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Well, we shared a little about the event orchestrations in the previous blog. Now, let’s focus on the next part.

We attended the workshops on Day 2 of the Focus Days and also talks on the latter Conference Days. Following are the breakdowns of our learnings there, in separate POV formats to cover our different experiences!

Day 1: The Workshop

Day 2 of the Focus Days portion, was our Day 1 — the workshop day.

All the workshops were very useful and interesting and we were keen to join all of them. The topic ranges from soft skills development like negotiation strategies and UX influence, to the craft-oriented ones like eye tracking and service design. But alas, our time and resources are limited so we need to choose really well which one to attend!

We needed to make full use of this opportunity, so we deliberated in-depth on which workshop to be attended by each of us. Factoring in the relevance of topic with our domains, strength, future project and function considerations, finally we settled with:

• Me (Sarah): Soft skills for UX professionals by Prof. Clemens Lutsch, Claudia Bruckschwaiger & Hanna Köhler
• Azim: Service design and UX – a conversation by Eric Reiss

On to the learnings we obtained from these two workshops!

In Sarah’s perspectives:

In this workshop, the speakers, led by Prof. Clemens Lutsch, divided us into several groups consisting of multiple hats to allow us to see different perspectives from different roles.

We were given some activities to increase our self-awareness about our own capabilities. To top it up, the speakers then provided some input about how these capabilities have been useful to our lines of work. We were then given an assignment to role-play based on several scenarios. These scenarios were to mimic the real life situations on how we adapt to different kinds of challenges during communication.

The outcome of this workshop emphasised that our technical skills are just medium to execute, but in order to be successful in design, there are many other soft skills that we need to master, and they are not easy and that practice is all it takes to succeed. There were 3 categories to these soft skills, being communicative, social and personal soft skills.

Communicative soft skills revolves around the way we designers communicate with the people we interact with. This includes our business or product team, our developers, and our designer peers. Examples would be the negotiation skills, active listening, ability to abstract, linguistic fluency, or ability to enthusiasm.

Social soft skills on the other hand would be on how we are dealing with the interactions with our team, like resiliency, emotional intelligence, conflict resolutions, diversity competence, or even ability to cooperate. Do you see the difference from communicative skills?

Personal soft skills is all about the core supporting your work executing. These skills revolve around the how behind you are executing your tasks or job, like analytical skills, decision making, creative thinking, strategic thinking, self reflection and willingness to learn. Whether or not you realise it, we pretty much rely heavily on these skills in your day to day work. It makes our executions more human and user-centric.

My take was around the communication area (that includes conflict resolution, influencing, negotiation skills, etc). We heavily practice this in Stampede, and it does not get any easier because you definitely don’t experience the same situation every day. We work with people from different industries, priorities and personalities. It is all about us versus the problem!

Azim’s Point of View:

Relevant to my designation as a UX designer, I enrolled into service design workshop by Eric Reiss of FatDUX. I had no prior deep knowledge about the details of service design works at this point of time, which makes this workshop such a pivotal moment for me to realise that services are everywhere – and they can be designed.

The workshop was filled with lessons that Eric himself has gained throughout his life and related them to the UX design or service design domain. One simple example, Eric told his personal story of cat food catering to “customers” (himself as cat owner who buys the food) rather than the “real user” (his cat, who didn’t appreciate green peas in the cat food) and the story of great service nuances provided by the hotels he stayed in during vacations, each of them provided the audiences with clear examples on how even the minuscule details can affect user experiences.

Those were the personal touches that Eric had throughout the session, but being a workshop that is geared towards service design, naturally there are technical lessons being passed down.

Some of the discussed methods and tools have already been incorporated into our practice in Stampede — like the how-tos of user interviews, building user persona, or ways to design effective surveys. Strengthening the fundamentals is always great as a starting point and further validates that what we have been practicing is on the right track.

However, plenty of methods and tools presented were new to me (or even to anyone in Stampede) that brought massive value out of this workshop.

The Service Star provides a clear visual on areas to be focused for the service provided, either for the company we are evaluating or our own service. A star-shaped spider chart would be ideal, but that would be an extremely rare (or even impossible) case where the service provided is perfect. On the service provider side, they would be able to gauge which areas to be improved and maintain the performance.

The ergonomics of need can outline users’ perspectives in clear metrics to detect which part of the service could be focused upon. The outcome will also prepare the service provider for what kind of situations they will face when dealing with customers (eg: when the attitude and expectation are already negative to undergo the task, how can the service provider handle the situation in the best way?)

Aside from the typically-used customer journey map and touchpoint matrix/service blueprint (which often end up being too convoluted and needing massive effort to be understood by people who don’t follow the process), FatDUX have their own framework of communicating the outcome better to stakeholders — the service-experience scope sheet. By filling in this sheet with the details and touchpoints involved, it will communicate the design clearly, outlining the factors and actors involved in the service, with a clear demarcation of the period in service.

