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User Experience Basics for Product Management
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User Experience Basics for Product Management
Jun. 22, 2017•0 likes•699 views
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User Experience (UX) has matured as a discipline and radically changed how products are delivered. It touches workflows, usability, customer needs, and of course visual design and UI. Product managers can't ignore it, even if they want to... and if they want to, they're probably wrong. The tools of User Experience can help us get closer to our customers and differentiate our products.
Roger HartFollow
Product Manager at Royal Society of Chemistry Advertisement
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User Experience Basics for Product Management
- Cambridge Product Management Network UX for product management – a basic intro Roger Hart (@RMH40) Thanks to our sponsors
- • Background • Why we should care • What UX is and isn't • User testing techniques • A few tips I’ve picked up I’ll try to cover: twitter.com/JoeNockles/status/874312073748107268
- We know it when we see it UX - WTF? https://www.reddit.com/r/ProgrammerHumor/comments/6f8ory/launch_a_90db_volume_slider_over_300_metres
- and we can’t unsee it
- (I met this guy) UX at Redgate
- We joked about building the “Do What I Mean” button
- (I read this book) http://amzn.to/2rUoPEn
- DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-9280.2008.02062.x
- Link all 9 dots using four straight lines or fewer, without lifting the pen and without tracing the same line more than once
- Easier?
- See also: Thinking, Fast and Slow: http://amzn.to/2st8dCa
- Product management http://www.mindtheproduct.com
- Using the affordances at your disposal to promote the outcomes you desire. UX for PdM:
- Dark Patterns Using your UX powers for evil WTF, Ryanair?
- “Onboarding” Initial user journey Removes barriers Makes things sticky Delights users
- Feels easy Intuitive Word of mouth
- Does all the things: • Usability • Workflow / interaction • Visual design • Service design • Information architecture • Business models? User EXperience
- “It's important to distinguish the total user experience from the user interface (UI), even though the UI is obviously an extremely important part of the design. As an example, consider a website with movie reviews. Even if the UI for finding a film is perfect, the UX will be poor for a user who wants information about a small independent release if the underlying database only contains movies from the major studios.” UX ≠ UI Jakob Nielsen & Don Norman (famous tech grown-ups)
- But UI is an enormous part of the story UX ≠ UI
- But usability gives you the biggest bang for your buck. UX ≠ Usability
- It’s not clean. It’s not tidy. It’s not sexy. It’s one of the most successful businesses on the planet.
- Learnability: How easy is it for users to accomplish basic tasks the first time they encounter the design? Efficiency: Once users have learned the design, how quickly can they perform tasks? Memorability: When users return to the design after a period of not using it, how easily can they reestablish proficiency? Errors: How many errors do users make, how severe are these errors, and how easily can they recover from the errors? Satisfaction: How pleasant is it to use the design? Usability (Again, from Jakob Nielsen)
- Can you understand it quickly the first time you see it, and use it do what you need to do? Or…
- Some UX is obvious Some requires research
- Or: “Expert review” …or “Ssshh. We know best” Apply your own expertise. Score on agreed set of heuristics. Use with early. Use with caution. Technique: “Heuristic evaluation” Nielsen’s 10 heuristics (from 1995, the world might’ve changed a bit)
- Which has better UX? (Example shamelessly nicked from David Travis @ UserFocus)
- Personas vs Jobs To Be Done Persona • Humanizes • Takes time • Useful for marketing • Captures emotional element • Not super actionable • Easy to be really superficial JTBD • Closer to functionality • Tempting to assert without research • Easy to prioritise • Can reveal surprising things about value (see: https://jtbd.info/get-started/home)
- Research techniques Quantitative: • Web analytics • Surveys & polls • Heatmaps • NPS • A/B testing Qualitative: • User tests • Interviews • Focus groups • Contextual / task analysis • Card sorting • Search queries / AdWords • Forums & feedback • (heuristic evaluation)
- What to do when? Quantitative: • Later • Validation (some discovery) • Answer specific questions • Ongoing checks • Effects of small changes Qualitative: • Early • Discover broad problems • Understand users • Redesigns & large changes
- Problems Quantitative: • Ambiguity & clarity • Sample size • (tech dependencies) Qualitative: • Everybody lies • Selection bias • (can be expensive)
- Beware pure quantitative
- Needs, not wants. something something faster horses something something.
