An Experience Design approach that blends innovative, creative design thinking methods with the delivery methods of agile, lean and continuous is the most efficient and effective way to design, develop and deliver compelling experiences that delight customers and drive business success.

What’s in a name?
Experience design is the creative process to design human-system interactions that shape perceptions and influence emotional responses and behaviour. As a discipline it has evolved and merged with a number of disciplines over time. Perhaps it’s strongest influence stems back from the world of human-computer interaction (HCI). One of the key components of HCI is to make the design process human-centred, so that it’s always focussed on the human activity and the goals that the users want to achieve.
While experience design evolves as a design discipline, the most recent influences that are shaping design methods have come from outside the design industry. Process methods such as ‘agile’, which came from the IT industry and ‘lean’, which came from large-scale manufacturing are now shaping both business and design thinking.

For over ten years there has been a groundswell of change within IT delivery methods. As a result the industry has seen the widespread adoption of ‘agile’ and its derivative methods. Agile is a set of guidelines, written in the agile manifesto, for the collaborative development of software that focuses on delivering value rather than features, that delivers working software in frequent incremental chunks, rather than in the more traditional, risk-fraught, big-bang way.

Lean on the other hand, came from the manufacturing industry, is focussed on delivering value in the most efficient and effective way. Its philosophy is based on ‘just-in-time’ principles, or manufacturing when it’s needed, thus seeking to reduce waste in any form, be it effort, materials time and costs.
Both agile and lean are all-inclusive environments. Where once experience design practitioners were used to designing in ‘design phases’ of the project in the comfort of their design studios, they found that they were hoisted out of their comfort zones and expected to work in these new collaborative multi-disciplined environments. Some practitioners who recognised the need for change, saw the benefits and advantages that these new methods offered. Experience Design practitioners who have an appreciative understanding of lean and agile have been seeking to ‘redesign design’ and move away from the practice designing in isolation and in advance of development and instead are adapting experience design to fit within agile and lean frameworks.

One of the underlying principles of both methods is ‘continuous’.  The agile manifesto recommends that we strive for ‘early and continuous delivery of valuable software’ and lean talks about the practice of ‘continuous improvement’ or ‘kaizen’. ‘Continuous’ is most relevant in this the digital age, where the notion of the ‘deadline’, as once enforced by the production schedules of the large industrial machines, is almost obsolete. ‘Continuous’ is iterative and evolutionary and change is built into the process as a priority requirement, rather than something that is prevented or discouraged.

Interestingly there are strong parallels in the design industry. ‘Design methods’, which emerged in the 1960s, is the discipline that looks at the processes and techniques for creative problem solving. Design methods (see Jones, J.C. 1970 and Cross, N. 1989) has always advocated an iterative and evolutionary approach to creative problem solving especially as it pertains to product development and engineering. Likewise, the disciplines of human-computer interaction (HCI) and user-centred design (UCD) have instilled an evolutionary approach, augmented by ‘test and learn’ methods. This is where possible design solutions are tested with end users of the intended product to ensure that it is fit for purpose and meets the users needs.

And so by combining design methods with lean and agile methods the practise of ‘continuous design’ is now emerging. Continuous design is a philosophical and practical approach that uses empirical techniques as well as qualitative and quantitative data to continuously steer experience, service and product design and development.

The continuous design approach is applicable at any point in the design development lifecycle. You can take the approach at the start of a ‘green fields’ project or apply it down the track when looking to improve existing products. To look at how to apply continuous design we’ll start by looking at a green-fields project and take you through the process.

Validate the opportunity or problem space
During the early part of the process you need to look to discover why there is an opportunity or a problem. Don’t just take it as gospel. Question everything. Be almost child-like in your pursuit of the answer. Use all the sources available, including internal and external stakeholders, market and competitor intelligence and key to the continuous design approach the customer perspective. You need to understand who the new or existing customers are. This is not just demographic information but you need to know what drives them, what influences them, what makes them tick and what turns them off. You need to develop a sense of empathy, which also needs to be shared by everyone on the project team. Once you have collected all your data you need to understand what it’s telling you. You need to analyse it, look for insights and develop a hypothesis about the opportunity. We call it a hypothesis because we acknowledge that at this point it’s just a best guess based on what we have learnt so far.
A primary objective in continuous design is to validate any hypothesis as quickly as possible in order that we can either ‘fail-fast’, change direction or scale quickly. Underpinning the continuous philosophy is the lean mantra of avoiding waste. We don’t want to spend lots of time, effort and money on something if we are uncertain it will deliver the expected results. So we need to test early and test often.

Design Thinking – where magic happens
While having a plethora of data is great, it’s true value is in understanding the patterns and stories that inspire action.  Armed with customer insights, understanding of context and our product hypothesis, we can set about envisioning the solution. Here’s where the art part comes in. We use design-thinking methods to explore the opportunity space. We might start by using divergent thinking techniques to explore the opportunities available. We combine this with visual communication to rapidly sketch out ideas to inspire further development or tangential ideas from the team.

Once upon a time ago, design was done in a creative vacuum by creative people, however in the world of continuous design anyone who is willing to think creatively about the problem or opportunity space is welcome. This collaboration can include anyone on the project team from subject matter or functional experts that are part of the project team or anyone who has direct contact with customers, such as sales or customer service people. After a time-boxed period of thinking broadly, we assess all the ideas and start to converge on the ideas with the most promise. We then take those ideas refine them and add a little more rigour around the thinking.

Design, test and learn
This is the first opportunity to get out of the office and test the concepts with the target market. We take our strongest candidate ideas and seek to validate our thinking with customers. This process of explore, test and learn underpins the whole philosophy of continuous design. The idea is to avoid creating waste in terms of time, effort and money by developing the detail of a product until we have first validated that the concept is viable. Everything that way has done to this point has been an assumption, or guesswork and now what we want is proof that we are on the right track with the right idea.

Testing your concepts with customers is not an automatic tick in the box. You need to be prepared for failure, if it happens. Just because you, or someone on the team thinks it’s a good idea, it doesn’t mean that customers will agree. However the key point it is better to find out the idea is not a good one as early as possible so that you can change direction or drop the idea altogether before you have spent too much time or effort on it. With the right mindset you can still view failed ideas as a positive experience because you have new learnings and a new set of information which you can add to your knowledge base. Like Thomas Edison once said, "I have not failed. I've just found 10,000 ways that won't work."

