Two things came to mind: one, is that you will not get good overnight — and knowing the fast-paced tech industry, even if you have mastered one skill, you should be able to learn new things as it progresses.

Which brings to the second point: I wish I had known that while technical skills are important, I felt I should invest more on adaptable skills such as critical thinking, strategic thinking and writing.

Why writing?

When I started writing for corporate, I was told that writing is easy. So I pretty much walked in for the job with that same mindset in mind. I thought personal blogging would prepare me tremendously for the job, and boy I was so wrong. 

When you write for your personal blog, you give less attention to your audience because you pretty much write for and about yourself. However, when you write for someone else in mind, you need to be mindful of who they are, what roles they have, what nuances are better suited for them — the list goes on. 

Furthermore, I learned how to structure my writing and vary my pace accordingly so the audience will be engaged and not get bored in the process.

Something, like below.

Now that I have ventured into tech and UX, writing gets much more challenging.

What does writing have got to do with UX?

If you notice, a large chunk of user experience is delivered through written messages. Think about the time when you are tickled pink by a funny copy on a 404 page, or being overwhelmed trying to contact several houses on Airbnb, or maybe something as routine as trying to find the most appropriate emoji to reply to Tony’s Slack message (OK, maybe just us for this one!)

No emoji? When Slack can’t find an emoji that matches your search, it shows a crying emoji in response.

Like traditional writing, all of the above mentioned are written with an audience in mind. The modus operandi is the same — find out who you will be designing and writing for, do user research, strategise, design, develop, test and launch! 

Traditional writing is often accompanied by content planning. The same goes to UX writing. It is often accompanied and informed by content strategy. UX design and writing will also consider users’ mental states at every phase of the interaction.

This is something traditional writing lacks of, and where the challenge actually lies.

Addressing the current mental state“I just sent my newsletter to 500 subscribers! What if they don’t like it? What if I have typos? Oh Freddy high-fives me!” Mailchimp took into account a user’s mental state upon scheduling a newsletter, and crafted a witty success message to alleviate it.

It seems hard, but is it worth it?

UX writing is one of the most sought after skills these days, especially with the rise of conversational interfaces and chatbots. Not only that, John Maeda, in his annual Design in Tech report, suggests that besides coding, the other “unicorn” skill a designer should have would be writing.

The need for UX writers definitely will increase. Hence it is good to start building the experience needed for the role.

So, ready to level up?

Getting started with UX writing

Start writing!

Take 15 minutes every day to write freely. It does not have to be about work — it can be about thoughts on things or whatever comes to your mind.

One good example that I came across on taking notes of your observation is in this article about engaging in the moment and putting words to things. I especially love how David describes the word ‘petrichor’, the earthy scent of rain having just fallen on soil after a dry spell, “you definitely knew petrichor before you knew it had a name.” His observation on how wine-tasting professionals let their senses take in the scene so they could describe how every wine tastes like, is also worth noting.

You can start by writing something as simple as how your day goes, or what you are thankful about. If you are having problems to write, some websites offer writing prompts to get you started:

• 365 Days of Writing Prompts
• Creative Writing Prompts
• Writing Prompts subreddit

Pay attention to UX writing in the wild

One of the best ways to learn writing for UX is to observe and learn. Medium is good place to start, as it is filled with tech articles of case studies, redesign stories, tips and tricks and many more. Case studies and redesign stories will be helpful to write design justifications — it will help you to articulate your design reasoning better. 

You can also start observing on how some microcopy on the apps you have been using influence your emotions and actions. Calling for Uber? Take note of the copy they use to book a ride. Searching for a product on Lazada? How good is the search copy on the website? Good Microcopy is also one the best places to start to learn.

Ahead of the way A recent delightful microcopy I found out was how Quora provides similar questions in line with yours. If there is no similar questions posted yet, then you may proceed to submit the question.

Get feedback

Learning is a two-way process. Once you have put down a substantial amount of practice, time to get some opinions! Getting feedback helps you to see your writing from a different viewpoint, and so you can start writing more inclusively.

If there is no access to any UX professionals around you, you can seek out feedback online. Slacklist is the good place to find a UX channel start to share your work. Alternatively, there is a number of UX Facebook groups ready to help you learn.

Build portfolio

There is also something important I learned last week from author Jocelyn K. Glei on progress, “Most of us make advances small and large every single day, but we fail to notice them because we lack a method for acknowledging our progress. So, acknowledge them.”

Tracking progress Knowing she’d be overwhelmed, Glei constructed an analog ‘progress tracker’ for all the key pieces of her upcoming podcast. The minute she created this roadmap, she felt more grounded, motivated, and in control.

You wouldn’t know how good you are at writing for UX without building your portfolio. Dropbox has a good guideline on how to start building your UX writing portfolio, taking consideration of how to present your work in the context of the user’s intent & navigations.

Process, not progress

Going back to my initial thought on Smashing Magazine tweet about not being good overnight: you will not be good overnight and that is OK. If you think about it, UX writing is a marriage of two very highly skilled disciplines — user centered design and traditional persuasive copywriting. It is understandable that it will take time to be really good at these two crafts.

So start writing, observing, getting feedback and building those portfolio. If you decide to break into UX writing, or have been doing UX writing already, I’d love to hear more of your insights about this post and your experience.

In the meantime, write on!

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As a UI/UX designer, your responsibility extends more than just pushing pixels behind your screen. The UI/UX discipline encompasses many umbrellas and you could be looking at fields such as human-computer interaction (HCI), usability, visual design, information architecture, interaction design and maybe in the future, more towards conversational design — especially the rise of chatbots and AI. Furthermore, a good UI/UX designer need to also be able to look not only at users’ perspectives, but also from a business’ end goal(s). 

It’s a wonderful time to be alive.