- A simple overview User testing
- You don’t need a fancy-ass lab: • Skype and a screen recorder (Morae, Camtasia, Chrome plugins, Win10 ‘Game Bar’) • In a café, filmed on a phone • Paper prototypes • Use colleagues (esp. new starters) User testing – making it easy
- 1) Plan realistic scenarios 2) Recruit representative participants 3) Run tests: • Set user expectations • Give an intro and guide • Ask for ongoing feedback • Keep them talking but be willing to let them fail User testing – how-to Actually the hardest part
- Interpreting user tests Simple / cheap: • Take loads of notes • Time on task • Quick survey • Retrospective sessions Complex / expensive: • Eye tracking • System Usability Scale (SUS) Feels appealingly sciencey
- How many? About 7
- Cheap, quick, quite easy. False positives, unrealistic. Paper prototyping?
- What type of test: • Exploratory Use early. Gauge understanding. Open. High interaction. • Assessment / validation Use later. Test specific designs and paths. More tightly scoped. May have benchmarks. • Comparison Use any time. Evaluate two options. Run multiple tests. Could even test competitors. User testing: test design
- Basically, be kind. But don’t always help them if they’re stuck. And maybe team up. User testing: moderation
- Good feedback, thanks. Mmm. Hm. What did you expect to see? What do you think will happen? Is that what you expected? I see you’re hesitating a bit… User testing: weasel words Try not to say “yes” or answer questions. Don’t talk over them. In fact, don’t talk much. www.userfocus.co.uk/articles/listening.html
- We’re going to book some teacher training! (and I need a volunteer) Exercise: running a user test
- You are a teacher who has heard that the RSC offers some training and professional development resources. You have a little bit of time available for online training, and want to improve your knowledge of organic chemistry for a forthcoming class. Using the web as you would at home, find out what the RSC has to offer and whether it would help you. Scenario #1 – finding out
- On a scale of 1 – 5 how confident are you that you completed that task successfully? On a scale of 1 – 5 how easy did you find that task? Quick survey
- What did we learn? Themes? Main problems? Any scoring? Feedback
- JTBD interviews A bit weird – emotion, history, specificity Where were you when… ? How did you feel about…? What were you doing, or trying to do when this happened? Did you have any anxiety about the purchase? Did you hear something about the product that made you nervous? What was it? Why did it make you nervous? Getting to a very specific (sometimes emotional) story
- • Qualitative keeps you honest • Don’t fold my iPad • Nobody wants to read, everybody has to read, Google reads everything • Your underpants go on the outside • Your brain wants to be lazy A few simple things I’ve learned
- Getting some help Local(ish) folks I’ve worked with. Others are available
- @RMH40 HartR@rsc.org
- The Design of Everyday Things – Don Norman Don’t Make Me Think – Steve Krug The Inmates are Running the Asylum – Alan Cooper The Mom Test – Rob Fitzpatrick Dealing with Darwin – Geoffrey Moore The Innovator’s Dilemma – Clayton Christensen UserFocus blog – David Travis Building the Minimum Badass User (video) – Kathy Sierra Intro to the Kano Model – PWC blog Building a Princess Saving App (pdf) – Daniel Cook www.uxmyths.com - List of common misconceptions Design for Real Life - Eric Meyer & Sara Wachter-Boettcher www.useronboard.com – Onboarding journey blog Further reading If you don’t have much time
Editor's Notes
- Steve jones at infinite monkey thing Confidence of a mediocre white man Gauge awareness. Ask who’s done what?
- Bit of career history & background.
- 1950s. Henry Dreyfuss, “Designing for People” Ergonomics. HCI in the 1970s (Xerox, Apple, IBM) Maturity in 1990s, via IT, as Don Norman leads the charge I like to point at 1998 – first Ajax support from MS OWA team (XMLHTTPRequest API), the avalanche pebble of rich web apps. No more full-page refresh. Design responds to its landscape. The browser explosion helped. 1999 – Google’s minimalist homepage. Step change in 2007 with the iPhone? Maturity of web apps. Frustration. Warning. If you don’t already know about UX, it will ruin you forever.
