How to maximize the positive contribution of a variety of stakeholders in workshops throughout the UX design process while minimizing any disruptive or negative impact.
To maintain focus in a UX workshop, set aside ideas in a "parking lot" if they diverge from the stated agenda. Parked ideas should be discussed later when they won't slow the team's momentum in addressing the meeting's main topic. Here are 3 guidelines for making the most of a parking lot.
Because the field is being defined in real time, practitioners often have questions about what Design Operations means, and how to establish DesignOps practices.
As you learn design thinking, you progress through stages: being a beginner, an intermediate practitioner, and possessing advanced expertise. This progression is like learning to cook: you won't be a master chef on day 1, but there are appropriate skills to aim for at each level.
UX practitioners associate the term “service blueprinting” with an artifact, framework, or collaborative tool. Those surveyed used service blueprints early on or near the end of the product-design lifecycle.
A service design perspective is needed to avoid fragmenting the long-term customer experience by individual (but uncoordinated) touchpoints, provided by siloed internal teams.
The design thinking project life-cycle has 6 well-defined stages. Mapping these stages onto a typical Agile development project shows when designers should conduct which UX activities.
A parking lot captures unrelated questions or out-of-scope conversation during UX meetings or workshops in order to keep the discussion focused and maintain momentum.
We conducted research with UX professionals and designers to find out what they think Design Thinking actually is. What attributes do practitioners assign to Design Thinking, as used in practice? And how does this understanding evolve as practitioners get more experience?
When you are in the early stages of designing a user experience flow, use scenario mapping to work out how different personas will use the proposed design to solve their tasks.
Cognitive maps, concept maps, and mind maps are diagramming techniques that can be utilized throughout the UX process to visualize knowledge and surface relationships among concepts.
By placing colored dots, participants in UX workshops, activities, or collaborative sessions individually vote on the importance of design ideas, features, usability findings, and anything else that requires prioritization.
The best user experiences are backed by research, but sometimes we move more quickly than our research does. How can we best use and track assumptions as we go through design iterations?
"I can't draw," is a common phrase heard in ideation. But ideation happens in early stages of design and is meant to be messy. This video shows how to use basic shapes to convey UI elements.
Using paper prototypes is a great way to test a design idea and get usability feedback quickly. You can test whether a layout makes sense to users and make immediate changes if they run into issues.
Mapping can help UX practitioners synthesize insight into one place and visualize the problem space. This video covers 3 maps that are often utilized during the discovery phase of a UX design project: ecosystem maps, experience maps, and process maps.
Our research with UX practitioners found 3 main areas of frustrations with service-blueprint projects. Here are recommendations for overcoming or alleviating these problems.
In a museum, knowing the backstory of an artifact makes it more interesting. Similarly, in a UX project, you can make better decisions when you know the context of your UX artifacts like journey maps and wireframes.
Agile development teams that struggle to keep track of UX work in the product backlog can utilize a separate backlog for UX. This method can help siloed teams where UX and development aren't in direct communication. Separate UX backlogs do have pros and cons, which are discussed here.
What does it mean to be a "designer?" Let's broaden the definition, based on the purpose, not the discipline. (Keynote by our Chief Designer, Sarah Gibbons)
Edgar Anzaldua presents a 6-year case study of learning and applying ever-more subtle UX concepts and growing his influence. Always something new to learn, from junior to senior professional level.
Teams who don't know much about UX, often ask you "so when will you give us the design?" during the early design-thinking stages. Areej Aljarba used design thinking itself to overcome this misconception. (Video from 'Back in the Real World' panel with past UX Conference participants.)
How do you decide whether to have a meeting or a workshop for a given problem or stage of your UX design process? Both involve a group of people, but there are 5 big differences, and the two formats work for different situations.
An 8-step process for UX designers and researchers to collaborate better with their stakeholders, for increased collaboration, to help stakeholders meet their goals, and to ensure the impact of your work.
Advance planning and having thought through alternatives can save you when facilitating a UX workshop and the unexpected happens (as it always does). Jan Haaland shares his experience during a panel with past participants in the UX Conference.
At the core of all the myriad of exercises and activity types in UX workshops are a simpler set of 7 foundational activities that can be blended to achieve the desired result.
With experience, UX teams have evolved techniques for better collaboration and design practices to involve and engage remote and distributed team members. With participants at the Virtual UX Conference.
Redesigning a user interface can be done in many smaller incremental releases, or as one big complete redo. Big change is risky, but necessary in 3 cases.
A general technique that's helpful in many kinds of UX workshops and design ideation is to first have team members work independently to create diverging ideas and solutions. Then, as a separate step, everybody works together to converge on the final outcome.
A clear vision gives the team something to aim for, and this is especially important for intranet projects, which often involve contributors from many different departments or functions.
In UX design, you always have to prioritize. Features, personas, usability problems, and the list goes on. Dot votes are a simple way to find the group sense of what's the most important.
The facilitator of a UX workshop, meeting, or other team activity anywhere in the design process has the job of enhancing the group's performance by optimizing the process through structure, activity, and guidance.
To launch a new design operations practice in a company, prioritize and aim for manageable and achievable first steps. Preferably measurable ones that can prove value and form the basis for subsequent steps.
Unsure how to get started using UX mapping methods? Use this collection of links to our articles and videos to learn how to visualize UX insights and ideas into mapped visualizations.
In the discovery phase of a UX project, a problem statement is used to identify and frame the problem to be explored and solved, as well as to communicate the discovery’s scope and focus.
Even people with limited drawing abilities can learn to sketch a wireframe if they learn a few common conventions used to represent various design elements.
Feedback during design critiques can be filled with hypothetical scenarios and unactionable suggestions. The right facilitation techniques help stakeholders and team members stay on track while still feeling heard.
Collaboratively create a UX roadmap in a workshop setting by guiding participants through activities that familiarize them with the project goals, context, and inputs and that identify key roadmap themes and priorities.
Pain points are problems that occur at the different levels of the customer experience: interaction level, customer-journey level, or relationship level.
A survey of people in user experience and product management shows that these professionals disagree on who should be responsible for many key tasks, like doing discoveries and early design.
A design system is a set of standards to manage design at scale by reducing redundancy while creating a shared language and visual consistency across pages and channels.
We made the 10 heuristics’ posters easy to read and understand by iterating through multiple versions and improving each based on user-centered principles and methods.
Set yourself up for journey-mapping success by educating yourself on the basics, defining objectives, building a crossfunctional team, collaborating on the map, and optimizing your presentation.
Communication is the top challenge when designing remotely, according to 213 UX professionals. Receiving feedback, replicating informal conversations, and maintaining a clear direction on projects were the biggest communication concerns.