Personal attributes — as opposed to core skills — while might seem secondary, they could elevate yourself and your skills as a UI/UX designer, what’s with more and more companies been hiring waves of designers. They can help designers in large aspects of their work, from satisfying users, working with team members and dealing with stakeholders. These attributes can be learned, developed, encouraged and sharpened — provided you are up for them.

Personal attributes

Empathy

Realising empathy Four inter-related yet distinct processes that has to work together to make this process possible. By Seung Chan Lim.

Empathy is more than just a buzzword floating around. Empathy is described as the ability to understand and share feelings of another person — in other words, being able to put yourselves in other people’s shoes, thus being able to understand their feelings, motivations, limitations, biases and many others.

As a UI/UX designer, you need to be able to develop a sense of empathy to get very far in your career, as you need to be able to understand your users, your clients as well as being able to work with your teammates. Having a sense of empathy will lead to an improvement in a lot of areas. The book Design Collaboration for the Enterprise mentions that by having empathy, you can also improve collaboration.

Seung Chan Lim wrote a wonderful article on a thoughtful examination of empathy in life and in the context of design.

If you want to learn to become more empathetic, here are eight tips to do so.

Critical thinking

Connecting the dots The stage of critical thinking, from data accumulation all the way till wisdom formation. Photo from Gapingvoid.

The best designers are often thinking. More than just that, they know how to think effectively.

We now live among unprecedented abundance of information. The Internet offers us more than we could ever consume and shops offer us more choices than we could ever process. This information glut, coupled with our fast-paced lifestyle, contributes to our inability to filter information effectively, leading to lack of value in the work that we present ourselves in — because we tend to include everything in!

While this skill takes time to develop, there are some small steps you can take to sharpen it. For example, you may start to distinguish between user complaints or feedback during UX testing. During initial project briefing, start making small notes about the nature of the project, and why it would be different from the previous or current ones you are working on. For example, if the new project would require a new interface for a ridesharing app, you may start to think of why the UX would be different from the UX for a recipe sharing app you are currently working on.

Critical thinking is more than just filtering information. Two more subskills of critical thinking you could start to practice are being perceptive and having an eye for details. Technically, if you begin to start questioning “why?” to a lot of things, it is a good start. While surfing the web, you may also start to question why a certain website behaves the way it does, and how they do it. You can start by noticing microinteractions and compiling them, as the folks at Little Big Details do.

Lynda has a good short, one-hour course for critical thinking you could start on.

Hunger for knowledge

There is no prescribed path to becoming a good UI/UX designer. Some people we know do have the qualifications for them, some don’t — but what sets them apart is their willingness to always learn and improve themselves. The industry is constantly evolving and revolutionising. What’s good is that with Internet at the tip of our fingers these days, it is very easy to keep up with the trends.

One tip we often tell budding designers is just a one word mantra: read. There are many books out there offering UI/UX lessons from basic, technical all the way to the psychology of users. The only thing you have to do is keep looking.

Here are some good UI/UX books to start with:

• The Design of Everyday Things – Donald A. Norman
• Don’t Make Me Think – Steve Krug
• The Elements of User Experience – Jesse James Garrett
• About Face: The Essentials of Interaction Design – Alan Cooper, Robert Reimann, David Cronin, Christopher Noessel
• The UX Book – Rex Hartson and Pardha Pyla
• Lean UX: Applying Lean Principles to Improve User Experience – Jeff Gothelf and Josh Seiden
• The User Experience Team of One – Leah Buley

Patience

The initial section was to be called ‘passion’ — but I changed my mind. Very often we emphasise on the importance on passion for us to pursue what we want, without realising that like supernova, passion burns brightly and full of energy, only to burst and fade slowly. 

If you are a new UI/UX designer, there will be many occasions where the learning curve might get too steep you feel like quitting. Having the patience to know that any worthy skills take time to master will keep you grounded and put you back on track on your endeavour to become an excellent UI/UX designer.

Having the patience will also help you to be more grounded. In return, you will be more open to learn more (hunger for knowledge), understand others (empathy) and being able to fill in the gaps (perceptive) while constructing your solutions (critical thinking).

Don’t forget to also check out: So You Wanna Be a UI/UX Designer: Part 1 – Core Skills.

The post So You Wanna Be a UI/UX Designer: Part 2 appeared first on Stampede: the strategic design & technology company.

It has also been one of the biggest contributors to many success stories, for example — Jeff Bezos invested 100 times more into customer experience than advertising during the first year of Amazon, and AirBnB’s Mike Gebbia credits UX with taking the company to $10 billion.

Clearly, good user experience is good for business.

More so than ever, we are in need of more UI/UX designers to carry on this challenge. Undoubtedly not an easy role, UI/UX designers need to equip themselves with a certain sets of skills. Which brings to the next question— what sort of skills?

From our experiences, we could list down these skills in two categories — core skills (technical skills needed to excel as a UI/UX designer) and personal attributes (might seem secondary, but they are actually important to level yourself up to be a better UI/UX designer each day).

This week, let’s talk about core skills needed to become a UI/UX designer. Onward!

Core skills

User research

Bigger companies might have a dedicated team to perform user research, but it is important for a UI/UX designer to get herself involved in the research from the beginning. This could give her more insight into the nature of the business, get herself acquainted with the clients & their problems and how they behave — which actually could help with the direction of the design later.

Wireframing

Wireframing is the step which allows you to define the information hierarchy of your design, making it easier for you to plan the layout. It is as MVP as it can be in the design process, especially if you want to start designing and you want to confirm with the client or the team on the layout.  Once it is confirmed, it is actually faster to start designing since you already have the structure.

This beginner’s guide to wireframing is very helpful for you to start building your own guidelines.

Visual design

In order to transform the wireframes into mock ups, suffice to say you will need to have basic visual design skills. Our designers use Photoshop for this before getting the designs signed off and handed over to the development team, but best to check with the team you are working with on their preferences.