Continuous Improvement
The design, test and learn approach does not just happen once. In agile development environments it happens every ‘iteration’ or even as often as weekly. We want to continuously build up design knowledge and confidence that we are delivering the right product for the right people at the right time. We apply the techniques throughout the project and also beyond once the product or service is launched. In fact, the live environment is the best environment for truly understanding how customers are interacting and responding to the product, service or experience. Therefore we need to be in a position to continuously monitor and measure the experience so that we can adapt and refine where the results are less than optimal.

To have the most benefit we need to be in a position where we can deliver improvements almost in real-time, rather than having to wait for the next infrequent production release cycle. To do this we combine the continuous design, test and learn approach with continuous delivery– “releasing high quality software fast through build, test and deployment automation”.

Continuous improvement is a seismic shift for organisations. It requires operational, cultural and process changes across the board. However it is the most effective way to reduce risk and waste while delivering compelling products and experience rapidly to market.

I just stumbled on myself on YouTube talking about 'Agility and the Customer Experience'. Check it out.

Cate Trotter from Insider Trends was also presenting at theThoughtWorks Retail Agility conference the other day. Being a big fan ofWilliam Gibson’s ‘Pattern Recognition’ series I was very excited to meet areal-life ‘cool-hunter’.
Cate’s day job is looking for trends, looking for patternsthat exist in subcultures that will come to influence main stream culture. Shetakes businesses on ‘trend tours’, to show them where the hip and happeningstarts.  She had a dizzying amountof great examples of cutting edge inovation in the retail sector that drivesnot just compelling customer experiences but also disruptive experiences. Realcreative ways of engaging customers and creating buzz. 
One of the underlyingthemes that seemed to emerge for me was the subtle shift away from ‘hard sell’and the focus on the immediate returns, to building brand and relationships ina more meaningful and engaging way. Which in the current economic climate isnot only refreshing but a very insightful strategy for long term survival.While most retailers are scrabbling to claim their share of shoppers’ limitedwallet with sales, discounts and ‘special-purchase’ cheap and nasty give-aways,to secure short-term income, some creating brand experiences that willencourage loyalty long after the event is over. 
Take Airwalk as a greatexample: They created and ‘Invisible Pop‐Up Store’ enhanced with augmentedreality to create buzz around the very limited edition Goldrun sneaker. So cool! Or Wetseal, who have taken theconcept of user-generated content and have created the capability to ‘crowdsource’outfits.
Big thanks to Cate.

I presented at the ThoughtWorks Retail Agility Conference onAgile Experience Design. Specifically I was looking at how retailers can takeadvantage of AXD to design, develop and deliver compelling, shopper-centric,omni-channel experiences that delight customers and drive business success.I’ve been doing experience design for a long time. I’ve beendoing agile experience design for a sizeable proportion of that time. When Iwas preparing the presentation I got that pre-presentation feeling, similar tothe pre-publication feeling I got when reading the draft manuscript of ourAgile Experience Design book. I was worried that I had nothing to say. I’vebeen doing this stuff for so long that it has just become second nature to me andfeels like common sense.
But no fear! A number of people approached me immediatelyafter the presentation and thanked me for talking about the approach, about howinspirational it was and how it’s really got them thinking about how they cando things differently and most important, make a difference. Perhaps to otherexperienced practitioners in the same field, what I’m talking about isn’tnecessarily all that different but it certainly seems to make a difference tomany of the business and IT people that I meet along the way.
I guess that is similar to what James Box and Cennydd Bowles said in their book ‘Undercover User Experience Design’, “The fundamentals of UX design…are easy to learn but difficult to put intopractice.” So I guess what I bring to the table is the benefit of my experienceand the context of all of my learnings in different situations.

Wow how remiss of me! I have completely failed to blog aboutmy biggest project of last year – the book! In November last year (2011) Marc McNeil and I published Agile Experience Design: A digital designers guide to agile, lean and continuous. To our knowledge it’s the first book to marketabout the topic of experience design in agile.
How it came aboutThere has been a lot of banter on the subject for a goodnumber of years on various SIG groups, and lots of great presentations deliveredat various conferences and published on the web that have sought to explain howto marry the two. However there was no one go to comprehensive reference point.I remember when I started with ThoughtWorks (agile customsoftware experts) as the only UX person in Australia wishing that I could finda definitive guide book on how to do UX in an agile environment. It is a verydifferent way of working but I was keenly aware that someone somewhere musthave solved the problem, and that I didn’t need to work it out for myself. Thebook ended up being the book I wished that I could have read back then.
I joined forces with Marc when I moved back from Australiato the UK and realised we were aligned in our thinking on the subject. We werealso still surprised that no one had published a book on the subject and so weset about doing just that.
An non-movable feastFrom start to finish we had FIVE months. Prior to signingthe contract I talked to Martin Fowler and Jez Humble,both successful authors, about the timescales and the unanimous opinion wasthat we were mad! Jez said ‘ You need at least 18 months to write the firstdraft, then you need some decompression time, then you need time to rewrite andedit.’ So we went back to the publisher, in the hope of revising the proposedpublication date. However we were faced with a ‘deal or no deal’. Marc and Iboth laughed and agreed that we might as well die trying as not try at all.
A very non-agile processIn agreeing to the terms we were also asked to commit to thelength of the book. At this point all we had written was two paragraphsdescribing the essence of the book. We had no idea. I flicked through a coupleof notable books on my shelf, of the ilk that I thought ours might be, stuck afinger in the air and suggested 100,000 words. When we submitted our firstdraft, it was 135,000 words long. Naively we had not appreciated that 100,000words had been cast in stone. We then had a very tough process to cut 35,000words (over a third of the final book) from the manuscript (and still deliveron time).
Concurrent workingSo five months is a doable time-frame, just, if you are afull-time author perhaps. But hey, we both had full-time jobs. This is the job thatgive us the experience and expertise to be able to write books. We both alsohave families. So we begged borrowed and stole time and worked bloody hard forfive intense months to produce the book. We are grateful to our families inparticular who made the bulk of the sacrifices, for allowing us to realise ourambition.
Collaborative andfeedback drivenTwo aspects that were sacrificed as a result of the timeframewas the ability to collaborate and also solicit feedback from peers andcolleagues on the work in progress. We started off with the best of intentionsand were able to include some contributions and get some feedback, but not asmuch as we might have liked. If word count and time had permitted we would haveliked to have included more anecdotes and lessons learnt from other practitioners.
Test and learnThis book was only ever intended as a guide, rather than arecipe book. It would be a contradiction in terms to say that there’s a onesize fits all approach to agile experience design. Every project will bedifferent because of the budget, timescales and people/process/technologyconstraints. However to stay true to the nature of agile experiencedesign I’m keen to hear about people’s experiences and how they have aplied,adopted or adapted some of the concepts and ideas in the book. I promise toshare the finding and attribute them to the contributers either on theaccompanying website (if I ever get the time to add some content to it) orperhaps even in version 2.0.

