How I stopped Designing and Started to love my Developers!

I stopped designing and my developers started to love me!

“I facilitate & guide teams to build usable products & services”

Praneet Koppula

Senior UX SpecialistMathWorks Inc.

@mphaxise

UX Designer at UX Consultancy

2006

CX Managerat Telco

2010 2012

UX Specialistat Product Companies

present

Businesses

UX’er the Grey: Gatekeepers to keep bad design choices away

UXCustomers

“A company has to believe that user experience is part of broader recipe for success”

-Jeff Gothelfhttp://www.jeffgothelf.com/blog/there-is-no-such-thing-as-ux-strategy

Businesses

UX’er the White: Support the orchestration of organizational resources to deliver great experiences

UXCustomers

“We describe the role of the “User Experience Architect’s Office”, which works across the divisions, helping to harmonize the human interface and industrial design process across the divisions of Apple and ATG.”

-Don Normanhttp://www.sigchi.org/chi95/proceedings/orgover/dan_bdy.htm

Responsibility of delivering a delightful experience through the product cannot be with a person or a team

Persuading teams is one of the top UX activityTop 10 UX activities that UX Designers do:1. Present solutions / concepts2. Persuade others3. Analyze tasks or activities4. Build prototype or wireframes5. Collaborate with subject matter experts6. Gather requirements7. Specify interaction design8. Conduct in-person usability studies9. Make storyboards, user journeys, flow diagrams10. Perform design reviews or heuristic evaluations

-UX Careers Survey

Nielsen Norman Group

What new skills do UXers have to learn?

What new processes allow us to do our jobs more efficiently?

What new skills do UXers have to learn?

Inward Empathy!

Building Empathy

How we see people isn't necessarily how they see themselves. We need to learn to see them the way they do.

Empathy towards inward teams

Know the teams’ mission/objectives

Understand their goals/task flows/pain points

Practice active listening with colleagues in cross functional teams

Know when to push / pull back

What new processes allow us to do our jobs more efficiently?

Research & Testing

Documenting research for what reasons?

“ .. You will be recording right, I will go through the recordings next week…”

“… can you summarise your findings in bullet points in an email…”

Research & Testing

Involve your project team in the research and testing phases.

Video recording is not a substitute for attending research.

Buy-in for both budgets and resource time for research.

Case Study 1 : GrameenPhone

“Data collection and on site visits done by the product managers/dev, UX team facilitates and trains them on moderation”

Benefit:“Drastically reduce idea to execution”A strategic new business user voice plan was released in record time giving the organization first mover advantage.

Case Study 2 : MathWorks

“ UX team will test designs/software only if there is at least 1 team member observing”

Benefit:“No more long hours of report generation and convincing teams about your design decisions”

Who owns the design?

Who owns the design?

Responsibility vs ownership

Be an advocate of the user

Let go of the design: Design owned by the team- your design tools play a major part: low vs high fidelity - hand hold your team during the initial steps- let them create the design artifacts

Designing Interfaces with or by Developers

Using paper/whiteboards gets everyone to participate

Wireframing tools are great for documenting digitally only!

Let your developers design the UI first as part of their process

“Designing in the Browser”

Building EHQ Mobile

Day 1: Ideation Day 26: Demo Day 86: Final Launch

Conceptualization and Story Boarding

Paper Prototypes

Day 1

Building EHQ Mobile : Design Workshop

Design workshop agenda:- Brainstorm - Affnitization- Story Boarding- Paper Prototypes

Design workshop outcomes:

- Problem and pain points clearly defined- Project plan with priorities- Everyone knew what was being built

Day 6

Winner

Building EHQ Mobile : Visual Design

Day 26

Building EHQ Mobile : Demo for Testing

Day 86Entire App Mobile Ready + Visual Refinements

Building EHQ Mobile : Final Launch

“Some user experience skills are always better than no user experience skills.With no UX skills on the team, there’s a good chance that whatever the team produces will have a poor UX. Probably close to a 100%. Any designs that aren’t a poor UX are just accidents that work out in the users’ favor.”

-Jared Spoolhttps://medium.com/@jmspool/hiring-ux-experts-versus-giving-your-team-their-own-ux-skills-c1fd9e4e480

I will try not to say “IT DEPENDS”