You might be thinking — “but I started with print design and I wanted to get into UI/UX, is it too late?” Absolutely not! There is an abundance of free UI/UX courses online you may find on Coursera, Hackdesign and many more. You may only need to start adapting your existing design practices to UI/UX. 

Prototyping

Prototyping can be defined as ‘a simulation or sample version of a final product, used for testing prior to launch.’ Prototypes are used to test products, fix issues and confirm requirements before sinking further into development. Prototype testing can save time and money since it can be used to identify earlier usability issues and reveal areas to be improved.

A lot of apps can be used to develop faster prototypes. Our team swears by InVision, but there are many others such as UXPin, Atomic and Sketch.

If you’d like to read more, UXPin here has a good article on a guide to prototyping.

Basic coding

We all hear of all these arguments floating about — “should designers learn how to code?”. The answer would be, “yes, but as much as possible to understand how development would work later.”

The designs done by UI/UX designers are eventually going to be translated into code, so it is helpful for UI/UX designers to know basic front end and programming knowledge. This is so that you could know what’s possible to be done before sending your design files to the developers without risking on their timelines or resources. It is vitally important, according to this discussion, that “UX folks have (at least) a theoretical understanding of “FE-related things”, including semantic page structure, optimization techniques, impact of JavaScript, graceful degradation/progressive enhancement, accessibility etc.”

Metrics and analytics

There is a possibility that user research will not be included in the scope of a project, so how do you start designing? First off, UI/UX designers do not design blindly. Your design decisions should be informed from experiential and data-driven decision.

UI/UX designers need to have some basic understanding on translating data so that we can use them to accomplish goals and achieve customer’s satisfactions. InVision has this good article on how to design with data.

Writing

In his annual Design in Tech report lead by John Maeda, he suggests that besides coding, the other one “unicorn” skill a designer should have would be writing. While many designers have noted the value of leading design with content, there are some others who are still persistent to start writing more due to many reasons. Well, we should not have.

Writing could also help immensely in articulating your design justifications to clients, or your team members. Furthermore, when you write, we empty up our mental estate in order to make way for more information to come through. We also remember better!

There is no magic to writing, and if you would like to start, here are some simple but powerful UX writing tips for designers.

Moving forward

Evidently, there is no shortcut to become a good UI/UX designer. Depends on your organisations or whether you work alone, sometimes not all of these skills are needed but it would be helpful to branch into all of these core skills as much possible.

After all, user advocation doesn’t take a day!

Next in Part 2: So You Wanna Be a UI/UX Designer : Personal Attributes.

(Thank you WOCinTech Chat for photos!)

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Running a UX workshop is a user experience lesson by itself as there are several types of personalities that can be identified from the involved participants. One participant might be very eager about the project creating a dominating presence, while the other might be too shy and nervous and keeping him/herself recluse from the beginning. This is where the UX workshop facilitator truly shines, by navigating around different personalities so that every participant becomes involved. Everyone has a say in things and their opinions are valued.

Deriving from our experience running this UX process, here are a few commandments in facilitating a UX workshop.

Thou shall be super prepared

There is a quote by author Joe Poyer.

Thorough preparation makes its own luck.

While luck itself is commonly linked to a coin flip, the quote itself means that being prepared will reduce the the risk of things going wrong.

Over the years we learned that the most impactful decision to reduce risks and uncertainty was to implement a checklist. Checklists are helpful, simple, and gives everyone a baseline of things we should agree on before starting the workshop. It can cover items such as, what stationery to bring (markers, pens, post-it notes, flip-charts, tape, ideation cards etc.), a list of participants, an agenda of the workshop, a brief flow/script of facilitation and many more.

For first time facilitators, you might want to hold a quick rehearsal with your internal team a few hours or a day ahead of the workshop. As you gain more experience overtime, you may find that this is no longer needed.

Thou shall have an agenda

Having an agenda lets everyone in the workshop know what to expect, what will happen, what they need to do, and plans moving forward.

Picture this, your clients arrive on that day hoping for a significant outcome from the workshop. They have allocated a huge number of hours or days out of their busy schedule just for it. Because of this, it is of the utmost importance to let them know what will happen during the workshop and what they will need to do and expect. By having an agenda, they won’t feel overwhelmed with uncertainty and everyone’s goals are aligned throughout the session.

Thou shall delegate

This is a lesson we learned the hardest. Stampede is made up of such talented people – sometimes we individually become too ‘enthusiastic’ and do everything by ourselves! However, realistically we can only do so much. If a person is able to focus on something, the better the outcome will become.

As a workshop facilitator, you can’t be doing everything at once. Delegate someone to take care of the note-taking or recording, or someone to bring in the refreshments at the start of the workshop. Ask someone in your team to alert you if they see someone is disengaged, or one part of the session exceeds its time limit – so you can keep the workshop back on track.

Thou shall be realistic

As a rule, you cannot possibly cram all UX activities in one day.

Decide what sort of activities will take place in the workshop. If it is only about identifying the user persona and journey, in my experience, the two itself would take roughly a day and a half. If there are no prior identification to the user personas beforehand by the clients, it would probably take more days. There will be many discussions going back and forth, especially if it involves quite a number of participants. To not overwhelm everyone, dedicate at most a two-day session just for one method. Some of these methods are the user persona, user journey, card sorting, and usability testing. Schedule an additional session if another method needs to be accomplished.

Thou shall be friendly yet determined

As mentioned, facilitating a UX workshop is a user experience lesson by itself. You need to be able to exude a friendly aura so that everyone feels relaxed and comfortable with you. In general, being friendly means that we become too lenient about things. We can go overboard with time limits, or one participant might just sit and stare into the screen while the others offer feedback, or worse, they might be too shy to participate at all and we don’t want to ask them so many times as not to humiliate them.

