The document discusses user centered design and how to gain support for design decisions from executives. It outlines conducting user research to understand needs, designing for tasks and goals rather than features, and using metrics and data from user testing to justify choices and gain organizational confidence in the product.

1. User Centered Design:
How to please users and get the CEO off your back
Dan Arra
San Mateo, CA
650-218-4444
darra@macadamian.com

2. “Selective Attention Test”, by Daniel Simons
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3. Agenda
 User Centered Design (UCD) Overview
 It’s a process… but negotiation is important
 Support your choices with data
 Storytelling is complementary and effective
 Differentiate your product
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4. Demystify UCD – Activities & Deliverables
 Users
 Who are they? What do they care about?
 How do they actually interact with your product?
 How would they interact with a new version/feature?
 Centered on value to actual users
 Product Strategy Workshop
 Key business objectives
 User requirements
 Design to illustrate value to users
 Design, test, incorporate feedback
 Rinse and repeat
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5. Demystify UCD – Activities & Deliverables
 Users
 Personas – context, context, context
 Centered on value to actual users
 Usage Scenarios
 Your business objectives… their value
 Still gotta have documented requirements
 Design to illustrate value to users
 Wireframes, models, mockups
 Visual concepts
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6. Demystify UCD
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7. Demystify UCD
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8. Support your choices with data (and process)
 Gain agreement thru metrics
 Simplify your decisions
 Justify your choices
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9. Gain agreement thru metrics
 Define objective measurable targets
 Express from the customer’s/user’s perspective
 Both qualitative AND quantitative are good
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10. Simplify your decisions
 With success metrics in hand…
 Obtained from actual users…
 You have confidence about what to include…
 And what to remove
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11. Justify your choices ( aka defend yourself)
 Charts, data – “During our first round of testing…
 time on task was x seconds”
 # of errors was reduced by y%
 Narratives – “We watched the users actually smile
and relax when then completed this task”
 Storyboards – “As you can see from this
diagram, the new path to the reservation screen
is…”
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12. Gain agreement thru metrics
 Organizational Confidence
 Success is often a matter of confidence
 If Sales believes in the product (based on
metrics), they will do a better job selling it.
 If Management trusts you’ve made the right
decisions, you’ll get the resources you need
 If Support understands the training issues, they’ll
be more effective
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13. Differentiate your product
Features are important IF they are valuable to users
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14. Identify Goals & Tasks
 Users don’t approach with a feature in mind –
think goals and tasks
 More isn’t always better. More often leads to:
 Clutter
 Bloat
 Complicated
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15. Differentiate based on those goals & tasks
 Feature war  Bad User Experience
 Study real behavior –
needs, goals, workflow, workplace processes
through:
 Direct observation of users
 Feedback from users
 Organize tasks, sub-tasks by:
 Order of importance
 Frequency performed
 Map relationships & dependencies between tasks:
 Flowcharts
 Mapping diagrams
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16. Information architecture & task relationships diagrams
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17. Differentiate your product and sell more of it
 If it looks good, you will get more interest
 It’s a process
 Good design can be measured
 Removes opinion and conjecture
 Requires expertise to test (“Blink”, by Malcolm
Gladwell – puppies, kitties and Aeron Chair)
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18. Who is Macadamian?
 Software Products Consultancy
 When the user experience is key
 Full scope of software development life cycle
• UX Design & User Research
• Software Engineering
• QA Testing
 Increasing customer adoption
 14 Year Track Record, over 150 staff
 Hybrid Onshore/Offshore - Ottawa(HQ), Romania, Armenia
 Experience across multiple markets and products
 Wide range of skills and processes:
• UX design + Software Engineering + Test/QA
• Desktop (Win, Mac OS)
• Mobile (iPhone/iPad, Blackberry, Android, WP7)
• SaaS (.NET, LAMP, J2EE, RIA, Flash/Flex)
• Strobe/Sproutcore Partner
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19. What have we done… lately?
 New Product Development, Extensions, Re-designs
 Mobile client development – iPad, iPhone, Android phone & tablet
 Web development – Web 2.0 apps with mobile “companion” products
 Desktop Clients – Windows and Mac
 User Experience Design & Usability Testing
 Product Families – Desktop, Web, Mobile Clients
 User Research including
• Usability “walk-throughs”
• Usability Testing
• Ethnographic research or “job shadowing”
 Examples
 Cisco – FlipShare Mobile, Umi home telepresence
 Juniper – Re-design of existing app to include web, mobile, desktop
 BitTorrent – Macintosh client & Android Tablet (both design & build)
 Varian Medical – Electronic Medical Record for iPad
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20. Our sweet spot…
 End-to-end: from napkin sketch to release (and anywhere
along your software development life cycle)
 Creativity: innovating in design and technology
 User Research: Validate user needs, usability, market, etc.
 Uncharted territory: dealing with technical uncertainty &
potential for change
 Intense deadlines – need for rapid response times
 Experience required – there’s no time for ramp-up
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