Thursday, 29 March 2018
Wednesday, 28 March 2018
Building A UX Team
(This is a sponsored article.) In my previous article, I explored the rise of design, in particular focusing on the emergence of design as a business driver. As the spotlight has focused on the potential of design to transform businesses, we’ve seen a growing need for designers — and related team members — across a wider range of specializations. These specializations include:
- Design Researchers
- Creative Directors
- Content Strategists
- Copywriters
- Visual Designers
- UI Designers
- Marketers
Of course, this list isn’t exhaustive and many designers undertake a cross-section of these roles by necessity. One thing is certain, however, as our industry has matured, the number and types of roles have increased and, as UX continues to become a sought-after business differentiator, these roles will continue to diversify.
As design has become recognized as a potential driver for business growth, many companies have begun to bring user experience (UX) design in-house, building their own UX teams. Equally, as UX has grown in importance, many small businesses have been responding to the opportunity by broadening and deepening their teams, thus enabling them to undertake larger and more profitable projects.
In this article, the ninth in my ongoing series exploring user experience design, I’ll outline how to go about building a UX team, identifying the attributes to look out for when hiring team members, defining a number of core disciplines to consider when building a team, and suggesting some avenues you can explore to find team members.
T-Shaped People, FTW!
When I first starting to work on the web in the early to mid-nineties, all that was required was a knowledge of HTML (and life was so much easier!). Over time I added CSS and JavaScript to my mix of skills, keeping a close eye on developments and adding to my skill set as needed.
For some time it felt like you could hold all of the web’s tools in your head; HTML, CSS, and JavaScript were complex, of course, but they were manageable. Fast forward to today and the landscape has evolved considerably, with new tools that we can add to our toolbox developed at an increasingly rapid rate.
As UX has grown up, we’ve started to see an inevitable specialization of roles, reflecting the complexity and diversity of our industry. This shift towards specialization is to be welcomed, it echoes an industry that is not only maturing but is also reflecting on the best way to achieve different outcomes. It’s a shift that is positioning carefully considered teams front and center.
The once fashionable idea of ‘unicorns’ — who know everything there is to know about everything — has, thankfully, been superseded by a focus on building teams, comprised of specialists with a deep understanding of their respective areas, who are able to work as part of a collaborative, multidisciplinary team.
With this shift towards collaborative teams comes a shift in the types of people we need to look for when we start to build a team. To function effectively, team members need to:
- be skilled in communication, able to express their thinking clearly to others;
- have an appreciation of the importance of feedback, and be able to facilitate the feedback process;
- be able to collaborate with others, working as part of a multidisciplinary team;
- have an understanding of the broad landscape of disciplines that now comprise UX; and
- be able to articulate and present their thinking to others.
Put simply: soft skills matter. To work in a collaborative environment requires empathy and an ability to work with others. It also requires an awareness and understanding of the various disciplines that come together to form the backbone of user experience design in the 21st century. Enter ‘T-shaped people’.
Tim Brown, the CEO of global design company IDEO, defines T-Shaped people as having two kinds of characteristics: the vertical stroke of the ‘T’ represents their depth of skill in a field; whilst the horizontal stroke of the ‘T’ represents their ability to collaborate across disciplines. Brown identifies two characteristics that T-shaped people have:
First, empathy. It’s important because it allows people to imagine the problem from another perspective – to stand in somebody else’s shoes. Second, they tend to get very enthusiastic about other people’s disciplines, to the point that they may actually start to practice them. T-shaped people have both depth and breadth in their skills.
When building a UX team it’s important to ensure that the candidates you consider possess these characteristics or, if they don’t, have the capability to learn them. By hiring, or working with, team members that possess empathy and perspective you’ll build a stronger, more effective team.
The ability to see problems from others’ perspectives is critical. Seeing a problem from the perspective of another team member underpins collaboration; equally seeing a problem from your user’s perspective is — as I’ve noted in my earlier articles in this series — critical. This ability to see problems from others’ perspectives is crucial when we build multidisciplinary teams.
A Multidisciplinary Approach
Within the field of UX, we are increasingly working with multidisciplinary team members who combine a knowledge and awareness of many branches of learning or fields of expertise. Designers will be a part of that mix, of course, but designers aren’t the only members of a team you need.