There is no shortcut around this. The first step is to identify the personality traits every participant have. Commonly seen are, The Shy One, The Rambler, The Off-Piste, The Assertive One, The Space Cadet and The Yes Man/Woman. This article frames a good way on how to deal with each personality trait – granted it is for user interviews, but a good guide nevertheless.

Thou shall have fun!

I shall not lie, after so many workshops, I still get anxious about facilitating one after another! Above all, we should bear in mind that what we do in these workshops is to help each other. We help the client to discover the best experience their users could have, and as the custodian of their business, only they could provide us that.

As a UX workshop facilitator, if you project yourself as having fun, your positive vibes will show and rub off on the rest of the group. However, if you are anxious, that will show too.

So, smile, enjoy the attention and focus on keeping everyone involved!

The post The 6 Commandments of UX Workshop Facilitation appeared first on Stampede: the strategic design & technology company.

We are lucky to have good clients, who most of the time become good friends for life. There are instances where clients would fly over to Malaysia and the whole team would go and meet them. If any of our team members were to visit other countries, they’d take the opportunity to meet up with our clients there over dinner or coffee.

Sometimes we sit down and think, “Hey, we do have good people”. As we spend more time in the industry, we also realise that it is important to go that extra mile in developing client experience so that both parties can benefit from it. We also strongly believe in going that extra mile for those who are worth it.

Why Client Experience?

Client Experience is the practice of onboarding clients or leads with the focus on the quality and thoughtfulness of the user experience. Every touchpoint within the client’s first few interactions with the company is designed to deliver the best experiences. It requires extra thoughtfulness, loads of empathy, and above all, a highly personalised experience.

Similar to user experience, touchpoints begin as a lead to a client, with every touchpoint and pain point being noted. Every interaction and experience should be seamless and memorable.

Client onboarding tips

Stampede takes great care in every process, including onboarding leads or new clients in order to provide a good first impression. Here are some tips we’d like to offer.

Be ready with all the information

Put yourself in the shoes of a new client – they are brimming with ideas, they want to tell you what they are looking forward for their project, they want you to help them realise their idea.

As an agency, we must help them discover these budding ideas. What we do is we provide them with a requirements discovery form, asking them to fill it in with the following details:

• Background of project/company
• What they need
• Who are the target audience
• Any competitors’ website’ they have in mind? (for competitors review)
• What goal they are looking to achieve with this new site (e.g. I want to increase signup by 50% by January, I want to get 15000 traffic by the next quarter etc.)
• Who the contact person is (for liasing and approval purposes)

Often enough, if the leads or new clients are still unclear, we offer to do Skype calls or face-to-face meetings if they need further clarification.

Be prepared with checklists!

We at Stampede are big fans of to-do lists. Every workflow – internal review, UAT, launch list, HTML/CSS, user experience framework – we have lists for it all. This includes onboarding, once we have secured the client.

Here’s a quick example of ours – Stampede Client Onboarding List.

Be interested

There’s a quote by Dale Carnegie that we hold very dearly, “To be interesting, be interested.”

We really love to get to know our leads or clients, as they often do great things and if possible we would like to be involved with them. Hence every time an inquiry slides into our inbox, we like to do a little ‘sleuthing’ – how their current website looks like, who the founders are, the team members, what they have produced, etc.

During the initial meeting, we bring these details up with client. By doing so, the client recognises that we have made a conscious effort to get to know them.

This does not only apply to information we find – sometimes we have questions, loads of them in fact. Ask clients in those meetings. We are often surprised at how interesting everyone is when we take the effort to get to know them.

Be proud of your work, and its process

Let’s be real – our clients discovered us because they have probably heard of us somewhere, or stumbled upon our work from a related source. But what they do not know is how care and detail we at Stampede pour into our every projects, no matter big or small.

These are several things we do to show this:

• Update blog with case studies of projects
• Portfolio of projects we have done
• Get testimonials from current clients
• Keep sharing wonderful work on social media platforms

Once, we showed a client how we came up with styleguides, competitive reviews, user journeys and many more. The results of the work is one thing, the process is another.

Clients love it when they know we invest so much in their projects. Which is why we are often told by clients – we are unlike any other agency, we are just like an extension of their team 🙂

Be proud of the people you work with

Good work will not materialise by itself. We believe that good work is a product of good people. Hence, why we are so proud of our team.

In a kickoff team, bring in the team members who will be involved in the project. They may just sit there and take notes, but take the time to introduce each and every one of them. List down their achievements, sometimes, you’d be surprised that they have forgotten that they have achieved those as well. To be reminded how good you are is so motivating.

It also helps set the tone and relationship the clients’ team and your team will have. After all, they will be working together for the next few months – so it is vital to set up a good start.

Be on time

Being on time is one of the ten leadership traits that require zero talent, as mentioned in the image above. Always be punctual; be on time for meetings, send off documents on time, keep the client updated, and make sure the project delivers on time.

There are times when we foresee inevitable delays. In this event, we will make sure to let the client know beforehand so that the delivery dates can be rescheduled to achievable times. This is also fair to the client so that they can plan accordingly, and they are most often okay with the heads up.

Be ready to always improve

Sometimes, try hard as we might, the lead does not turn into a client. Take the time to get to know why. “Are there any shortcomings on our part? Is there any information they need from us but we overlooked it? Is our price reasonable? Will you consider us again?” Taking the time to follow up and ask these questions helps us improve our service.

Be ready to go the extra mile

Mr Wicky Sundram spotted in Stampede t-shirt!

Unfortunately, there are times that we have to turn down the lead’s project due to budget constants, schedule or resource allocation problems.

Do go the extra mile to find out what they need in the given time. “Should we recommend you to freelancers? Is it OK if we move the deadline in the next quarter so we should be able to accommodate you?”

More so than often, a lead is willing to wait until our schedule is cleared (it can sometimes take up to two months!) once we are willing to help them to move forward with their project. As mentioned, it does not hurt to do something extra.

