2020 reading roundup: adopt a test & learn mentality

As year 2020 comes to a close, and as I archive my day planner, mounds of sticky notes, and work journals for the year, I found a few quotes and insights I highly recommend to my community of UX professionals. Do you make it a practice to ask yourself how the next thing you design can maximize your opportunity to learn about your business, brand and users?

"Customer feedback is information you collect from your customers about their experience with your product, service, website, or business as a whole. You can use this feedback to improve customer experience by removing or reducing areas of friction and increasing positive touchpoints."

Hotjar's Understanding Customer Experience

"Expertise can be the gradual accumulation of many modest insights."

James Clear’s Blog | Author of Atomic Habits

"This generation has never been more informed than ever, but at the same time remarkably not reflective."

Unknown

"it’s critical to track the effects of your experiments both quantitatively and qualitatively”

“Whether we use KPI’s, Usability, Credibility, or other measures, having an imbalance in either direction leads to a lot of guessing.”

Business Thinking for Designers

“Always Have two goals when testing hypotheses…

The key to creating good product experiments is to start with two viability goals at once: a primary goal that changes and a secondary goal that stays the same. In other words, the primary goal is something the team wants to achieve without losing something else…

For example: Our (primary) goal is to increase revenue while keeping costs the same (secondary).”

Designing with Data

Bonus book recommendations

Make Time

• Incredible collection of practical and easy productivity tactics to maximize the finite hours of your day. From the creators of GV's Sprint.

7 Habits of Highly Effective People

• This 'old school' book is incredible for any working human. Having read it later in life I’ve realized it’s the clear foundation for many other popular business leadership and productivity books that followed it. This book is actually in my list of top 10 non-fiction books of all time. I officially understand what all the the hype is about following Franklin Covey and the years of success the organization has had helping professionals. I especially recommend this read to graduating High School or College students just coming in to the working world.

Review: Building a Story Brand by Donald Miller

I recently stumbled upon the Building a Story Brand book at an airport kiosk. After a quick skim I found the writing style refreshingly concise and compelling. Before the end of my flight I had read the entire book and discovered author Donald Miller’s equally interesting podcast and online course geared for busy marketing and sales professionals to clarify their brand’s message by framing their value proposition message around the age old Hollywood hero's journey story arc. 

Value proposition messaging

As an experienced designer day to day I totally agree with Miller's mantra that getting your brand message dialed is arguably the most important foundation underlying sales collateral design, especially marketing websites, and sales PDFs.

Note: this book does not cover the value prop canvas but is getting very clear on marketing sales pitch messaging, and design.

In essence, the book encourages the creative or business stakeholder (you) to orient your business’s offering to take your hand as the magical oracle guide to be lead to a new world of pain relief by way of a a predictable, outlined journey to win the day.

As we know as User Experience Designers, understanding our customer's pain point is an essential prerequisite to crafting compelling copy and content design. Once the headache type is understood, we can cleverly agitate that pain through psychological levers or inspiring motivation and present our brand as a trustworthy relationship that serves the resolution.

7 essential parts to every story brand

• Main character

  • The customer, AKA the Hero trying to win the day

• The Problem

  • The pain point you've identified in the customer to which your brand provides pain relief, wisdom, etc.

• The Guide

  • The brand, the business, the service provided, the voice articulating the value proposition…(take my hand)

• The Plan

  • A clear articulation of what your customer is expected to do with you (the brand) to achieve a mutually understood notion of success

• Call to action

  • The action to take, such as contacting sales, submitting a web form, adding a product to a cart, checking out, and waiting for a package to arrive...

• Stake if fail (loss)

  • The FOMO...agitating what life will likely continue to be without your product in their life

• Stakes if succeed (win)

  • Reiteration of what success will look, feel, taste like, etc.

Exercise outline: creating value proposition website sections

• A. The Header

  • i. Does it answer the questions: 

    • What are you offering?

    • How does it make our customers’ lives better?

    • Where can I buy it?

    • How can they buy it?

  • ii. Do the pictures you intend to use support the sales pitch or confuse customers about what you are selling?

• B. The Stakes

  • i. What is life going to look like if the customer does not buy your product or service?

  • ii. What negative experiences are you keeping your customers from having to deal with?

• C. The Value Proposition

  • i. What positive results will a customer receive if they buy your product?

  • ii. What does your customer’s life look like if they buy your product or service?

• D. The Guide

  • i. Empathy: what empathetic statement can you make that expresses your care, concern, or understanding about your customer’s problem?

  • ii. Authority: how can you reassure your customers you are competent to solve their problem?

  • iii. Testimonials iv. Other: logos, statistics

• E. The Plan

  • i. Three or four steps: What is the path a customer needs to take before or after buying your product?