When thinking of a team it’s important to widen the frame of reference and look beyond the core strength of design. Take a look at any successful product and behind it you will see a team that is comprised of a wide range of individuals, encompassing: design across a range of aspects; business and strategy; marketing and storytelling; analytics; and many, many other disciplines.
When building a team, it’s important that the team is well-rounded with a cross-section of individuals who are used to looking at design problems in different ways. This becomes increasingly important when we consider the growing rise of digital product design.
In order to build a successful digital product, it’s important to consider:
- Design Researchers
The ones who drive a design based on user research and a wider understanding of the benefits of design research. - UX Designers
The ones who afford a high-level view of the design process. - Content Strategists
The ones who lead a website or product’s content focus, starting with content as a skeleton around which a design is built. - Copywriters
The ones who create written content at both a macro- and micro-copy level. - Visual Designers
The ones who create a design’s overall visual approach. - UI Designers
The ones who design the interface between the product and the user, and the various interactions that underpin the design. - Front-End Designers and Developers
The ones who handle the build at varying levels of complexity.
It’s a measure of how complex our industry is that we’re still finding terms to describe many of these roles. It’s also a measure of how complex our industry is that the above list is only scraping the surface.
In addition to the above list (which is broadly design-focused), it’s also important to consider project managers, business strategists, marketing experts — the list goes on. With such a long list of potential team members, it becomes quickly apparent that (good news for us!) there is considerable scope for working in our industry.
To become a lynchpin team member it helps to immerse yourself in as many of these areas as possible. The more you learn about different disciplines and their different ways of working, the more indispensable you become.
Finding Team Members
You might be considering hiring a full-time team member or a freelancer, but you still need to find these people. Where do you start and what should you look for?
First of all, if you’re considering expanding your team — and the roles you’re considering will be long term — it’s important to put some time in. Unless you’re willing to pay a recruitment firm, there’s no substitute for doing some good, old-fashioned research.
The last thing you want to do is hire someone in a hurry, then live to regret it later. Spending time getting to know different individuals and exploring their work in depth pays off in the long run. Doing so helps you to find individuals who are a better fit for your company’s culture.
Unsurprisingly, there are many design-focused communities that you can explore. As you begin your search, look for individuals who are active in those communities. It’s impossible to list every community, but you might like to consider:
- Behance
Owned by Adobe, Behance’s mission is to “showcase and discover the latest work from top online portfolios by creative professionals across industries.” The site’s ‘Curated Galleries’ are a great way to discover different designers organized across a range of creative fields. - Dribbble
Although it’s come under fire occasionally, there’s no doubting the fact that Dribbble is a great place to discover designers. It’s known as the place “where designers get inspired and hired,” and is well worth exploring. - Product Hunt
Billed as “the place to discover your next favorite thing,” Product Hunt might look a little out of place on this list, but it’s a great way to discover active participants within the design community.
In addition to the above resources, it’s also worth looking for designers who are actively working on side projects or who are contributing to open-source projects.
When interviewing potential team members, I’ll always ask if they’ve worked on any side projects. Side projects are a good indicator of a person who has a passion for their subject. They’re also a useful beacon, helping you to identify individuals who are actively learning and who have the project management skills to develop their own projects.
However, not everyone wants to undertake a side project. Another attribute that’s worth looking for is an individual’s contribution to other, perhaps open-source, projects. Someone who is actively contributing to an open-source GitHub repository is someone who has passion — and passion is hard to teach.
There are also numerous job boards, that act as a matchmaking service, connecting designers who are looking for work with companies who are interested in hiring. Adobe’s platform, Adobe Talent, offers you that ability to “hire from five million creatives on Behance.” Smashing Magazine has its very own Smashing Jobs, designed to help designers and developers alike to find jobs and connect with great companies.
In Closing
As UX matures as a discipline, so too have the number of different specializations. As the field has grown, so too have the opportunities. Instead of putting all your eggs in one basket and searching for an elusive ‘unicorn’ designer, a better approach is to build a team of individuals who can work well together.
When building a UX team, it’s important to focus on soft skills as well as hard skills. Look for T-shaped people with experience of working in a collaborative environment. And remember, a great team is comprised of individuals who work well together, so don’t forget that personality goes a long way. Building a team takes time, but the effort you put in more than pays off. The more rounded your team is, the more opportunities will present themselves to you.