One the most undervalued roles in a web or software development team is that of a Copy Writer/Content Strategist.  Having a skilled specialist on a team who is able to set the tone of the conversation with users and ensure that it is consistent across the site can make the difference between a mediocre or great product.

Unfortunately, it’s rare to have a dedicated Copy Writer on a team unless the product is either content heavy or marketing driven. Largely the duty of authoring all those small but important bits of text tends to fall to the User Experience Designer and Product Manager/client when creating and reviewing wireframes.

In the worst-case scenario it gets left with the Devs to do when they are building pages. In this case instructional text, error messages, field labels, etc. end up sounding like the have been written by an emotionless robot. This is not a slight aimed at the English skills of my technically minded colleagues, but more a reality of what happens when copy is produced as a by-product of writing functional code.

Recently a colleague of mine, Meaghan Waters, shared a set of content writing guidelines, which had previously been shared with her by an old colleague, Amy Teshio.

It has some great tips and reminders on how to write compelling content. I found it so valuable and helpful that I had to share it here as well:

Clear, Compelling, Concise

Like most things in life, good writing is about thinking and feeling:

• If you can think clearly, you can write clearly.
• If you are passionate about what you have to say, your text can be compelling.
• If you can be dispassionate about how you’ve said it, your text can be concise.

Some tips:

Believe in your message.

Trusts its value. Let it speak for itself. Tell stories. Know when to move from information, to story, to visual rendition, back to information, etc. (or consult with others).

Get it down on screen/paper, then revise.

Let the flurry happen. Put it aside and come back with fresher eyes. Consult with our editorial team. Give yourself enough time to draft, consult, revise. Writing is different from editing. Don’t try to do them simultaneously.

Edit, edit, edit.

Remember, just because you are reluctant to give up a particularly nice word, sentence or paragraph doesn’t mean the reader will miss it. If you are having trouble giving it up, copy it to a separate file and make it your own buried treasure.

“Vigorous writing is concise. A sentence should contain no unnecessary word, a paragraph no unnecessary sentence, for the same reason that a drawing should have no unnecessary lines and a machine no unnecessary parts.”
William Strunk, Jr., The Elements of Style

Vary your sentence length.

Mix up the rhythm. It keeps it interesting and sounds less robotic.

As a general rule, a good sentence contains one idea.

If you have another idea to convey, start a fresh sentence.

Find your voice and stay with it.

Know your audience.
Voice should reflect subject matter.
Use the appropriate tone:

• Formal vs Casual
• Serious vs Humorous

Use active verbs. Avoid “to be” constructions and the passive voice.

No: The white iPhone is preferred by generation Xers.
Yes: Generation Xers prefer the white iPhone.

Stay close to the idea.

Don’t put too many qualifiers between you and your message. This attempt to be conscientious will only confuse the reader. Readers don’t retain ideas that are in remote locations.

Don’t say “perambulate” when you can say “walk”.

Avoid jargon. Use the simple, reliable work. Good writing is not so much a matter of using unfamiliar words, as using familiar ones in unfamiliar ways.

Watch stuff like:

Three factors of influence versus three influences.

When talking to different participants, paper copy remains a critical component of the way they manage day-to-day information.
But note: paper copy didn’t do the talking to the different participants.

Avoid passive voice/double gerunds.

No: The e-binder concept form was seen as a way to provide a format for organizing sharing.
Yes: Participants see the e-binder as a way to organize the sharing of information.

Why learnings instead of lessons? Why around instead of about?

So here i am, hopefully about to buy a new home within the next month and as a stipulation of that purchase I need to organise insurance. My mortgage provider's quote felt very expensive so I decide to get some alternative quotes to compare against.

What an experience!

First I try the two big comparison sites. I manage to get to a list of quotes with one of them but I end up in an eternal loop of fatal errors on the other site and I abandon it all together. With the first site, many of the 'cheapest' quotes are from brands I've never heard of and maybe i'm exposing my shopper mentality here, but when I'm insuring the biggest investment of my life to date, I want someone reputable. So I make a note of a couple of the quotes from the bigger brands to take it to the next level.

Quick and generic is ok for investigation but not purchase
However, i'm not completely confident in the coverage of the quotation system of the comparison site. It's generic and quick, which is good to generate some leads but not enough for me to purchase from. I want to make sure all the extras I need are included and all the extras I don't need are not included.

Rather than repeat the exercise online I decide to call, so that at least I can talk to someone to understand my options.

Price difference between channels
My first big issue is the big price difference between channels.  I understand that online shopping is 'cheaper' because there are no wages to pay for customer service centres etc, but with insurance in particular, it makes me nervous that I have not entered or disclosed the right details or got the right level of cover and there is no way to really. Especially when you are getting completely different prices. I wished the internet would say (for example) total policy cost £200.00 per year plus 15% discount for online purchase is £170.00 per year. Then I have the confidence that I am comparing apples with apples when I look at the online and offline prices.

Single channel only
Then there are the insurers, Axa for example, who won't even let you speak to a customer service person. There is no sales contact number on their website at all! You apply online or go elsewhere. How can I check that all my needs are covered? Well I think I'll take my business elsewhere thanks.

Information we want first
Most insurers are getting better at this but there are a guilty few who still get this badly wrong. They start by asking for all your personal information first (online and offline), rather than the subject of the enquiry, which in my case is home insurance. I feel much more inclined to give my personal information once they have satisfied my need.