  • ii. What are the benefits of each of those steps?

• F. The Explanatory Paragraph

  • i. Simply use your one-liner* followed by your BrandScript script to make this section simple, clear, and easy.

• G. The Video (optional)

  • i. Decide on video

  • ii. Decide on title

• H. Price Choices (optional)

  • i. How will you visually display the price or prices of this product?

• I. Junk Drawer

  • Misc. information, anything else you feel is compelling to say or include.

Buy the book!

The book is an excellent read and these highlights I found most interesting are no replacement for reading the full text. Purchase it here, and explore the podcast! I receive no kickback for sales proceeds, I’m simply advocating UX Designers and my readers consider this cool shot in the arm book for better understanding marketing experience design.

Dare to Lead by Brené Brown

Every so often I spend some time organizing personal files and run across an interesting note I’ve captured reading a book or article. I found these few bullet points I had jotted down while going through Dare to Lead that I found so useful, and surprisingly pertinent to my career as a UX Design Leader. Highly recommend this book, it’s worth the time for any young professional looking to lead people effectively.

Key takeaways:

• What stands in the way, becomes the way.

• Don’t avoid tough conversations putting politeness over clarity.

• Focus more on scary feelings that arise with change. 

• Don’t focus on problematic behaviors.

• Connection & empathy builds trust.

• Embrace failures and risks.

• Focus more time on fixing what broke, not on reassuring people–they are ‘still’ valuable.

• Focus on accountability & learning, not shame & blame.

• Stay dedicated to problem identification. 

• Don’t rush to big blind swings.

• Be measurable.

• Strive for progress not perfectionism.

10 Awesome UX Design Podcasts

If you are new to Podcasts or have already discovered this amazing technology for design literacy already.

I’ll admit there are a large number of podcast episodes framed to showcase content authors on a book tour, but the nuances of communication unlocked by longer conversations surface some often greater insights beyond the usual scope of Tweets, Medium articles, and books. I strongly recommend you give the following shows a try if you’re interested in the conversation surrounding UX/UI Design and business.

High Resolution

Design thinking and product design discussions with design and business leaders.

View podcast website

UI Breakfast

Practical interview with cutting edge and inspiring designers, developers, researchers and business leaders. Great way of finding inspiring work, products and workflows from talented people.

View podcast website

Design Matters

Debbie Millman asks industry leaders smart questions about their process, workflow, and experience.

View podcast website

User Defenders

The host teases our great stories from epic designer guests. Production quality and use of time are both impressive.

View podcast website

Method Podcast

Huge variety of design topics covered by Google in this podcast. Great way to stay up to date with the most cutting edge best practices and perspectives in design today.

View podcast website

DesignBetter.co Podcast

Cool conversations with design and business leaders with emphasis on organization and leadership concepts.

View podcast website

A Responsive Web Design Podcast

Karen McGrane and Ethan Marcotte get into project workflow details and valuable lessons learned following impressive responsive website redesign projects. Bummer this podcast had to end–some great insight especially regarding content strategy and design system interplay.

View podcast website

O’Reilly Design Podcast

Always relevant and future thinking interviews and Q&A with cutting edge designers. Good way to find new inspiring people to follow.

View podcast website

Invision Design Talks (YouTube)

Super relevant discussions from Invision whose content (like their products) is always well thought and a great use of time. Audio versions of these talks are available through some podcast apps.

View YouTube Channel

5 Great Design Books for Your UX Library

Starting a UX library in your studio? Here’s a list of some of my favorite UX books and a few key takeaways. Enjoy!

A Project Guide to UX Design

By Carolyn Chandler, Russ Unger

There are a ton of well-reviewed books and readers for the general UX practitioner available. However, this one still stands out on my shelf as a great primer to get your head around UX for most projects. The project guide illustrates how UX Design connects multiple design disciplines including business strategy, research, interaction design, and engineering.

Explore Book (GoodReads)

Now, Discover Your Strengths

By Marcus Buckingham, Donald O. Clifton

I first learned of this book listening to a video blog from UX designer, Sarah Doody. The book is a well researched albeit prescriptive method devised to make you aware of your innate professional talents and intuitions and learn how to best harness them in the workplace. Arguably, It's most sustainable to build your career around your natural superpowers and curiosities above pure ambition and will. Check out this book and accompanying assessment (worth it) and you might be enlightened.

Explore Book (GoodReads)

Lean UX

By Jeff Gothelf

An extension to the canonical book, The Lean Startup, Lean UX provides an ultra-concise, principled overview of UX Design’s role in agile projects. It also provides thoughtful, sustainable action steps for integrating the lean approach to organizations of various shapes and sizes.

