A Customer Experience Journey Map is a very useful tool to understand and improve customer experience. It allows organizations to develop a user experience mindset and gain better insights into customer’s needs. It helps identify key Moments of Truth and drive actionable priorities to improve a product or innovate on creating new products.
When you involve stakeholders in creating a Journey Map, they “walk in the customer’s shoes” and know the story of customer experience. They start telling this story to themselves and others in the organization. The customer stories and insights...
Our existing B2B product has been developed for 15 years and the need for complete redesign was acknowledged in 2013.
Unusual for the software business in our country and field of business, this project for the brand new solution was driven by UX from the beginning. The main target was to introduce new level of collaboration between all company functions to formulate a shared vision for the future product.
It took us one year to move from user research to prototypes, and in the meantime our UX team grew from two to six persons. Hence, we will also talk a bit about...
As organizations increasingly look to digital as a primary means of communication, users have come to depend on sites and apps for information in both the good times and the bad. Communicating exceptions or problems to your users–whether a service disruption, weather event, cancellation, or anything else out of the ordinary – is now a critical use case for many online experiences. What is more, recent research shows that a painful experience for a user can have a disproportionately high impact on his or her perception of the entire brand, making it all the more critical to ensure you are...
As a UX Pro, I've dealt with clients for 15 years doing user research and product design. Some clients are a dream while others can be sheer nightmares. We all develop strategies to cope and to CYA (Cover Your Apples). In 2014, I became an entrepreneur and "The Client." I discovered a whole new world of Baloney Sandwiches that vendors were trying to feed me. Talking to other Product Owners and CEO's, I discovered some trends when working with designers, consulting firms, agencies, and dev houses. I realized that my consulting practice was guilty of some of these no-no's too. This talk will...
This talk presents a series of challenges and opportunities that are emerging for design leaders, managers (and their teams) in a context where startups and established companies are changing their organisations to be lean, modular, product-driven and customer-centric. It consolidates learnings both from my experience in creating a design team in a eduTech company, and from a collection of case studies and opinions gathered among other design managers in agencies and companies: culture, process, cross-team collaboration, accountability, impact on the company are some of the key topics of...
Communicating the human-centered experience of users to clients or teams back at the office can be a challenge. “You had to be there…” doesn’t cut it when summarizing and reporting the rich qualitative results of in-home field studies. Reading transcripts or watching hours of video recordings is inefficient; stakeholders cannot often join researchers in the field due to practical, logistical, or time constraints.
This case study describes two simple methods of reporting results—one almost entirely visual—to convey timely research highlights to stakeholders...
Regardless of your UX focus, you’ve no doubt learned that if your language isn’t easy to understand, it’ll undermine your user experience. But how can you learn which words are most effective for your customers?
Fortunately, we have many research and design tools at our disposal, and identifying which words to use isn’t as specialized a task as it might sound. This case study illustrates how to expand on an existing research practice, the field study, by adding a 5-step language analysis component. As we discuss each step in the process, we’ll cover the method and the lessons that...
No online program
We, as consultants, have been working on a Usability Process Assessment that's compact & simplified (one-page assessment; get projects from doing *nothing* to doing *something*). We ultimately developed a non-threatening "HCD Checkup" that we've now run with dozens of projects to help them assess and improve their design practices. We'll talk about the checkup itself, how we developed it, how we use it, and what we've learned.
Should you or should you not include an explicit "Home" link in your primary navigation?
For years, practitioners debated this with anecdotes, gut feelings, and personal preferences. But no one could produce any actual data. Enter this empirical online study, which found strong evidence to steer the conversation.
This informal discussion takes to task a depressingly large number of recent UX research studies for mobile devices whose conclusions result more from hope than experience. The common threads of these difficulties are two-fold: 1) correlation as causation (i.e., what users are doing being incorrectly related to why they are doing it); and 2) lack of necessary controls in an environment that already has a huge, nearly insurmountable number of them. The results of what I call these “myths” of mobile...
UX practitioners are encouraged to create simple designs, however user research often shows that humans are complicated and finicky. If we ignore the fact that humans are driven by complex motivations and needs, we not only fail to be true user advocates, but can also miss opportunities to innovate. How can we create designs that are simple and at the same time address complexity of human behavior? In this poster presentation we will discuss examples from user research projects conducted for a major online ticket reseller showing complexity of human behavior related to attending live...
Preschools often encourage parents/guardians, staff, and administrators to become involved in the educational community by volunteering at social events. However, engaging stakeholders in the co-construction of curriculum and learning environments can sometimes prove difficult to organize. This poster details the results of a case study on encouraging community participation at a Reggio Emilia inspired preschool by using a service design methodology. The poster explains how the project engaged the community by creating and facilitating stakeholder networks in person and on social media....
How can User Experience engage with Product Management and Engineering to brainstorm, explore, and influence long term product direction?