Ask only the relevant information
Why ask about details that are obviously related to a contents policy when I am only requesting buildings insurance? I already had to spend 15 minutes in a horrid holding pattern before speaking to someone please don't make this any longer than necessary!

Provide detailed feedback.
'I'm sorry we can't offer you insurance right now. Please try again next year'
??? I'm sorry what? What the heck does that mean? Is your site down? Did I do something wrong on the form? Do you have a problem with my property that no-one else does, if so any chance you could tell me about it before I shell out a fortune for the next 25 years? As for trying again 'next year'...erm no chance!

So i'm no nearer at the moment - happy to take recommendations for UK home insurance suppliers :-)

I regularly find myself giving a list of recommended reading to people who are looking to learn more about UX design or a specific topic. It usually ends up being the same 3-4 books that I recommend, but after one of these conversations recently I figured I’d take a few minutes to run through my bookshelf and put together the extended list of all the books + blogs that I’ve read and would recommend. This is by no means meant to be a comprehensive list of all UX good books, just the ones that I’ve had the time read.

General UX books

The Design of Everyday Things, Donald A. Norman
*most often recommended
A classic read from one of the gurus of UX. This is my favourite book to recommend to people who are just starting to understand and appreciate the importance of UX. It highlights the amount of design that we encounter and use on a day-to-day basis without ever noticing – which is a sign of successful design. After reading this you’ll never look at door handles the same way again. Emotional Design: Why We Love (or Hate) Everyday Things, Donald A. Norman
Don Norman’s follow up book which shows the journey he went on as a designer, where he went from focusing primarily on aesthetics/form to appreciating the impact that emotions and psychology have on the way we experience design. The Elements of User Experience: User-Centered Design for the Web and Beyond, Jesse James Garrett
This is best, most straightforward explanation I’ve found that can articulate the difference between Interaction Design, Information Architecture, Visual Design, UI Design, and how all this hangs together to create a website. The Inmates Are Running the Asylum, Alan Cooper
When it was first released this book challenged the common approach to design as being something that was done in a token way after the engineers has done all their hard work. This once pioneering book has now become a bit dated in my eyes. Not because it is any less relevant, but just because there are very few companies that don’t at least nominally acknowledge that user experience is important. Whether they do anything about it is another matter. It’s still a worthwhile read, but nowadays it just feels a bit like it’s stating the obvious.

Usability

Don’t Make Me Think! A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability, Steve Krug
*most often recommended
The is the classic book about web usability and how easy it can be get it right if you approach it the right way. A must read for anyone starting to get it to UX, and best of all it can be read in an hour or three. Rocket Surgery Made Easy: The Do-It-Yourself Guide to Finding and Fixing Usability Problems, Steve Krug
*most often recommended
The companion book for Don’t Make Me Think that is the best step-by-step guide to conducting usability testing you’ll find. Krug’s basic point is it really is straightforward and anyone can do it. This books shows you how easy it can be. This quick to read book will leave you ready to start conducting tests that day. Web Form Design: Filling in the Blanks, Luke Wroblewski
This is the book that I am the most thankful that someone took the time to write. Luke W. does a great job of answering the questions about how people use web forms. While he rightly doesn’t give any absolutes about what is the best layout, he provides research based insights to understand how all the little details, such as label placement, affect usability and can be applied. They seems like such small details, but anyone who has designed a web form knows just how important these details are…and how much time can be spent debating them.

Design

Universal Principles of Design: 125 Ways to Enhance Usability, Influence Perception, Increase Appeal, Make Better Design Decisions, and Teach through Design, William Lidwell & Kritina Holden & Jill Butler
A comprehensive collection of general design principles and concepts that can be applied equally across the various design disciplines. It covers anything from Gestalt principles, to colours, and storytelling. If you want to add some theory behind how some design patterns work, this reference does a great job of explaining all the concepts with visual examples. Designing for Interactions, Dan Saffer
A good general overview about what Interaction Design is, how it works and how it fits in to the overall design landscape from one of the better known Interaction Designers, Dan Saffer. Thoughts on Interaction Design, John Kolko
An intellectual look at the emerging field Interaction Design and how it can make a difference. John Kolko is one of the more inspiring Interaction Designers out there. He ties design theory in to making a practical difference.  It provides some great challenges and food for thought for experienced IxDs. Envisioning Information – Edward Tufte
Tufte is one of gurus of information design and visualisation. This beautiful book uses historical examples from all over the ages to explain the subtle nuances of communicating information when designing maps, diagrams, data sets, etc. 101 Things I Learned in Architecture School, Matthew Frederick
Some great design food for thought. UX design shares a large amount of knowledge, principles and practices with Architecture. There is a lot we can learn from this well-established discipline. Similar to the Universal Principles of Design above, this book captures some general principles that can be applied to lots of different areas. Getting it Right with Type: The Dos and Don’ts of Typography, Victoria Squire
Good typography is a key element in any kind of design work. Having a good understanding of how it works is something that everyone can benefit from.

Strategy & Planning books

Business Model Generation: A Handbook for Visionaries, Game Changers, and Challengers, Alexander Osterwalder & Yves Pigneur
The Business Model Canvas is one of the most useful tools you can find to help drive and inform product strategy conversations. Subject To Change: Creating Great Products & Services for an Uncertain World, Peter Merholz, Todd Wilkens, Brandon Schauer, David Verba
A great book on the changing nature of business and how to produce innovative products. Focused on the strategic side of business. Rework: Change The Way You Work Forever, Jason Fried & David Heinemeier Hansson
This captures the essence of start-up culture and how to work effectively in small teams. For people working in large bureaucratic organisations this can seem like a fantasy-land utopian state, but a lot of the mindsets and approaches can be adopted regardless of where you work. Zag: The Number One Strategy of High-Performance Brands, Marty Neumeier
If you need some inspiration about how to think outside the box and be different in your product strategy, this book helps outline how to embrace an innovative mindset.

Human Behaviors

Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
We all experience being in-the-zone, a.k.a. the flow. Some of us try to design for it, but few people really understand the psychology behind how it works. This captures the insights of someone who has dedicated years to understanding it.