- If you would prefer not to spend the entire rest of your life angry at door handles, try to forget everything you have ever heard about UX.
- It’s all around us. Once you notice, you never stop. Makes people cross, adds friction. Often inconsiderate. Hanlon’s razor. Bad UX is often well intentioned. Comes from “Nerdview” – inability to see the world in a user or novice’s terms. Curse of knowledge. Constructing a world for you and your knowledge. Not far off privilege? You see it with text so very often. UI writing. Intro to UX at Redgate…
- Dom, are you here? UX embedded in dev teams. Ambient user testing. Whole team involved. UX drove early product decisions. Collaborative fight with product managers. UX fighting for he user, humanizing.
- RG took complex things and tried to make them “ingeniously simple” Next, next, done for your business problems. That depends on smart tech and usable UI But for complex products and problem spaces, that means delivering and *simplifying* complex information.
- Starting as graduate tech author, I looked for a theoretical core to my discipline. Found it in HCI, and how reading/understanding work. Took an interest in the underpinning cognitive neuroscience. Quite old now. Originally 1996 How reading works. Mental schema. What it means for something to be easy or hard to do. Human factors for Technical Communicators, Marlana Coe - http://amzn.to/2rUoPEn
- Explain the Daniel Khaneman idea of two mental systems (Thinking, fast and Slow: http://amzn.to/2st8dCa ) Effort engages System2. System 2 is aversive and critical. If you want someone to do something, avoid S2 If you want someone to engage with something, engage S2 without aversive feelings Small design changes. Caveat: if all other things are equal. Psych reproducibility crisis. Subway distance experiments.
- Give a minute to think about it. Going to make a short change. Don’t worry if you didn’t get it (of course some things are hard. That’s fun. King example. Princess saving)
- What we did there, was make some design changes to suggest a path. It’s a terrible example. We designed some UI to help people use the product.
- Product mgmt, also the 90s (CEO of product quote, Ben Horrowitz 1997) Some, but not loads. Why does it matter? Pragmatic marketing grid. PdM PMM. UX is similar.
- The way I like to think about it. …But there are caveats. This sounds a bit like manipulation? Nudging people, sending them down the happy paths to unlocking product value. Can you use your powers for evil.
- Well, sometimes it’s evil. Can be deliberate. Can also be hella lucrative. That’s between you and your conscience, I guess.
- Can be delightful. Ask for examples. What made it delightful?
- Feels a bit intangible. You know it when you see it So what is it?
- …and they call economics the imperial science You can’t do it all. It takes a village to UX a product… I’m going to concentrate on a few bits. Starting with some misconceptions and confusions.
- Not photoshop. Not UI design. Not that bloody story about Google optimising a shade of blue. But UI is very important. It is how your UX is delivered. The $300M button (check out without creating an account)
- Where the delighters can live. Think: Apple, Slack, Deliveroo, New Relic Kano model Reaction to types of product functionality Industrial design 1984 (Toyota?) 1-D – linear, simple performance features Basics never enough. Usability as table stakes. Delighters become normalised (iPhone) progressive. Might recognise this from the category model, product becomes category, etc.
- I am not a designer. Usability was a huge thing at my last place. Usability is where it all started. Differentiator for years, until the market caught up It’s commodity now. Simple UX is table stake for web apps. But usability is still my go to focus. The low hanging fruit.
- It’s usable. Ish. Learnable, mostly. And so good at happy paths. Ask why it works.
- Similar to the Daniel Pink stuff around what motivates people? Enabling autonomy, mastery, purpose? Kathy Sierra? Good products make you better.