This article is part of the UX design series sponsored by Adobe. Adobe XD is made for a fast and fluid UX design process, as it lets you go from idea to prototype faster. Design, prototype, and share — all in one app. You can check out more inspiring projects created with Adobe XD on Behance, and also sign up for the Adobe experience design newsletter to stay updated and informed on the latest trends and insights for UX/UI design.
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Tuesday, 27 March 2018
Monday, 26 March 2018
Friday, 23 March 2018
Creating A UX Strategy
(This is a sponsored article.) As designers working primarily on screen, we often think of user experience design as being primarily a screen-focused activity. In fact, user experience affects the entirety of what we build and that often includes activities that are undertaken off-screen.
To design truly memorable experiences, we need to widen our frame of reference to include all of the brand touchpoints that our users come into contact with along their customer journey. Doing so has the potential to materially impact upon business outcomes, recognizing the role that design — and user experience — can play at the heart of a wider business strategy.
Whether you’re building a website or an application, at heart you are designing for users and, as such, it’s important to consider these users at the center of a customer-focused ecosystem. Great brands are more than just logos or marques, and websites or applications, they’re about the totality of the user experience, wherever a customer comes into contact with the brand.
This expanded design focus — considering touchpoints both on- and off-screen — becomes particularly important as our role as designers widens out to design the entirety of the experience considering multiple points of contact. It’s not uncommon for the websites and apps we build to be a part of a wider, design-focused ecosystem — and that’s where UX strategy comes in.
Over the last few years, we have seen designers move up the chain of command and, thankfully, we are starting to see designers occupy senior roles within organizations. The emergence of designers as part of the C-Suite in companies is a welcome development and, with it, we are seeing the emergence of CDOs, Chief Design Officers.
As James Pallister put it in “The Secrets of the Chief Design Officer,” an article exploring the CDO phenomenon written for the UK’s Design Council:
“As Apple’s valuation shot higher and higher in recent years, a flurry of major corporations — Philips, PepsiCo, Hyundai &mdahs; announced the appointments of Chief Design Officers to their boards.
This was no mere coincidence. Seeking to emulate the stellar success of design-led businesses like Apple, global companies are pouring investment into design.”
This investment in, and appreciation of, design has been long overdue and is beginning to impact upon our day-to-day role as designers.
Forward-thinking companies are elevating the role of designers within their hierarchies and, equally importantly, stressing the importance of design thinking as a core, strategic business driver. As a result, we are seeing design driving company-wide business innovation, creating better products and more engaged relationships with customers.
As this trend continues, giving designers a seat at the top table, it’s important to widen our scope and consider UX strategy in a holistic manner. In this article, the eighth in my ongoing series exploring user experience design, I’ll open the aperture a little to consider how design impacts beyond the world of screens as part of a wider strategy.
Considering Customer Journeys
Before users come into contact with a website or an app, they will likely have been in contact with a brand in other ways — often off-screen. When considering design in the widest sense, it’s important to focus on the entirety of the customer journey, designing every point of contact between a user and a brand.
Forrester, the market research company, defines the customer journey as follows:
“The customer journey spans a variety of touchpoints by which the customer moves from awareness to engagement and purchase. Successful brands focus on developing a seamless experience that ensures each touchpoint interconnects and contributes to the overall journey.”
This idea — of a seamless and well-designed experience and a journey through a brand — should lie at the heart of a considered UX strategy. To design truly memorable experiences, we need to focus not just on websites or apps, but on all of the touchpoints a user might come into contact with.
Consider the Apple Store and its role acting as a beacon for Apple and all of its products. The Apple Store is, of course, an offline destination, but that doesn’t mean that the user experience of the store hasn’t been designed down to the last detail. The store is just one part of Apple’s wider engagement strategy, driving awareness of the business.
The Apple Store is an entry point into Apple’s ecosystem and, as such, it’s important that it’s considered in a holistic manner: Every aspect of it is designed.
Jesse James Garrett, the founder of Adaptive Path which is an end-to-end experience design company, considers this all-embracing approach in an excellent article, “Six Design Lessons From the Apple Store,” identifying a series of lessons we can learn from and apply to our designs. As Garrett notes:
“Apple wants to sell products, but their first priority is to make you want the products. And that desire has to begin with your experience of the products in the store.”