Agile

Agile Experience Design Lindsay Ratcliffe & Marc McNeill
Another book that falls in the category of books that I’m glad someone took the time to write. Fellow ThoughtWorkers Lindsay and Marc have put pen to paper to capture the approach and techniques that we use to experience the benefits of going Agile. The Toyota Way, Jeffrey Liker
One of the must reads for anyone looking to learn more about Lean and Agile practices.

Tools & Techniques

Designing for the Digital Age: How to Create Human-Centered Products and Service, Kim Goodwin
A great reference book and how to guide for the UX/Interaction Design process. It covers everything from project inceptions, through research, prototyping, and on to detailed interaction design. Not something you’ll read from cover to cover but great to be able to refer back to when you need to figure out/remember how to do something. Gamestorming: A Playbook for Innovators, Rulebreakers, and Changemakers, Dave Gray & Sunni Brown & James Macanufo
For anyone who runs a lot of workshops or activities this is a great resource. The games themselves are useful for inspiration, but it is worth reading just for the first chapter that explains the structure and mechanics of how games work. This is Service Design Thinking: Basics – Tools – Cases
The first book to be written that is dedicated to Service Design, it gives a good overview of what it is all about, the tools and techniques used, and some useful resources/templates to help get started with it. It’s also a beautiful example of information design in itself.

Research methods

Measuring the User Experience: Collecting, Analyzing, and Presenting Usability Metrics, Thomas Tullis, William Albert
If you want to tighten up your research methodology and back up your findings with solid stats, this shows you how to do it. Observing the User Experience: A Practitioner’s Guide to User Research, Mike Kuniavsky
A great capture and explanation of the tools and techniques in the UX research toolbox. Mental Models: Aligning Design Strategy with Human Behavior, Indi Young
Mental models are one of my favourite tools for communicating research findings and human behaviours. A simple, but effective tool this book will show you to create them.

Sketching/Prototyping

Sketching User Experiences: Getting the Design Right and the Right Design, Bill Buxton
*most often recommended
Bill Buxton of Microsoft fame outlines the philosophy behind sketching and prototyping products. He highlights that value of exploring ideas with sketching and prototypes before launching in to the more costly build phase. It’s also filled with great case studies. The Back of the Napkin: Solving Problems and Selling Ideas with Pictures, Dan Roam
A great guide for anyone trying to improve the use of their sketching skills as a facilitator. It’s not so much a how to guide for drawing, but more a way to help visualize and explain problems. Prototyping: A Practitioner’s Guide, Todd Zaki Warfel
A good overview of creating and using prototypes. It’s main focus is an in-depth review of the prototyping tools that were around at the time of it being published, full of great tips and techniques on how to use them.

Design Blogs that I read

Some good user experience/interaction design/information architecture/graphic design blogs that talk about tools, techniques, resources and challenges:

• Box and Arrows
• Smashing Magazine
• UX Matters 
• Johnny Holland Magazine 
• Core77 
• A List Apart 
• UX Magazine 
• 52 Weeks of UX 
• Wireframes Magazine 

Well known people’s blogs

Future Perfect – Jan Chipchase
Jan Chipchase was once described to me by one of his colleagues as the ‘Indiana Jones of the design world‘. He’s been conducting international ethnography research for many years now. His blog is generally a collection of photos and thoughts from all over the world. Great for remembering that there are other countries and cultures out there. He makes me jealous of his experiences, but grateful for being able to regularly sleep in my own bed.

Jacob Nielsen’s Alertbox
The blog from the self-styled ‘guru’ of Usability. Jacob Nielsen was one of the pioneers of web usability and has been preaching about his research findings and usability guidelines for years. While he can be criticised for focusing on a very narrow view of user experience and placing no value on design (his unchanged website design has been proof of this for years) he does still come up with some useful research based insights from time to time.

User Interface Engineering Brain Sparks
Another celebrity of Usability, Jared Spool has been blogging and talking at conferences about usability and interface design for years. This blog is a thinly veiled marketing vehicle for UIE conferences and seminars, interviewing industry experts about topics that they are about to present on. However, this doesn’t stop its articles and interviews from being worth listening to.

Good Experience
A blog from Mark Hurst who has been blogging about customer experience, user experience, human experience since before UX was called UX.

Ask ET
A discussion forum about Information Design, hosted by Edward Tufte, the guru Information Design.

Cooper Journal
A blog about design, business and the world we live in from the company that bears the name of Alan Cooper.

This is brief story about how Webex became the answer to my complex user-testing problems.

I had an interesting XD situation recently which I thought I’d share in case you end up in a similar position. The client I am working with is based in the UK. Some of the users we wanted to test with are dispersed around the globe. What’s more we have an offshore development team working in India to build our product. So the issue was how to get rapid end-user feedback on the design concepts in development without blowing the entire development budget on travel. It was also essential to us that members of the development team experienced the user-testing first hand so that they could appreciate and learn about the users behaviours, mind-sets and mental models.

I have used a number of remote testing software packages previously such as Loop11 or Usabilla to get feedback on a user-interface in development. However most of these packages offer unfacilitated, or software-facilitated test options. While remote unfacilitated testing is great the downside is that there is no opportunity to explore the users perceptions or ask the probing questions that come as a direct result of observation of their reactions or behaviours. The kind of research that is pivotal in early stage UI development. Certainly none of them were offering the ability to have multiple people in multiple geo-dispersed location logged into a single session simultaneously.

I knew there must be a solution out there somewhere, either that or I’d stumbled across a potential new product idea that could make me wealthy. To my surprise the answer had been under my nose all the time in a product I had only really associated with business communications and hadn’t previously associated with user-testing. Webex! The business communication tool. It allowed me to do everything I needed including:

• Ability to support multiple users in different geo-locations simultaneously in one session
• Ability to stream webcam and audio contribution from multiple or limited participants in the session
• Ability to view the participants screen and interaction with the screens to be tested, while simultaneously viewing a webcam of their facial responses and listening to verbal cues.
• Ability to record both audio and video tracks from the session and access them or share them later.
• Ideally software-as-a-service, rather than client-side thin or thick applications that the user needs to install.

Webex had it all! What’s more it was easy to set up*, control during the session and because I was fortunate enough to have access to an existing corporate Webex account  there were no additional overheads or expensive subscriptions. Perfect!