- Usability is the soul of onboarding Onboarding is phenomenally important for uptake (King example – perversely weeding out users who wouldn't get value, and maximising value for those who would. Sometimes this shit surprises you)
- Fancy way of saying that we find the low hanging fruit. We’re going to try one. Most of us drink hot drinks. Most of us have used software. Most of us understand basic UX. FROM NIELSEN Visibility of system status The system should always keep users informed about what is going on, through appropriate feedback within reasonable time. Match between system and the real world The system should speak the users' language, with words, phrases and concepts familiar to the user, rather than system-oriented terms. Follow real-world conventions, making information appear in a natural and logical order. User control and freedom Users often choose system functions by mistake and will need a clearly marked "emergency exit" to leave the unwanted state without having to go through an extended dialogue. Support undo and redo. Consistency and standards Users should not have to wonder whether different words, situations, or actions mean the same thing. Follow platform conventions. Error prevention Even better than good error messages is a careful design which prevents a problem from occurring in the first place. Either eliminate error-prone conditions or check for them and present users with a confirmation option before they commit to the action. (Read full article on preventing user errors.) Recognition rather than recall Minimize the user's memory load by making objects, actions, and options visible. The user should not have to remember information from one part of the dialogue to another. Instructions for use of the system should be visible or easily retrievable whenever appropriate. (Read full article on recognition vs. recall in UX.) Flexibility and efficiency of use Accelerators -- unseen by the novice user -- may often speed up the interaction for the expert user such that the system can cater to both inexperienced and experienced users. Allow users to tailor frequent actions. Aesthetic and minimalist design Dialogues should not contain information which is irrelevant or rarely needed. Every extra unit of information in a dialogue competes with the relevant units of information and diminishes their relative visibility. Help users recognize, diagnose, and recover from errors Error messages should be expressed in plain language (no codes), precisely indicate the problem, and constructively suggest a solution. Help and documentation Even though it is better if the system can be used without documentation, it may be necessary to provide help and documentation. Any such information should be easy to search, focused on the user's task, list concrete steps to be carried out, and not be too large.
- Consider visual design, ease of understanding, error recognition, user control, etc. Which is better? Now let’s flip the context. A small café? A larger one? Camping? An older user? A grudging parasitic student landlord? A 15 year old doing D of E… and trying to look cool. Brings us to personas vs JTBD
- Personas humanize, JTBD get to the core of use cases. I’ve usually found you start with lots of both, and for non-huge products, end up with a few core JTBD and a couple of core personas.
- Who’s run each of these? Don’t do heuristic, it’s basically “daddy knows best” I’ve always skewed qualitative. VERY SIMILAR TO PdM Explain each. What’s hard about each one. Tips. We’re going to focus on user testing. Interview methodologies if there’s time.
- Suck eggs…
- Mom Test. Being nice, finding things to say. Spurious correlations. One think to keep in mind. Needs, not wants.
- Vince Darley, talking at BoS2017 Ocado – 3 employees, way off the chart with crate damage. Supervisors. Late crates only. Scanned in. “Gravity conveyor”. Contextual enquiry found this. At king. Made early game harder. Test cohort. 2nd day retention tanked after days. Recovered in 7 days. 14 days 10% lead, for those remaining. Lifetime value Harder start. 419 – filter fast. Loss rate over time. Keep on hook. Quant data shows patterns. Qual data gives context. But beware direct questions.
- …unless it tests well in the market. NB – problem with faster horses bullshit and not talking to customers. We don’t just listen to what people say. We watch what they do. How they react. We care about how they feel. The turkey twizlers story. So we enquire. We do user testing.
- Win+G, dumps to screenshot folder if hardware supports. UX is hokey because it’s designed for YouTube kids.
- https://measuringu.com/sus/
- Bulllshit graph Study after study suggests small-N qualitative hits the spot. Jared Spool got different numbers, there’s a variance. 5-10 should work.
- Fun though. Google design sprints. Load sof alternatives.
- Why are we testing? What do we want to know?
- Not testing you. Someone to take notes. Consent. Comfort. Tips: How would you expect… Give an example.
- Super awkward. Active listening. http://www.userfocus.co.uk/articles/listening.html
- Volunteers? Start at Google.com
- This is what’s called an exploratory test. It’s very open, and could go off track. Has a defined end, but many paths. Very qualitative.
- What to do if people get stuck? Have a fail back position.
- UserFocus (David Travis) UX Doctor (Dom Reed) Modern Human (Paul)
- http://uxmyths.com/
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