Big Picture, Part 1: Problems, Problems

  • Learnings and Reminders

    The minimum size of an Active Area (AA)

    Ideally, it is 48 x 48 pixels. However, there are elements that needs to be smaller in relation to other elements with it—with this consideration, we could go down until 32 x 32 pixels.

    The cohesion between two UI elements

    In order to show cohesion and relation between two UI elements, we could use proximity—place the element near each other. However, when there are more important considerations like if space won’t permit one element to be there, we could use motion to cue that those two elements belong together.

    Recency

    The elements in relation to the user’s “now”.

    Contextual

    Elements that are there only when you need it and also there when you thought you didn’t need it.

    Numbers 3 and 4 fall under Relevance.

    Outcomes Over Features

    The outcome most teams are aiming for is a change in behaviour. The outcome you want will depend on your business or organisation: it might be selling more dog food, getting people to sign up to a monthly donation to your charity, or opting for mediation over court in their separation. Source

    Shareability of Content

    When deciding the number of characters an item could have, consider thinking about it being in other platforms.