This is a case study inspired by a session at UXPA Boston Conference 2014 given by Meena Kothandaraman and Emily Chu. They presented a set of innovative user research techniques that they had used in their practice at Motivate Design. It turns out that some of these techniques are also great for doing futures brainstorming with cross functional teams.
Come to this session to learn how to set the stage, how to break the ice, and how to...
Ever felt like a therapist in your UX work? Learn from a licensed therapist turned user researcher on how to apply therapy techniques to your UX practice. Skills you will learn include: facilitating groups and understanding group dynamics, motivating behavior change in individuals, reading your team members' nonverbal cues, and providing an environment for change to occur. The more you understand people's behaviors, the greater impact you can make in your UX work, both with your team and beyond.
This presentation will bring big data into the context of UX research by describing how big data can inform usability in three ways, focusing primarily on strategy and quantitative models. A case study involving field research will be explained and the audience will act as the UX team to help build the model at each stage to better understand the theory and final product that resulted. Quantitative models help make product research more interpretable by developing testable, causal relationships between product features and business outcomes (e.g., feel of product and product satisfaction...
You know what your users experience in the lab setting, when they are in a controlled environment. But what happens when they actually take your product into the real world and try to use it? The technology explosion in the market research field has resulted in a wealth of new tools that allow UX designers and researchers to deploy users to test sites, apps, and products in the real world and report back on their experiences in ways that are actionable and meaningful. This session will arm attendees with the knowledge and technique they need to conduct mobile ethnography studies on their...
A great challenge facing businesses today is the overabundance of data and how to use it to take action. UX researchers must have a level of business savvy to craft actionable recommendations that transcend design and impact key business goals.
Understanding business needs starts with your first conversation, where it becomes the foundation for your study and develops throughout every communication and phase, right up until you deliver your findings, recommendations, and next steps. Without tying business goals to research, your research becomes unusable, and could jeopardize its...
Ever wondered what makes some practitioners truly great? Is there something in how they are wired that sets them apart and amplifies their contributions on products, projects, and within organizations?
Our presenters will explore how recent advances in brain science and empathic competency may offer practice owners and businesses measurable ways to hire and cultivate individuals who can make a true difference in the success of their products and teams. The two will share findings from their 2015 survey of more than 500 practitioners throughout Europe, Canada and the United States...
This presentation will discuss how to apply the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG 2.0) to mobile websites, best practices for accessible mobile website design, and how to conduct accessibility inspections of mobile sites, as well as demonstrate mobile assistive technology and evaluation methods for mobile websites.
We can no longer predict how people are accessing our content now, let alone in a few years’ time when the technology people use to access the web will inevitably diverge even further, and perhaps in ways we haven’t even considered yet. Rather than seeing this unpredictability and lack of control as a problem, we should embrace these ‘known unknowns’ and the inherent flexibility of the web. Put simply, responsive design is about being more flexible and assuming less about our users, from how they’re accessing our content and what technology they’re using to their environment.
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The purpose of usability testing is to identify areas of a design that interfere with a user’s ability to use that product effectively, efficiently, and enjoyably. Therefore, we observe while a small group of representative users completes a set of tasks; however, rarely are people with disabilities included in usability tests. That is, unless the purpose is to specifically identify accessibility issues. Why do we keep these studies separate? Are people with disabilities not completing the same tasks as everyone else? Rather than separating usability and accessibility testing, or worse,...
In science fiction and action films, gestural interfaces are everywhere, and new gestural input technologies generate a lot of anticipation with their kickstarter videos. And yet in the real world, gestural input (with the exception of multitouch) has gained little traction. Why is that?
We've been working with a variety of gestural technologies, trying to incorporate them into professional products, and we have learned where the problems are, and what we need to do to cross the divide between hype and practice.
This presentation looks at the current state of gestural input...
During this ignite track you'll learn about some cutting edge UX tools and methodologies, as well as some fascinating design psychology topics that you can apply to your upcoming projects.
http://igniteshow.com/
Getting user feedback through in-lab 'immersive' study Presented by Sukhada Jog
Getting feedback from users on an...
Update 6/24: Here is the Unconference Schedule!
During the conference, you and your fellow UXPA attendees create the Unconference sessions. You choose a topic to present. You decide which topics are chosen. So open your mind. Listen. And enjoy yourself.
In the ideal world of user experience we always put our customer first, our teams are all on the same page, and we strive to delight customers above all else. But what happens when you are the lone customer advocate in a sea of data driven, results-focused, back end engineers? A small UX team trying to drive change across hundreds of engineers and re-focus their years of legacy work to be customer-backed seemed an impossible feat. However, with support from leadership, and some out of the box techniques that allowed us to bring a scalable customer empathy program to the organization, we’ve...
Online screen sharing tools have changed our research toolkit. Now we can conduct research faster and more cost effectively using screen sharing tools and webcams. And then came mobile devices. To...