*The easy to set up part comes with the advice of enquiring with your users in advance of the session about their operating system and internet connectivity. If your users are on a fairly standard OS with ‘decent’ connectivity then there should be no set up required. However, as according to Murphy’s Law, we didn’t check in advance and our first participant was using Linux and had low connectivity and the combination meant we had to abandon that particular session! Doh!

I’ve just been confirmed as a speaker at the Agile UX 2012 Conference coming up in March at Sydney, Australia.

I’ll be talking about Finding time for the creative exploration process within Agile software delivery which I blogged about a while back.

It’s exciting to see Agile UX becoming a mainstream topic and being given it’s own conference. Plus it’ll be exciting for me personally, as it’ll be my first time talking at a conference.

Hopefully I’ll see you there.

Interested in defining the future of UX?

Adrian Howard (@adrianh) & I, Eewei Chen (@ultraman), invite you to submit sessions to the User Experience Stage of the Agile 2012 conference (Dallas, Texas, Aug 13-17 2012). The 2012 conference theme is “advancing the state of the art“.

User Experience practices have always helped agile teams discover, build and deliver the right product: putting the customer at the heart of every decision. The User Experience Stage at Agile 2012 is for anybody passionate about building products that truly delight their customers.

We are especially keen to demonstrate some of the ways Agile and User Experience practices are being combined in the Lean Startup and Lean UX communities: driving the iterative discovery and development of new products in new and exciting ways.

Questions this stage will attempt to answer:

• What is the future role of UX?
• How do you discover what users really want?
• How can you better iterative to discover new product ideas?
• How can generative user research be integrated with agile projects?
• How can an agile team sustain a long-term product vision?
• How do UX practices help agile teams build better products?
• How do you put practical UX skills into the hands of the whole team?
• How do you deal with the challenges of UX work on your agile team?
• What are UX practitioners doing to enhance real world agile projects?

The stage aims to bring together practical and theoretical sessions from the best practitioners in the field. We want to see and hear about ways UX is evolving and improving to create awesome customer experiences. Please submit a session if you feel you have something important to share. And please, don’t hold back!

How do I submit a session proposal?

To submit sessions and find out more about speaker compensation, please visit:

http://agile2012.agilealliance.org/for-speakers/

NOTE: Please submit all UX related sessions to the User Experience Stage.

To encourage early submissions there are two submission rounds:
* January 15, 2012 – Early-bird submissions deadline
* Febuary 19, 2012 – Final submissions deadline

The earlier you submit, the more potential feedback you will get from our review team – helping you improve your proposal and making it much more likely to be accepted!

Anything you want to see or hear about specifically?

Don’t hesitate to let us know what you also want to see on the User Experience stage. Is there a tutorial you would like to see or a subject you would like to hear discussed? Is there someone from the agile or user experience world you would like us to invite? If you have a topic or presenter in mind, please let us know.

Thank you for your interest. We’re looking forward to meeting you in Dallas next August.

Sincerely,

Adrian Howard (@adrianh) & Eewei Chen (@ultraman), Agile 2012 – User Experience Stage producers

 

There are lessons to be learnt everyday! One of the big struggles that experience design folks have is ensuring to balance the needs of the business with the needs of the customer. To do this we look at both the business and the customer goals and expose the conflicts early so that we can create a balanced solution. When we don't take time to do this it results in a biased solution that favours either the customer or the business.

It's my mum's birthday in two days. My goal is to send her a birthday card. I have the card all written and I head to the post office on my way to work. I thought they opened at 8am (it's the run up to Christmas after all) but i find that they only open at 9am. But never fear a stamp vending machine is near! The post office has a stamp vending machine at the entrance, so I can buy stamps. Hurrah! I now have a card that is written, addressed and stamped. I look around but alas! There is no post box any where in sight! So the post office accomplished their goal of making money but is the customer happy? No! My goal is incomplete and I've either got to go out of my way to complete my goal and be late for work or else the card will not be delivered on time! Surely a post box at a post office isn't too much to ask?  

Teams in my workshop present back to each other (UX Cambridge 2011)

 

UX has never been more relevant. As UX practitioners, we are being respected by absolutely EVERYONE. Here are a few reasons why…

We play well with everyone

Only a fifth of participants at my UX Cambridge workshop “Idea to prototype in just 180 minutes“, were UX designers, front end dev or usability researchers. The rest were made up of developers, graphic designers, business analysts, scientists, marketeers and business owners. People showed up to better understand how to embrace and work better with UX in order to create better experiences for their customers.

My design workshops are about having fun whilst tackling a very real problem a specific industry sector is facing. Not only do participants have to solve a surprise design challenge each time but they have to do it in newly formed teams with complete strangers. Team members have to quickly form rapport and trust quickly. There is no time for silly power plays. #JFID. Effective facilitation and pulling together cross functional, poly-skilled people to leverage strengths and surface ideas are the key to success. The person doing this (me in this case) needs to be well versed in all things awesome about UX.

Ryan Haney, Redgate Software also ran an amazing workshop, “Game on. Getting your organisation from game-zero to gaming in no time. “again around ways to think about solving problems using innovation game and play techniques. He had a Nerf gun that he used liberally if you were the last one to post up an idea. Dare I say we could run a whole day workshop together where creativity is a must and speed is of essence. Wouldn’t that be awesome!

 

UX strategy = Business strategy = success for everyone

We have the power and talent, so it is our responsibility now to better champion the customer. This means being sought after naturally to define what it is that businesses need to create at a strategic level. Over the last 2 years, my role as a Idea facilitator means getting together with business owners both external and internal to define the next generation of ideas to help them remain more than relevant and competitive in today’s fast-paced customer centric world.We are working collaboratively to suggest strategies that directly map to business KPIs, Value and their business model.

Business strategy is UX Strategy. Peter Drucker summed it up quite nicely when he wrote:

“What the customer thinks he or she is buying, what he or she considers value is decisive – it determines what a business is, what it produces, and whether it will prosper and what the customer buys and considers value is never a product. It is always a utility– that is , what a product or service does for him or her and what is value for the customer is anything but obvious.”

In the UX Cambridge Panel discussion I, Eewei Chen, also mention the role of the UX advocate:

“There are loads of advocates doing the work for us. We can see the resurgence of the power of design at a higher level. I mean, look at Apple’s Jonathan Ives- he’s a God! It’s about being strong and passionate, otherwise what’s the point?”