Have any tips with onboarding new clients? We’d love to know! Please share a comment down below if you have any tips. Thank you.

The post Tips on Delightful Client Onboarding Experience appeared first on Stampede: the strategic design & technology company.

In UX Research Part 2, we shall take a look at one of the biggest questions that we had been asked: how do we know which methods to use, and when to use them? 

To make this easy, I shall elaborate on the common methods we use based on three phases of UX project:

• Research
• Design and development
• Deployment and maintenance

Research

If we are about to define who the users and customers are for our product, there are several ways to find out:

Survey

Survey is one of the cheapest ways to find out who the users and customers are since most of the survey softwares out there are mostly free or affordable, and in next to no time you can whip something up and start gathering feedback from real users. Implementing the survey is the easy bit, the tricky part is preparing the questions as you won’t get the feedback you’re after if you don’t ask the right questions. Some examples of good questions would be:

• How did you learn about product X? Why did you decide to use product X?
• What were your goals when you started using product X? Did product X meet your expectations related to these goals?
• What are the the most frequent tasks you do using product X? Explain how you do these tasks (step by step)
• What other products do you use to accomplish similar tasks and why?
• When you are using product X, do you find anything frustrating that you wish was easier/different?
• Is there anything that you wish product X allowed you to do that it doesn’t allow now?
• What comes to mind when you think about product X (how would you describe it to a friend)?
• What do you like the most/least about product X?

You may find some other examples of good questions here in UX Stack Exchange, but bear in mind that the questions you prepare need to adhere to your specific set of users, otherwise we are not getting the feedback that is valid.

Persona

A persona by definition is a representation of the goals and behavior of a hypothesised group of users. What functions do they want, and when in certain stage of decision do they care the most? Think beyond gender, income and age, and look to tasks and domain experience as key differentiators. I have written about how to determine a user persona in a previous Stampede blog post.

Competitive Analysis

“Competition brings out the best in products and the worst in people.” says American businessman and pioneer in radio and broadcasting, David Sarnoff. Competitive analysis in UX context is a method for identifying the strengths and weaknesses of competing products or services before starting to work on our own prototypes. Here’s a good guidelines on how to conduct and prepare competitive analysis report.

Stakeholder Interviews

Stakeholder interviews are conducted with the key stakeholders of the organisations for the product: this could include customers, bosses, subordinates, or peers both within and outside the organisation. The interviews allow you to step into the shoes of your interviewees and see your role through the eyes of these stakeholders, which should answer the questions, “What do my stakeholders want from me? What do they need me for?”

Usually stakeholder interviews should provide enhance clarity on how your work as the UX team matters from their viewpoint, how they plan to assess the outcome, as well as identifying barriers and ideas to improve the situation.

Task Analysis

Task analysis, as defined in Interaction Design Foundation, is a simple and effective process for laying out tasks from a user’s perspective. It is sometimes also referred to as “user scenarios”. It is close to a creating a user story as defined in agile methodologies.

This approach helps you avoid the mistake of automating the frustrations that already exist or repeating past mistakes. It gets you to the bottom of what the user will want to do and the simplest, most effective way of doing that. One of the key challenges when conducting task analysis is to let go of what you already think you know and allow the user’s needs to guide the process instead.

Design and Development

As we have moved on to design and development phase, there are several questions before we move on to build final products:

• How will the interface look like?
• How effective will it be?

In Stampede, we use wireframing and prototyping approach to showing clients how the interface will look and function before we move on to design the final product. Ensuring that it works as intended for the target users in the minimum viable product (MVP) stage before we move on to the next phase, would save a lot of time as there will be only be minimum tweaking on the wireframes and prototypes before we finalise.

Wireframing

A wireframe generally is a skeleton of a page, showing the priority and the organization of things on the screen and how users will get to other parts of the site. While wireframes will vary in their level of detail, they reflect the designer’s ideas about the placement of elements on the page, the labeling of elements, site navigation, and how the user will interact with the site. Wireframes are usually shown to the clients during the early phase in design, ensuring that all parties involved in the UX project – designer, developer, client – are all in the same page about what should be in the interface.

Prototyping

A prototype can be defined as “a simulation or sample version of a final product, which is used for testing prior to launch.” The goal of a prototype is to test products (and product ideas) before sinking lots of time and money into the final product.

Prototyping is essential for resolving usability issues before launch. It can also reveal areas that need improvement. Once a draft of your product idea is in the hands of real users, you’ll finally see how they want to use the product. You can then go back and adjust your initial guesswork.

There are a number of prototyping tools for non-coders out there that turn images and sketches into functional, clickable screens like Axure, Sketch and Balsamiq. Your pick!

Deployment and Maintenance

Now that everything is functioning, it is time to understand how usable the product it is as we release it to our clients or users.

User Acceptance Testing (UAT)

As we adopt agile methodology in our UX projects, UAT is conducted by preparing a series of test scripts detailing functionalities and objectives according to user stories. The document is then presented to the client to conduct the testing, as well as to log the notes of defects. At the end of the UAT, the tests are compiled, assessed based on severity, and assigned to the team.

There are many ways to do UATs as well as adapting the UAT template to your liking. We personally use Google Spreadsheet as it is easily accessible to everyone, but if you have quite a number of testers, I would suggest to use tools to conduct UAT. Tools like EngageUAT have been receiving good reviews, so we look forward to try it one day!

Usability Testing

There are two ways to conduct usability testing post-launch: moderated and unmoderated.

In moderated setting, users are to attempt tasks under the watchful eyes of observers. These observers shall record their reactions to using the website or product, as well as encouraging them to voice out their opinions, whether pleasant or unpleasant, loudly. However, the observers are not to tell them what to do – instead, just watch as users interact with the product and record them.

