Letters from the Equator

There’s a really vibrant UX community here in London, with a diverse range of activities and groups such as book clubs, talks, field trips, mentorship programs and the like. But there’s one type of meetup I’ve particularly gained a lot from, called Start UX.

About a year ago, Joe Lanman had an idea to gather a few people who weren’t officially UX designers but were trying to build it into their work and organizations. At the time, I was working at a startup and I was doing everything from user research all the way to the production code. One of the group’s first members, Jeff van Campen, got me into Start UX along with a few others – Francis Norton, Nick Smith, Rob Enslin, and Basheera Khan, who were all interested in getting UX into organizations and influencing change.

We’ve been meeting informally since then to talk about our experiences (war stories) about getting UX into our work and organizations. I’ve been extremely grateful to have these friends to share with, bounce ideas off, and rant to whenever I needed an outlet, some help or support, even another perspective.

The benefit of having a group of people like this isn’t just about learning from each other, but about challenging each other to do what’s worth doing. It’s like peer-coaching.

A year has passed since Start UX first got off the ground, and even though some of us have moved on to dedicated UX roles, the journey still continues and the relationships have grown more mature and valuable. So, I think the spirit of Start UX is about challenging, encouraging, learning from, and growing with one another – like apprentices in a guild.

I highly encourage other practitioners to start their own version of Start UX. If you’re interested in starting one, here are some loose guidelines that may be useful to you and your group:

• keep the group to about 10-12 people, with each meeting made up of about 5-7 people (not everyone will make it at all times) – this keeps the group more intimate and allow for better sharing and social cohesion
• keep to the same group members, so that the members will really get to know each other and each member’s issues over time
• use google groups or something similar to facilitate discussion online, plan meetups, etc.
• for the meetup: find a spot that’s conducive for discussion, has enough room to support a meeting space, and refreshments
• choosing a meeting topic can help scope discussions (e.g. we had a meeting about deliverables once)

Also, make sure to share it with the wider community. That’s one thing our group has failed to do, but that’s going to change -  starting with this blog post. :)

Design consultancies that promoted Design Thinking were, in effect, hoping that a process trick would produce significant cultural and organizational change. From the beginning, the process of Design Thinking was a scaffolding for the real deliverable: creativity. But in order to appeal to the business culture of process, it was denuded of the mess, the conflict, failure, emotions, and looping circularity that is part and parcel of the creative process. In a few companies, CEOs and managers accepted that mess along with the process and real innovation took place. In most others, it did not. As practitioners of design thinking in consultancies now acknowledge, the success rate for the process was low, very low.

- Bruce Nussbaum

OK great now that that’s over, can we all focus on designing with intent and embracing risk and failure?

Smart people want to give their best and as they learn more, they learn that they need to learn a lot more before they start sharing. They learn some more and they learn they need to learn some more. What they forget is that most of the expertise that they already have is either becoming “obvious” to them or better yet, going into their “background thinking.”

Becoming obvious means that there is nothing special about it.

Becoming their background thinking means that they don’t even realize that it’s knowledge. It becomes part of them. For example think about alphabets and multiplication tables. It is in our background thinking and we don’t think about that as knowledge.

@sjors: Good summary on why it’s important that anyone should blog

(via @sjors)

Jared Spool does it again.

He explains how two important aspects that are key to successful design teams:

• Direct exposure to user observation of team members for at least 2 hours in six weeks

Each team member has to be exposed directly to the users themselves. Teams that have dedicated user research professionals, who watch the users, then in turn, report the results through documents or videos, don’t deliver the same benefits. It’s from the direct exposure to the users that we see the improvements in the design.

• Involvement of strong influencers (execs, project managers, etc.) in direct observation of users

The tipping point came when we found teams where all these other folks were participating in the user research studies. No longer did they assert their own opinions of the design direction above what the research findings were telling the teams. Having the execs, stakeholders, and other non-design folks part of the exposure program produced a more user-focused process overall.

The question is – will we be willing to sacrifice invest in order to ensure this happens to make our designs more successful? It’s a common occurrence everywhere, and we as designers need to stand our ground.

Apple crates from Bailey’s Home & Garden - perfect modular shelves for any home…

Thinking of getting a few.

That, or the Ikea PS Bintje’s.

Piolo - the small and simple iPhone 4 stand.

£4.

Makes me want one (the phone).

I just finished reading Giles Colborne’s “Simple and Usable” – a delightfully compact, practical and highly readable book about interaction design. I’m glad the book isn’t one of those books that tries to solve everything about interaction design. Instead, it’s a book from a designer telling stories about his experiences solving design problems to someone who is interested in, but may not be an expert in the subject.