We need to start planting seeds everywhere and get other people to do the PR work for us. That way everything we design and build has a reason we had a hand in deciding makes sense from a business perspective which makes it sooooooooooooooo much easier to then deliver with a smile on our faces whilst making the smile on our customers and business owners faces even bigger.

Thank you Leisa Reichelt and her presentation on Strategic UX that really highlighted how relevant and well placed people like myself are now. Spiderman said it best:

“With great power comes great responsibility.”

Everyone likes a good story – but make sure they get it!

As a leader and workshop facilitator, I have to be able to make sense of the world and it’s problems. I also need to be able to engage our audience and participants. Improv as an art form, when done well, allows the story teller or stand up comic to frame events and issues that surround us in a way that it connects to their very soul. As a designer I curate experiences that allow customers to achieve their goals effectively, having learned or experienced something they enjoyed.

When brainstorming in a collaborative environment I make sure partipants understand why they are doing things each step of the way. Often the goal is good enough but to keep them truly engaged I outline the entire set of exercises at the start and clearly state why how each step allows us to progress closer to the end goal.

We take participants on a journey of discovery and help them see value by joining the dots. These step by step creative techniques help form the basis of good user centered idea generation that map to real business benefit.

Thank you Ian Fenn for his presentation “Love all the People: What UX practioners can learn from Bill Hicks” where he talks about Dieter Rams, Jonathan Ives and re-introduced me to the amazing Bill Hicks!

 

I was delighted to be invited to plan and facilitate a strategic envisioning workshop with the global management team at ThoughtWorks. It was back in June 2010 in Gurgaon, India. (I should mention i paired with shelley beeston on this).

The  process we developed focused on  :

• envisioning the measure by which we can assess our success
• extending the horizon of our shared vision of the future
• and elevating the aspirations of our intent as an organization, and the desired impact we want to have on the world.

In the end, after a series of workshop sprints and lightning talks designed to encourage a broad range of divergent ideas and emergent thinking, the group eventually circle back to the bold ambition of being the “Blueprint for the Humane Corporation” and defined a stretched view of the ThoughtWorks 3 Pillar Framework (Sustainable business, Software Excellence, Social Impact). Obviously i can’t provide much detail on the exact outputs, but i can talk about how we approached it.

The process

When planning the workshop, everyone we talked to warned us about how impossible it would be to keep the workshop on track. A room full of the most brilliant, energetic and high performing people at ThoughtWorks presented a formidable challenge…. so we spent a lot of time planning and structuring the activities. We even created individual passports for participants with a path for navigating different tables (so that they all got to work with different people in different activities over the two days)

We wanted to ensure the process was highly visual, and focused on producing tangible assets. One way of ensuring this was to focus activities around visual templates (using the grove visual meetings methods as a base)

Some of templates we developed for the workshops are shown below…

It was an amazing experience, working with a set of the most intelligent and thoughtful people around. Since then, the leadership team has been using the 3 horizons model to sort the initiatives into a program of work. Its great to see the outputs of the workshop now having a real impact on the ambitions and plans of the organisation.

Dieter Rams’ 10 design commandments:

Good design is innovative

Good design is useful

Good design is aesthetic

Good design makes a product understandable

Good design is unobtrusive

Good design is honest

Good design is long-lasting

Good design is consistent down to the last detail

Good design is environmentally friendly

Good design is as little design as possible

 

http://www.vitsoe.com/en/gb/about/dieterrams/gooddesign

I’ve recently found myself trying to explain the difference between the skills I bring to a project as a UX Designer and why I’m not able to cover the role of a dedicated UI Developer.

There is of course a necessary overlap between the skills-sets in these roles, which is a good thing. And some individuals have a broader coverage of skills than others. However, people outside of these roles don’t always appreciate the specialist skills and focus that is required to work within them.

This as simply as I can describe the different skills required for each role:

• User Experience (UX) Designer = Research + Design
• UI Developer = Design + HTML/CSS/JS
• Application Developer = Back-End coding + HTML/CSS/JS etc.

As much as I’ve tried to avoid it, I just haven’t been able to prevent myself from creating a Venn diagram to visualise this.

These different combinations of skills bring with them a different perspective and focus on what each person does.

UX Designers combine their research and design skills together to understand the user needs and produce concepts/solutions/designs that people want to use. This requires a focus on human behaviours, psychology and understanding why people do what they do. It’s all the soft squishy, creative stuff on the right-side of the brain.  Most UXers can tell you what it should do and why it should do it, but can’t actually build something that works.

Application Developers (which is a very broad and hopefully inclusive term for your average technical skill set) build the underlying functionality which makes the product work. It’s all about code, logic and the left-side of the brain.  Often heard from Developers is “I can make it work, but it won’t look pretty“. Meaning that they can craft HTML that will technically work, but it may not create a very good impression for anyone who is influenced by the look of it (which means your average end user).

UI Developers fill the middle ground by combining both design sensibilities and technical skills together. They are skilled at making something both look good and function in a browser/device at the same time. They have the production skills to be able to produce visual designs in Photoshop and then turn them in to HTML code that deals with the wonders of browser compatibilities.  This requires in-depth understanding of how browser rendering engines behave to be able to implement a design for the web that renders correctly and get all those pesky pixels to line up perfectly.

Of course this is very much a generalisation and it is possible to find people who work effortlessly across all these different skills-sets. I need to make the caveat that every person has different strengths and weaknesses. My point here is about the commonalities that define UX Designers, rather than each individual’s unique differences.

There is an age-old discussion out there on should designers know how to code? which often ends up concluding that ideally, yes they should. However the kind of people who can effortlessly switch between focusing on code and user needs are a rarity. The mindset required for each is generally quite distinctly different. Most people just aren’t wired up to do both. At the very least, even if they can, switching between them in their day-to-day role on a project tends to hinder their ability to do either well.

Breaking down Design further

Of course this is very much a simplification of the four areas covered in this diagram Research, Design, HTML, & Back-End. With just one wave of a Venn diagram I have lumped an entire technology industry in to just one circle. 

At the risk of complicating the main point of this post, I do feel the need to break down the area of Design a little bit more as it’s the area that I feel most non-Designers struggle to understand the differences between the design disciplines, and the different the backgrounds that UXers come from.