Seen through this lens, it becomes clear that the products we design are often just one aspect of a larger system, every aspect of which needs to be designed. As our industry has matured, we’ve started to draw lessons from other disciplines, including service design, considering every point as part of a broader service journey, helping us to situate our products within a wider context.
If service design is new to you, Nielsen Norman Group (helpful as ever), have an excellent primer on the discipline named “Service Design 101” which is well worth reading to gain an understanding of how a focus on service design can map over to other disciplines.
When designing a website or an app, it’s important to consider the totality of the customer journey and focus on all of the touchpoints a user will come into contact with. Do so, and we can deliver better and more memorable user experiences.
Designing Touchpoints
As our industry has evolved, we’ve begun to see our products less as standalone experiences, but as part of a wider network of experiences comprised of ‘touchpoints’ — all of which need to be designed.
Touchpoints are all the points at which a user comes into contact with a brand. As designers, our role is expanding to encompass a consideration of these touchpoints, as a part of a broader, connected UX strategy.
With the emergence of smartphones, tablets, wearables and connected products our scope has expanded, widening out to consider multiple points at which users come into contact with the brands we are designing.
When considering a UX strategy, it helps to spend some time listing all of the points at which a user will come into contact with the brand. These include:
- Websites,
- Apps and mobile experiences,
- Email,
- Support services,
- Social media.
In addition to these digital points of contact, it’s important to consider >non-digital points of contact, too. These off-screen points of contact include everything, from how someone answers the phone to the packaging of physical products.
To aid with this, it helps to develop a ‘touchpoints matrix’ — a visual framework that allows a designer to join the dots of the overall user experience. This matrix helps you to visually map out all of the different devices and contexts in which a user will come into contact with your brand.
The idea of a touchpoints matrix was conceived by Gianluca Brugnoli — a teacher at Politecnico di Milano and designer at Frog Design — as a tool that fuses customer journey mapping with system mapping, which can be used as the basis for considering how different user personas come into contact with and move through a brand.
Roberta Tassi, as part of her excellent website Service Design Tools — “an open collection of communication tools used in design processes that deal with complex systems” — provides an excellent primer on how a touchpoints matrix can be used as part of a holistic design strategy. Tassi provides a helpful overview, and I’d recommend bookmarking and exploring the website — it’s a comprehensive resource.
As she summarises:
“The matrix brings a deeper comprehension of interactions and facilitates further development of the opportunities given by the system — of the possible entry points and paths — shifting the focus of the design activities to connections.”
This shift — from stand-alone to connected experiences — is critically important in the development of a ‘joined up’ UX strategy.
When you embark upon developing and mapping a broader UX strategy, a touchpoints matrix helps you to see how the different nodes of a design join up to become part of an integrated and connected experience or an ‘ecosystem.’
Building Ecosystems
When we holistically consider our role as designers, we can start to explore the design of the whole experience: from initial contact with a brand offline, through engaging with that brand digitally. Collectively, these amount to designing a brand ecosystem.
Ecosystems aren’t just for big brands — like Facebook, Instagram or Twitter — they are increasingly for everything we design. In a world that is ever more connected, what we design doesn’t stand in isolation. As such, we need to consider both context and scope as part of an integrated strategy.
In addition to considering the design of products, we also need to consider the wider ecosystem that these products sit within. For example, when considering the design of applications — whether web-based or native — we also need to consider: the user’s first point of contact and how we drive discovery; the experience while using the application itself; and addressing wider issues (such as offering users support).
All of the aspects of an ecosystem need to be designed so that we deliver great user experiences at every point in the process. This includes:
- The process of discovery, through social and other channels;
- The design of a company or application’s website, so that the story that’s told is consistent and engaging;
- The content of email campaigns to ensure they’re equally considered, especially if there are multiple email campaigns targeted at different audiences;
- The packaging, when we’re designing physical, connected products; and
- The support we offer, ensuring that customers are looked after at every point of the journey, especially when issues arise.
This list is just the tip of the proverbial iceberg, but it clearly shows that there are multiple points on a customer’s journey that need to be designed. A considered UX strategy helps us to deliver on all of these aspects of an ecosystem and become increasingly important as the ecosystems we design become richer and more complex.