There is an easier way to do this through unmoderated setting. Users can now attempt tasks remotely while we record their behaviour using tools such as Hotjar, UserZoom and UserTesting. Decide a goal, start recording, and watch results from dozens to hundreds to users in the same day.

Comparative Benchmark Study

Comparative benchmark study is what we do when we ask users to perform the same tasks in the products we built against other products mentioned in the competitive analysis. We would define some core metrics to be compared and tested between our products and competitors’ products like completion rates or checkout time taken and assessed the strengths and weaknesses in of our own products.

A/B Testing

Being Stampede, we are always trying to improve on things, for example, what would happen if we do enlarge this button or move it to the left – do you think it would affect user experience? As design and improvements don’t stop upon releasing, our rule is this: don’t guess, test. However, we do take into account of if time and budget allow us to further experiment, otherwise, the improvements are done gradually, subject to the clients’ approval.

Can you tell us more about the tools?

Now that there is a simple guideline on which UX methods to use in every phase of UX project, you might be asking – there should be tools to improvise each and every method, is that so? The answer is yes absolutely! We shall take a look at these tools in the Part 3: UX Toolbox.

What are the methods you often use during your UX projects? How have they helped you understand your users and build your products? What have you learned? Tell us about them in the comments section!

The post UX Research Part 2: Which UX Methods to Use? appeared first on Stampede: the strategic design & technology company.

Were answers provided to our questions? Not quite, because we doubt the reviews but we’d love to watch it anyway. So we set up expectations, or metrics – that if something happens or does not happen in the movie, then it’s going to be good. So we go. It ends up making us feel good. Hypotheses proved, metrics met.

In this case, we are the end user. So it is easy to conduct research based on the persona we know best – ourselves. But what if we are taking someone on a date to see the movie, whose favourite genre is entirely different from ours – and impressing him/her is paramount?

The scenario is no different in the user experience (UX) when you are building products, services, applications and websites for people who are intended to use the website, and whose opinions and impressions matter.

In UX, research is important to ensure that we are designing it for the users, instead of ourselves. The formalised research is called UX research, which helps us identify, prove or disprove our assumptions, recognise their needs, mental models, their pain points, challenges as well as what unites them together towards the common goal of using the product. Essentially, research shall add information to our work, improves our understanding and validate our decisions.

How do we start?

Created by Erin Sanders in this article, the Research Learning Spiral provides five main steps for conducting UX research. The first two steps are about forming questions and hypotheses, and the last three steps are about gathering knowledge through selected UX research methods.

1. Objectives. What are the knowledge gaps we need to fill?
2. Hypotheses. What do we think we understand about our users?
3. Methods. Based on time and manpower, what methods should we select?
4. Conduct. Gather data through the selected methods.
5. Synthesise. Fill in the knowledge gaps, prove or disprove our hypotheses, and discover opportunities for our design efforts.

There are many ways to do UX research. The most important question is: how do we frame it within many other factors? These factors can include:

• The end goals of the product – both from business and users’ perspectives
• Time constraint
• Accessibility (to information, users, stakeholders, decision makers etc.)
• Other limitations

The first three are the most common factors we encounter in Stampede. In taking considerations of these factors, we work closely with clients to ensure that we get as much information as possible in the research stage before we begin in the UX designing phase.

The end goals of the product

When a UX research does not take place…

For example, after 3 months of launch, they’d like to see the sales increase 300%.

For strategists, this is an important thing to note – as we can reverse engineer our way in finding out how to increase the sales by 300% through a number of methods, which should be specified in research.

Secondly, the most important thing is of course, to consider the needs of the users. For example, by the end of the process, the client should be receiving testimonials as how easy it is to use the website now. Other ways to measure this expectation is also to install heat map analysis tools for your websites such as Hotjar, Crazy Egg or ClickTale.

The tools on UX shall be explained later in Part 3.

Time constraint

As much as we like to talk to as many users as possible and take much longer to conduct research, most of the time we do not have that luxury.

Typically, user research stage in Stampede takes place for the first two weeks after a UX project kicks off. At this point, as we work closely with our clients on securing the business and user end goals, we also narrow down the best methodologies as possible to fit in the timeframe.

For example, in the course of two weeks, it is quite impossible to conduct a physical workshop involving the main stakeholders who are scattered all over the country. It takes a lot of time by itself for the arrangement and logistics, let alone preparing and conducting it.

So what do we do? In the research stage, we ask the clients…

• … for the contacts of key primary users we can get hold of and ask them for time to do usability tests – depending on accessibility arrangements, if any (see next point)
• … if there are existing products they like, and we do comparison reviews
• … if there are existing data of users we could take a look – users statistics, testimonials, dev site links, wireframes etc. Every data should come of use.

We shall talk about knowing which UX methods to use later in Part 2.

Accessibility

Another factor to take into consideration before starting on the UX research journey is to find out the accessibility of the key stakeholders. These can be:

• The decision maker from the client side – most likely the product owner
• How accessible we are to users if we intend to interview or do usability testing?

Other limitations

When we talk about user experience we often forget about the most important thing: the user’s experience. Too often we are so obsessed with clever solutions and stunning visuals that they completely ignore the fact that their users won’t care about it as long as it works. This is why limitations are key to great UX. The odds of achieving a clear and understandable user experience are way higher if you limit yourself and the features of the product you’re designing depending on the users’ needs.

Other limitations that might surface before you start on UX research would be:

• Scope given by client. There are clients who are lenient about us experimenting and suggesting, but it is always good to check with them every single time.
• Client approval
• Other items that might have been mentioned in Non Disclosure Agreement (NDA) e.g. the limits to how accessible the current site data might be, their users or disclosure of current information etc.

All of these can help us to narrow down how to begin our UX research and determine which methodologies to use in the next stage.

What’s next?