Within the context of Software Development, I would argue that design is primarily all about Visual Design, Interaction Design & Information Design.

It has to be said that the line between these three design disciplines is very blurry and rarely possible to separate entirely (the best way I’ve seen them articulated is in Jesse James Garret’s JJG Elements of UX).

This is how I would expand my diagram and the roles to include them:

To further expand the distinction between the roles:

• UX Designers focus on the structure and layout of content, navigation and how users interact with them. These don’t normally (but can) try to be perfect from a visual perspective. The types of deliverables they produce include site-maps, user flows, prototypes and wireframes, which are more focussed on the underlying structure and purpose of the software.  The visual appearance does impact on these, but can be created as a separate layer that is applied over the top.
• UI Developers focus on the way the functionality is displayed and the fine detail of how users interact with the interface. They produce the visual comps and functioning front-end code. This is very much about polished final production quality outputs.

The other role that I added in to the expanded version of the diagram is the Graphic Designer. It’s worth calling out that there are specialists who tend to work solely in Photoshop to produce static visual comps. This starts to talk to the area of illustration, fine arts, print media and the more creative stuff. Traditionally within web design this was a separate role, but not so much any more. Within software design the majority of people tend to have developed technical skills to become a UI Designer/Dev.

The different disciplines within UX Design can be expanded further to paint a much more comprehensive picture. The best way I’ve seen it articulated was put together by Dan Saffer in his book Designing for Interaction. He represents the different disciplines of User Experience Design like this:

If you start thinking about designing experiences across different platforms, devices and contexts then you very quickly need to bring in Industrial Design, Architecture, etc. But that’s a blog post for another day.

As a bit of Friday fun, I thought I’d share something from my sketchbook which came up during the week. This visualisation fell out of my head a while back when I was trying to explain to someone how UX fits in to Agile in a simple way. As with any methaphor, it has it’s limitations, but I thought someone might find it an interesting to think about things.

Ideas are a fragile concept that unless acted upon will wither and die before they even get a chance to breathe and see the light of day. Start ups breathe life into good ideas and give them a chance to become great and if we are lucky, become game changing.

I recently mentored at Launch48 London. I love working with start ups because those involved know it is ok to fail and they don’t have very much time. in Launch48′s case, as the name suggests, teams only have 48 hours (more like 24 hours of ‘awake’ productive time) to create a viable business proposition. Business plan, marketing and dragon’s den style presentation at the very end. there were many amazing mentors there, each with their own experiences and advice to give.

If anyone knows me, they know I am most effective as a catalyst and will always try and give teams some structure. Time is always against them so I always jump in to help them with some thought, feedback and high level creative ideation to help them along. This frees them up to focus on the actual ideas and gather information they need to move closer to their final awesome ideas

Here are some of the sketches I left with them. nothing heavy. Just enough to help them frame and structure their thoughts and ideas:

State the problem (not the solution), Empathy map, Elevator pitch

 

User journeys, Business Model Canvas, Feature prioritisation, RAIDs (Risks, Issues, Assumptions, Dependencies)

 

 

 

 

Sorry if I seem to be picking on retail experiences recently - but big brands are all around us telling us how wonderful they are yet the actual customer experience tells a different story. Only today I had to use the internet on my iPhone to help a retailsales assistant who almost failed to make a sale because of the lack ofconsistency and synchronicity between the web-channel and the internalpoint-of-sale system in the retail channel.

• I went onto argos.com and reserved a couple of products for collection at my local store
• I arrive in store and queue at the till
• I give them my reservation number and they call up my reserved order on their system and I confirm those are the items I want. So far, so good.
• The sales assistant tells me the total amount and asks me for payment, at which point I make a query as the total  is £10 more than the internet had told me.
• We locate the problem product which is a pair of headphones. They were advertised on the web as a special promotion but the promotion didn't show on the in store point-of-sale system.
• The  sales assistant goes to on another terminal (presumably because she didn't want to have to close down the point-of-sale instance she was looking at) to pull up the Argos website. It fails to load. Instead there was an Internet Explorer error saying 'out of memory'
• She goes back to the POS system and checks the details again and tells me there was a promotion on the product but it ended 2 weeks ago.
• I told her that the price was current less than thirty minutes prior when I was on their website
• She goes back to the terminal where she was trying to access the internet and gets the same error
• "I'm sorry" she apologies "I'm having a problem with our systems and I can't verify the price for you."
• She calls for a manager. Given I am short of time in the time I wait for a manager to appear I manage to pull out my iPhone and launch the Argos site and show her the product at the correct price. Using the same phone, I show her the email that Argos sent to me to confirm my reserved items and corresponding offer price...
• She apologised and overrode the price on the POS system and promptly went on a break      

When your business model is built on direct sales and youare actively supporting both a retail and a digital channel it’s essential thatthe two are synchronised, or if you choose to make them independent make itclear to the customers and manage their expectations.

Great people, great sessions. I was privileged enough to have been accepted to run a workshop at the most recent Future of Web Apps conference in London.

How to Build a Web App Fast Eewei Chen, BSkyB & Jill Irving, ThoughtWorks

This workshop allows you to experiment with rapid design and coding techniques to help you deliver an idea for a first prototype in less than 8 hours. Teams will be issued a surprise challenge and have the duration of the workshop to create a web app that will delight users and answer the challenge!

What participants learned:

• How to think creatively and generate ideas that really matter
• Learn how and when to focus those ideas and tie it back to real business and end-user goals
• Know when to create prototypes and concept usability test at key stages of a project
• Understand the key development challenges and learn valuable tips to help you work faster
• Create a minimum viable delightful solution and get it out to market fast!

The future of web apps highlighted to me the fact that there are some very good practitioners already creating some amazing apps using the very latest techniques and software. Some of my favourites included:

Christian Heilmann – Mozilla, Alex MacCaw, Eric Wahlforss – Soundcloud Giorgio Sardo – Microsoft Dave McClure – 500 Startups Cennydd Bowles Pete Koomen – Optimizely Adam Seligman – Heroku

Have a look at some of the presentations including mine!

http://lanyrd.com/2011/fowa-london/coverage/

Thank you Ryan Carson, Lou and Cat for having us and putting on a fantastic conference!

Here are some pictures from the workshop I ran with Jill Irving (ThoughtWorks):