Few of my favorite takeaways:

• Progress = outcomes, not output.

• Create the first version of the thing rather than spending half the day debating its merits in a conference room.

• Emphasize learning first and scaling second.

• Figure out what you’re trying to learn, and the fastest way you can learn it.

• Created a shared understanding of design problems and solutions.

• Collaborate: creating together increases the design IQ of the entire team.

Explore Book (GoodReads)

Everybody Writes

By Ann Handley

The more screens I design, the more I appreciate the value of written communication as a digital designer’s skillset. Understanding the people who use the product your designing should include comprehending how to communicate with them naturally, contextually and with relevance to their needs through the business lens. This book will help you write with intention and consistency for the web and in business communication in general. I picked up this book up on a whim and am so glad I did. 

Explore Book (GoodReads)

Universal Methods of Design

By Bella Martin, Bruce M. Hanington

100 design techniques to try when approaching a design challenge. Concise summary of each method and good perspective on usage.

Explore Book (GoodReads)

Conclusion

Tangible books may be a slowly dying technology as digital formats take over. Thankfully, all of these titles are available in digital format. Either way you prefer to read, I suggest taking notes in the margins of books or on sticky notes. And once you’ve completed any great book, try synthesizing your notes to help a friend or colleague understand a few of the most valuable highlights. Educating someone else is a great way to retain newly gathered information.

Happy Reading!

UX Design and Ego

It's important to remember the best design wisdom may come from anyone on your project team. And the best way to empathize with the users you design for is to understand where your ego starts and stops as a designer and thinker. It's easy to make biased design decisions based on your own, albeit compelling perspectives that may not be relevant. 

Good discussion of ego and professionalism on the Love Your Work podcast.

"The strength of our ego boundaries is the result of each properly resolved developmental crisis." 

- John Bradshaw

"Innovation is the state once drama is gone."

- Cy Wakeman

Design and the Gig Economy

Creating this post as a reminder that what we design solves business and customer problems–but it can also negatively impact real lives. This is especially apparent in exciting startups in the gig economy space. It's important to think deeply about the impact our design innovation and mission might have on humanity.

“As the gig economy grows, so too does the danger that engineers, in attempting to build the most efficient systems, will chop and dice jobs into pieces so dehumanized that our legal system will no longer recognize them.”

Read: “What Have We Done?”: Silicon Valley Engineers Fear They've Created A Monster

What's a User Experience Audit?

A UX audit is an analysis report involving a strategic design inventory exercise and documented list of critical design opportunities to improve a product's user experience. These 8 factors are important to consider. You can use tools such as Capian, Invision, or Google Docs to create and present annotated screenshots to support your reader's comprehension of the audit. Tip: Checkout PageMarker (Chrome Extension) for any easy way to circle, cross out and draw arrows quickly over the browser window before taking your screenshot.

1. Quantitative Data

• What features or content might be a problem today according to analytics?

2. Qualitative Data

• What heuristic or user-validated insights gan you gather to assess the current state of design?

3. Accessibility

• Find out what WCAG standards does the client or organization need to abide by?

4. Interactive Pain Points

• What touchpoints are broken, confusing, difficult, etc.?

5. Information Architecture

• Analyze your products' content to recommend action steps toward better ways to organize, surface, and tag all the information that's supports user journey and business goals.

6. Branding Violations

• Assess the organization's brand style guide to call out any ways in which the product breaks brand rules.

7. Performance

• Run performance testing tools to identify steps to improve site speed and extended use.

8. Recommendations

• Write actionable steps to resolve (or further investigate) those important product issues and opportunities you identified in the steps above.

4 Qualities of a Good Architect

Visionary architect Gae Aulenti finds these 4 traits most critical to a great architect. IMO, this is just as applicable to the design profession.

1. Analytic talent

Know how to study and recognize every different kind of architecture, to create unique, specific solutions with respect to their context, their foundation place.

2. Synthetic talent

Know how to make the necessary synthesis to give priority to the major architectural principles, to disregard what is arbitrary in a project.

3. Prophetic capacity

Embrace the art, poetry, and aspiration for invention for your project.

4. Awareness

Surface and understand Biases.

7 Best Practices for building a Design System

• Do the UI inventory first.
• Discover top 10 components to address, and stick to those.
• Make type clear and accessible. 
• Use color, illustration and shape for creative expression.
• Check typefaces and all UI elements on non retina and retina devices.
• Checkout Salesforce lightning framework for inspiration.
• Design systems are principally for for the agency’s internal design and engineering teams’ organization for design consistency. Your client cares more about the page mockups and how those modules look together for important pages in the funnel.