Now that we have established the factors that will help us to move to the next stage, here’s one thing to keep in mind: the biggest mistake a UX strategist can make is excluding end users from the process. Start the design process by including the users from the start, listen to their disappointments, pain points as well as what makes them happy – not only while using the product, but also understanding their mental model in general.

In conclusion, UX research is a very interesting process in a sense that it helps us avoid our biases since we are required to figure out solutions for people who are different from us.

What factors have you considered before you embark on a user experience research? Share with us in the comments section!

There are a number of popular methods used in improving the user experience at all phases of research and design. We shall take a look at some popular methods and when you should use them in Part 2: Which Methodologies Should I Use?

The post UX Research Part 1: How Do We Start? appeared first on Stampede: the strategic design & technology company.

Stampede beraya at Casa de Shaiful

At Stampede, during one of our Blitz (scrum) sessions, we threw a question that we can all relate to. It’s about each and everyone’s most favourite and memorable Hari Raya memory.

What is your best Hari Raya memory?

Here’s what the team had to say

Iwan

For me, the best Hari Raya memory was from last year (2015). Before this I would only go back to my hometown, but now that I’m married, I get to start celebrating with two families. It is a new experience for me because now I need to decide which kampung I need to visit first. This also means I get to eat twice as much and can get to savor both Negeri Sembilan and Ipoh cuisine. My wife’s family are ethnic Banjar people so the food they serve is very unique to me, while my side makes the best rendang. Last Raya was also very memorable because my wife was pregnant at the time so many people came to visit.

Shaiful

My best Hari Raya memory last year in 2015. My family organized an open house, because my grandparents are not around anymore so there’s no place to ‘balik kampung’. The turnout was huge, with about 12 families attending the invitation. The guests contributed to some of the food and brought their own specialties to be shared.

Then there were also some crazy scenes happening when the kids got together. One of them just strolled into my room and picked up my ukelele and started jamming.

I think the biggest highlight of that Raya was the barbecue setup, using a big burner and set up at the porch of my house. Having a barbecue pit is very unique during Hari Raya. Then there were also some crazy scenes happening when the kids got together. One of them just strolled into my room and picked up my ukelele and started jamming. After that they went on to the playground.

Shaza

In Malaysia, Hari Raya is often celebrated by traveling back to your hometown—this mass exodus is called “Balik Kampung” (translation: going back home to the village). My parents have called Ipoh town home for many years and yet when Raya beckons, we will always look forward fondly to Balik Kampung to my grandmother’s house, a small village in Batu Kikir, Negeri Sembilan. As Malaysia gets more urbanized, Balik Kampung could also mean going back home to wherever home is, cities, towns and villages alike.

When I was a child, my parents couldn’t afford to make the trip and celebrate Hari Raya with their family every year. At one time, I remember we didn’t go back for 3 years. So this made Balik Kampung something to look forward to. I remember us taking the rickshaw from our house in Kuala Terengganu to the bus terminal, followed by a bus ride to the Kuantan terminal by the river, an exchange to yet another bus onwards to Negeri Sembilan, disembarking at a small stop by the roadside and walking down the village road for another 2 kilometers (not easy with three children and massive luggage) before finally greeted by the excited shrieks of my aunties and uncles.

Raya food and popping zombies—that’s the dream.

My grandmother has gone for a few years now, but we still honour her memory and family tradition by celebrating Hari Raya together. One of the fondest memories I have of Hari Raya recently was playing Left 4 Dead in a LAN party with my siblings at the Raya table, surrounded by lemang, ketupat and laksa, with my dad checking in every so often to replenish his supplies of “Kuih Raya” (specialty raya cookies that truthfully, all tastes the same).

Raya food and popping zombies—that’s the dream. Anyone game this raya, look me up on Steam.

Zana

My father would occasionally join us in his sarong and fire ‘meriam’ (bamboo cannon) with the older cousins.

My fondest and best memory of Raya was when I was around 7 years old. During that time we would go back to my grandmother’s kampung. Once there all the cousins would get together to play with fireworks. It was cute because the smaller cousins would play with ‘Pop Pop’ (small firecrackers), while the older ones would play with larger fireworks. With such a variety, all sorts of sounds could be heard with everyone playing. My father would occasionally join us in sarong and fire ‘meriam’ (bamboo cannon) with the older cousins. Another thing about Raya is collecting ‘Duit Raya’ from the adults which we would soon spend on buying sweets.

Tony

For me, the best and most memorable Hari Raya was the time just after Nauly (my daughter) was born. She came into my life during the fasting period before Eid. That Raya was not like the other times because the neighbors would come over to visit and be excited over Nauly. It was a great combination of becoming a dad and getting together with friends and family.

Hakim

I can’t recall a particular Raya that is the best. During that time I would visit family and friends, eat great food and getting some well needed rest after a month of fasting. Then at night, I’d hang out with my friends and watch football somewhere. One thing I do look forward to during this season is my grandmother’s cooking, as she makes the best Soto. Don’t just take it from me, my friends also love savoring her cooking.

What about you?

So what’s your favourite Hari Raya Memory? Share one of your best moments about this holiday with us below in the comment section. You’ll also be able to see what we’re up to this Raya on our Instagram and Facebook channels, so be sure to check that out too.

The team at Stampede wishes everyone a blessed Eid and Selamat Hari Raya, Maaf Zahir Batin. Enjoy your holidays and make even more great memories!

The post Our Best Hari Raya Memories! appeared first on Stampede: the strategic design & technology company.

An increasing number of design companies have now begun to ditch the unforgiving waterfall project management approach for an agile one. It allows teams — both internal and clients’— to hit key milestones fast, to get greater visibility to the project, and to receive continuous feedback — hence allowing them to reach quicker to change and bottlenecks in the development process. The agile approach helps teams respond to these unpredictabilities through incremental, iterative work cadences, known as sprints.