I did find the initial part of the book about design approaches a bit straightforward, mainly because it contained a lot of good design principles I had been hearing a lot elsewhere as well. However, I think it was a necessary in order to provide appropriate context for the four strategies for simplicity, which was the main focus of the book.

However, the main strengths of this book is the way it unfolds. Each page is provides a little story or lesson with a nice big photo next to it, and you’re not forced to dig too deep into theory or complex abstractions. The stories, when added up, provide a sort of perspective about design that’s actually quite holistic. And because each story was neatly fit into one page, it felt as though I was having a conversation of sorts, with the author narrating his experiences around this subject.

This is a really great way to explain design, because it’s not a hard science, but neither is it completely subjective. When I was fairly new to design, one of the hardest things to understand was how designers think and work. There are a ton of design books out there, many of them are either too technical, too sublime, too visionary, or a combination of the three. I still find that as a practicing designer now, we don’t talk enough about our experiences in doing design and fetishize outputs and ideas all too much.

It’s hard not to recommend this book to anyone. I really think it’s a very usable book, and it’ll be a staple on my bookshelf to remind myself of the little things that I need to consider when I think about my work.

When I first got wind of Global Service Jam back in January, I got really excited that a service design unconference was coming to town. I was desperate to get on board so I tuned into GSJ via twitter and kept a watchful eye on organisers, news, and making sure I got a ticket when the time came.

And now the weekend’s over and I’m not quite sure how to put it – Global Service Jam has certainly been a very memorable design jam event for me, but I think I’m left with more questions than I had before about service design and I’m now really wondering if it isn’t really all that different from UX.

Firstly, I have to be honest that my team wasn’t made up of service designers. It would’ve been interesting to gain some insight into how a service designer would’ve approached the problem. In fact, it would’ve been helpful to be given some tips on how to approach service design if you were, say, from an information architecture background or even an interior design background (as one of our team members did).

So over the weekend, “service design” felt to us like it was UX except with a larger scope… it felt like many groups went down the route of not being able to scope an idea, and it felt like we could’ve spent more time focusing on the design process than trying to brainstorm ideas.

I certainly cannot fault the organizers, sponsors, and mentors for being such an amazing, energized, and cooperative team. Two mentors that stood out for me were Belina Raffy, through her energetic improv activities, and Robin Pharoah, who really helped us get to grips with our service idea of helping teens speak out to the wider community.

It has certainly been one of the most energized design events I have ever been to. Design Jam 1 was pretty energetic and UXCampLondon was as well – but it the combination of the 2-hour review sessions, the full weekend span, the frenzied “times up” bell, improv ice breakers, Shoreditch + Brick Lane, the uber-ambiguous “superhero” theme, and the personalies combined that truly set itself up as the craziest design jam in the world (so far).

So, if I’m right, I’ve successfully the 1st design jam ever organized and now, the craziest design jam ever organized.

In the end – I took a way the fact that designing for services takes up way more effort than designing for an app or a website, and it forces you to really dig deep, go far out, and really engage with people (or find good research that has). All the teams who put up commendable effort did all this and it was encouraging and inspiring to see their work, even if the service outcomes weren’t as comprehensive or pragmatic.

OK so in the end I guess we did end up with a service after all.

When I was studying the HCI course at UCL, we had a module known as “Design Tools and Techniques” (it’s now been changed/modified to “Design Practice”), which provided an overview of design that looked like this:

1. The Design Problem
2. Requirements, Scenarios & Task Analysis
3. Prototyping
4. Sketching
5. Design Judgements
6. Visual Design
7. Visual Communication
8. Interfaces
9. Personas

If you’re from a design background, you’re probably looking at this and going… WTF? Task Analysis? Interfaces? Personas? What does that have anything to do with design?

The graphic design course outline from Central St. Martins makes a bit more sense. I wish we had learnt more about sketching as a thinking tool (not as a drawing tool), about exploration in creative problem solving, about the various modes of working (individual vs. collaborative), about the different ways other designers produced their work as well as the various graphic design areas (photography, typography/letterpress, print, animation, etc.).

However, I actually think that the module hasn’t done much damage. I still see a lot of UX designers use patterns, tools, and processes as a starting point – when we should only be considering those when we’ve fully understood the fundamentals. I sometimes wish we could have sessions where we deconstruct the patterns, tools and processes we’re so used to – just to get at the essence of creative problem solving.

While I don’t discount the value I’ve gained from learning about cognition, affect, organizational psychology, ergonomics… it’s good design that really makes all those skills truly worth something.

And while I’m giving my alma mater a hard time here, I’ve also heard criticisms about CSM being too open and exploratory. Maybe we should get UCLIC and Central St. Martins to trade students for half a year.

That would really mess things up nicely.