In Closing
The opportunities ahead are fantastic for designers working in this industry. The landscape we are designing for is evolving rapidly and, if we’re to stay ahead of the game, it’s important that we turn our attention towards the design of systems in addition to products. This involves an understanding of UX strategy in the broadest sense.
When embarking upon the design of a new website or product, or undertaking a redesign, it’s important to widen the frame of reference. Taking a step back and considering the entirety of the user experience leads to better and more memorable experiences.
By considering the entirety of the customer journey and all the touchpoints along the way we can create more robust, connected experiences. By focusing on the design of holistic experiences, we can delight users, ensuring they’re happy with the entire experience we have crafted.
This article is part of the UX design series sponsored by Adobe. Adobe XD is made for a fast and fluid UX design process, as it lets you go from idea to prototype faster. Design, prototype, and share — all in one app. You can check out more inspiring projects created with Adobe XD on Behance, and also sign up for the Adobe experience design newsletter to stay updated and informed on the latest trends and insights for UX/UI design.
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Thursday, 22 March 2018
Wednesday, 21 March 2018
Tuesday, 20 March 2018
Monday, 19 March 2018
Friday, 16 March 2018
Thursday, 15 March 2018
Wednesday, 14 March 2018
Tuesday, 13 March 2018
Monday, 12 March 2018
Friday, 9 March 2018
Thursday, 8 March 2018
Wednesday, 7 March 2018
How To Build A Skin For Your Web App With React And WordPress
So you’ve trained yourself as a web engineer, and now want to build a blazing fast online shop for your customers. The product list should appear in an instant, and searching should waste no more than a split second either. Is that the stuff of daydreams? Not anymore. Well, at least it’s nothing that can’t be achieved with the combination of WordPress’ REST API and React, a modern JavaScript library.
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A Comprehensive Guide To User Testing
(This is a sponsored article.) With a prototype of your design built, it’s important to start testing it to see if the assumptions you have made are correct. In this article, the seventh in my ongoing series exploring the user experience design process, I’ll explore the importance of user testing. As I explored in my earlier article on research, where I explored the research landscape, there are many different types of research methods you can use, and there are a variety of different user tests you can run, including:
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Tuesday, 6 March 2018
A Comprehensive Website Planning Guide (Part 3)
In Part 2, I covered the details of evaluating a plan, choosing web professionals, and determining your website structure. The question of why planning for the web is just as important as planning for anything else associated with your business was covered in Part 1, so head on back to read that part first in case you missed it. In today’s final part of this guide, I’ll start with a few of the most common approaches in any initial design.
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Monday, 5 March 2018
How To Prevent Common WordPress Theme Mistakes
If you’ve been thinking of creating free or premium WordPress themes, well, I hope I can help you avoid some of the mistakes I’ve made over the years. Even though I always strive for good clean code, there are pursuits that still somehow lead me into making mistakes. I hope that I can help you avoid them with the help of this article. 1. Don’t Gradually Reinvent The Wheel Be careful when making things look nice — especially if you create a function that does almost exactly the same thing as another function just to wrap things nicely.
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Friday, 2 March 2018
Beyond Tools: How Building A Design System Can Improve How You Work
When high potential projects fall apart, it’s often a failure of collaboration and alignment. The tools, the assumptions, the opportunity, and the intentions may line up, but if people don’t communicate or don’t have a clear map to help them move in the same direction, even the best projects falter. Communication failures are human problems, so they’re messy and hard to solve. They involve feelings and a willingness to have uncomfortable conversations.
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Thursday, 1 March 2018
A Comprehensive Guide To Wireframing And Prototyping
(This is a sponsored article.) With the big picture established and your user interface considered, it’s time to start building some prototypes. My sixth article in this series of ten articles dives into the prototyping process. As I’ve stressed before in the earlier articles in this series, the best design follows an iterative process: You undertake research, working with users to identify the underlying user requirements that need to be addressed.
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Contributing To WordPress: A Beginner’s Guide For Non-Coders
If you’ve been using WordPress for any amount of time, there’s a good chance you’ve come across the following statement: “Free as in speech, not free as in beer.’ If you haven’t, pull up a chair and let’s talk. WordPress is a free and open-source software (also known as FOSS) project. The explanation of that could easily fill up a separate article, but the TL;DR version is that the software is free to download, use, inspect and modify by anyone who has a copy of it.
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