In an agile paradigm, every aspect of development — requirements, design, etc. — is continually revisited throughout the life cycle. When a team stops and re-evaluates the direction of a project sprints every two weeks for instance, there’s always time to steer it in another direction. The results of this “inspect-and-adapt” approach to development greatly reduce both development costs and time to market. Mistakes are reduced, products are shipped fast, reiterations are made there and then, users’ needs are more addressed rather than initial requirements.

Simply summarised, Agile project management is the process by which projects can be managed and implemented in small chunks of work. Small victories.

Scrum and Kanban

Scrum and Kanban are two terms that are often (incorrectly) used interchangeably in Agile approach. In reality, there are significant differences between these two Agile methodologies. Understanding these differences is key to choosing the path that will work best for your environment.

Scrum vs Kanban (Source: solutionsiq.com)

Scrum is a tool used to organise work into small, manageable pieces that can be completed by a cross-functional team within a prescribed time period (called a sprint, generally 2-4 weeks long).To plan, organise, administer, and optimise this process, Scrum relies on at least three prescribed roles: the Product Owner, the Scrum Master and the Team Members. Scrum board refers to the visual representation of the work flow, broken down into manageable chunks called “stories”, with each story moved along the board from the “backlog” (the to-do list), into work-in-progress (WIP), and on to completion.

While Scrum limits the amount of time allowed to accomplish a particular amount of work (by sprints), Kanban limits the amount of work allowed in any one condition – so that only a certain number of tasks can be ongoing and completed on the to-do list. Kanban board, just like Scrum board, refers to Kanban’s visual representation of the work flow.

How are agile projects managed?

Using Scrum model rather than Kanban, as previously adopted, we have established that there are three roles: product owner, ScrumMaster and team.

The product owner is largely responsible for the business aspects of the project. She ensures the right product is being built and is the most empowered to make decisions about the product. If an agile project involves teams both internal and client, someone from the client side is usually the product owner as she has the say on what should be established within the requirements.

The Scrum Master is usually the project manager or the project lead, ensuring that the team works together in the most effective manner possible. A good Scrum Master facilitates meetings and discussions within an agile project, remove impediments in the progress, tracking progress and issues — in short, ensuring the teams get what can be done as smoothly as possible.

Then there’s the most important people: the team. They assume each role dedicated in the agile project either as Strategist, Designer, Front End Developer, Programmer etc and together will collaborate on how to best achieve the product goals.

Agile project management divides responsibility among more than one team member, and everyone is involved in every phase of the project, rather than focusing on one member at a team— like waterfall approach. The result is every team member is more informed of every project decision and everyone should be in the same page once done right.

Tools

Scaling agile isn’t easy the first time round – all good things is not the first time round. Luckily there are always tools to help expedite agile approach as good as possible. Here are three of which we have tried out.

Yodiz

We use Yodiz as our Agile project management tool in Stampede. Its features include Scrum tool, issue and bug tracker, Kanban task board, and epics management software. With a visual, Kanban style Scrum board, users are able to see a comprehensive sprint planning view. They effectively manage user stories and sprints, create, edit and re-prioritise them easily, associate them into epics that span across multiple projects, and track daily work progress and burndown charts. It is so far the most comprehensive out of all tools we have tried.

JIRA

JIRA Software gives your team the flexibility to plan and adopt any agile practice, whether it be scrum, kanban, or a mixed methodology. Teams can create and estimate stories, build a sprint backlog, visualize activity, measure team velocity, and report on progress. JIRA seems to be more visual and less cluttered than Yodiz, however, JIRA is more catered towards large enterprise scalability and we serve smaller companies — hence, Yodiz is a better choice for us.

ZebraPlan

If you’re a tech startup, it can be tough to find quality Agile software at a palatable price point. ZebraPlan offers a great solution for small teams with big needs. The software breaks down tasks into sprints, which users can easily drag-and-drop tasks into. The dashboard view has all the necessary charts to keep your team in check, and the software has some overall cool features, like KPI comparisons, code review, and, for those opting for the “ultimate” plan, 16 reports to choose from.

Conclusion

Agile approach might have been touted to be oriented heavily towards software development, but to be honest if we think about it, its core principles of “inspect and adapt” should apply more now where things are often changing and evolving. Agile should be a natural fit, once you figure out how to make it work for you. After all, as each team and project is different, you are best off picking the methods and applications that work and adapt them as you go.

Does your team also run agile? What tool do you use? Do you have any good tips for running agile project management?

Sources:

• Agile Methodology
• Agile Project Management Done Right
• What Is Agile Project Management?
• 3 Differences Between Scrum and Kanban
• Understanding Agile Design and Why It’s Important
• Agile Project Management Software 

The post Getting to Know Agile Development appeared first on Stampede: the strategic design & technology company.

You really need make sure the product principles are right from the start.

User Experience, as we all know inherently sits at the nexus of Development, Design, Marketing, Business and Leadership in a business – and we could couldn’t help wondering where UX fits in startups life. It is necessary, but UX research and processes do take time, and startups daily life tend to be very hectic to give room to these exercises.

Who better to speak to than Linda Rasip, CTO of Aleph One as well as a good friend of ours. With about 15 years of experience under her belt, she’s worked on different platforms like Joota.com (social content curating platform), Halal Speed Dating, Purelyb, iResidenz and Jooblii (an e-commerce site).

Linda and her Joota team in the early years!

Having to address many technical and user challenges pertaining to infrastructure and development, Linda is perpetually positive and fascinated by the endless changes that the industry often goes through, and she enjoys the process and challenge of learning new things.

We decide we should take the taxi to her house and pick on her brain.

We thank Linda for her time and her invaluable insights about practicing UX in startups. If you would like to speak to her, you may contact her through email or Facebook.

(P/s: Linda is also nominated as one of the Developer Heroes in Rice Bowl Awards – vote for her!)

The post UX and Startups: An Interview with Linda Rasip appeared first on Stampede: the strategic design & technology company.