Articles of Note
“At a minimum, you’ll learn something by poking the system. You may have been struggling with long sprints. Things feel stale. Maybe you’ve added a couple new team members, or have shifted things around, and you need to reset. Or you are in a state of crisis, and nothing seems “to work”. Managers are descending to micromanage you. Or you are feeling like the team is “kicking ass”, but has hit a local maximum for continuous improvement. Whatever it is, you’re willing to try something new.”
“Whether success is demonstrated using a metric or the opinion of an executive is a cultural matter. It is purely the responsibility of the executives as it is their decision whether to allow investments to take place that do not demonstrate success using metrics. If an executive wants to help their organisation succeed and insist on learning about the customer, they should simply fail any investment that does not use data to demonstrate success.”
by Airtable
“To get the user insights you need to improve, you need to set up a system where your team is constantly receiving a steady stream of quality user feedback. You don’t need a big UX research team or a massive budget to achieve this. By automating your UX workflow, you can spend less time on the logistics of UX research — finding users to talk to, scheduling interviews — and more time getting into the heads of your users.”
“Many organisations are not mature enough to deliver good design, even when given the mockups they asked for. Mockups and sketches are often a distraction: it’s so tempting to believe that having something you can look at means you understand the whole. Your scarce resources might be better spent trying to find and collect data, and learning to prioritise. On beginning with depth and substance, not appearance. Building something ugly and basic, but which meets user needs.”
“Having been involved in running thousands of controlled experiments at Amazon, Booking. com, LinkedIn, and multiple Microsoft properties, we share seven rules of thumb for experimenters, which we have generalized from these experiments and their results … To support these rule of thumb, we share multiple real examples, most being shared in a public paper for the first time.”
Worth Another Read
“Too often, Tech and Creative see themselves as separate camps within a design team. One common reason for this is that a waterfall method effectively creates this separation by virtue of the two roles being separated in the project plan (design first, production second), and separated by one party handing artifacts off to the other. By physically pairing these roles, you are able to bring roles in closer contact, and have them looking and talking about the design together.”
Craft 2017 Redux
The Craft Conference in Budapest this April had the usual selection of excellent sessions. We think you’ll find these of special interest:
Videos of most of the other sessions are also available on the conference site.
Something for You To Watch
(Jane Austin, 32 mins)
“Rather than having a single “genius” designer who drives their own solutions to problems, quality design facilitates the bringing together of different perspectives. For this to work, you need to build a deep, shared understanding, and once you get to this point, you can operate through consent, not consensus, meaning that decisions can be made quickly and transparently.”
(Dan Olsen, 43 mins)
“My Product-Market Fit Pyramid consists of five layers. [Your] target customer, which is the base of the pyramid. [T]heir underserved needs. These two bottom layers are the market. The top three layers pertain to your product. The first … is your value proposition … The next layer above that is your feature set … Finally, at the top layer of the pyramid we have user experience … Given this framework, product-market fit can be seen as how well the assumptions and decisions you make in the top three product layers resonate with the market”
(Bermon Painter, 45 mins)
“A style guide is a great collaboration tool to bridge communication gaps between business stakeholders, designers, and developers. Static or living style guides are a great place to start but become increasingly difficult to maintain because style guide generators are dependent on parsing comments in CSS in order to generate HTML patterns and documentation. In short, there is no single source of truth for the HTML leading to maintainability problems. In this session we will discover creating a truly reusable module through the creation of a pattern API.”
Upcoming Events
Agile in the City, 1-3 November, Bristol
DesignOps Summit, 6-8 November, New York
London Agilists: Culture Mapping, 9 November, London
7 Habits to Building Better Products, 9 November, Palo Alto
Design Sprint Bootcamp, 13-14 November, San Francisco
UI22, 13-15 November, Boston
Gatineau Ottawa Agile Tour, 20 November, Ottawa
Design Sprint Kit, 28-29 November, San Francisco
Clarity, 28-30 November, San Francisco
Lean Innovation Academy – Designing Lean Experiments That Matter, 29 November, Bern
Lean, Agile & Design Thinking, 5 December, Barcelona
Experience Code, 31 January – 1 February, Vancouver
Interaction 18, 3-8 February, Lyon
If we’ve missed something of relevance to Agile & Lean UX folk please let us know at crew@quietstars.com.
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