There were many learnings to be unpacked and relayed to the team for us to improve our service design practice. This avenue is waiting for us to explore structurally as some of our recommendations when tackling digital UX problems were in the form of service design, and we are eager to flesh out the solutions using methods gained here to maximise the value that our clients can receive.

Day 2 and 3: The Talks

Finally, the main event starts — the conference.

The day started with the official launching of the event, as this is the day where most attendees registered for. We got to see the fantastic opening ritual where there were drums, gongs and an opening act by the Founder of the event itself, Hannes before all the talks started.

Once again, we faced the same dilemma — all talks were exciting for all of us. We had a problem here! The 2-day conference was filled with talks given by speakers that came from many countries and backgrounds. Yet it was set to be multiple tracks segregated by theme ranging from leadership to design management to UX research, it would be wasteful if we focus on just one or two, and miss the talks that would benefit us.

We had four team members, so why not split? To maximise what we could gain out of this, we made use of our numbers and specialisations, strategised on how to split up and went to the workshops that would give us the highest impact on our growth opportunities. Shaza and Wan attended the ones that were relevant to the business side, I (Sarah) attended the ones about design advocacy, and Azim attended the ones that were heavy on the UX research side.

We saw that the strategy deemed effective after several talk sessions, and we continued to do so till the end of the conference.

Sarah’s Point of View:

As a product designer, the central theme of the talks I went to was design advocacy. It emphasises that designers educate and collaborate with non-design teams and stakeholders about solving problems using design. The outcome of design advocacy is the value of design being recognised and practised in not only business, but also the technical team.

One of the things I learned was that when it comes to advocating design, the key is opportunity. However, designers ourselves are the ones who should create the opportunities. Scott Parker, who talked about “Functional Process to Strategic Contributor – Realising the Value of Design”, explicitly covered the topic where designers are problem solvers and how we are responsible for realising where and how we can create opportunities for ourselves when it comes to making the value of design visible across the organisation; we should not just wait for those opportunities to come our way.

On top of that, I learned from Ashnee Gounden of Discover Limited who spoke about “Scaling Design with Limited Budget and Time in a Sustainable Way”, that there are considerations when it comes to advocating design. You need to look into the UX maturity of the particular organisation. Evaluate it before you can start navigating around it; this is because as designers, we need to understand before giving solutions. Find out what matters to the organisation and work your way to improve the UX maturity level. Trust me, the “scaling” portion is most exciting part.

Scaling here would mean how you would navigate to increase that maturity itself. How do you plan that incremental journey and what your considerations are. Of course, there are many ways to improve it. It really depends on what matters to the organisation and what their challenges are. Empathise their situation before coming in and introduce the process. Really look into it and strategies based on all the resources you have. It was John Bowie who emphasised “Influence is Not Enough: Inspiring the Unconverted”. He talked about how people respond to inspiration more than influence, so what can you do to inspire them? And what’s next?

When it comes to design debt, of course, a designer like me would be excited to manage it. “What are my considerations?” “How much are my resources and capacity?” “What can I do with everything that I have currently?” These are the questions that you need answers before executing. According to Alicja Suska of Outlaw Design, who talked about “The ROI of Managing Design Debt – Getting the Leadership Buy-in”, communication of the return from managing the design debt is also crucial as it definitely helps the overall organisation to be more effective and profitable in the long run, so create those opportunities! Leverage the people around you as this helps us understand other people’s perspectives and priorities. This was also covered by Manuel Schnell of Kelag and Juergen Hillber of Red Bull. They emphasised gathering and understanding what the other team is doing so that the whole team could see things eye to eye. This way, our solutions will be richer with inputs from multiple disciplines.

As a plus point, Alejandro Carbejo shared “Context and Empathy as Pillars for Collaborations in DesignOps”. This is where I learned how the DesignOps team at the back end has been supporting the structure of the design team to collaborate as support to other teams in an organisation.

The interesting part is that Stampede has already been practising these for years and attending the talks diversifies my view on navigating situations.

Azim’s Point of View:

I was assigned to attend the UX research & management track, which is very relevant to my line of work in Stampede — UX design. These talks have expanded my horizon on how research can be done from an international perspective, with some familiarity about how we have always done things and issues faced in projects (many things are similar!). But of course, there are many new discoveries made here, which opened my eyes regarding the level of international design thinking. Wish I could cover them all but here are some of the selected highlights we could all learn from!

There were talks discussing the process. One of the notable one I have attended was by Javier-Bargas Avilla from Google, where he shared his experience of improving YouTube’s localisation feature, where they started with the complex German language as the base model (German translation were atrocious, at least according to native speakers). He outlined the metrics used as base to be gauged, and emphasised the importance of collaborative effort with the deserved party (locals in this case) which in the end lead to measurable success.

And there were talks discussing the methods. Dr. Panagiotis Zaharias from UX Prodigy discussed long-term UX, where he made the stance that the UX research methods we have adopted so far are actually measuring momentary experience only, not considering the long-term experience yet. Sourced from academic studies, 4 methods were outlined that have yet to be used in real practice; Day Reconstruction Method, Experience Sampling Method, AttrakDiff, and UX Curve — with their pros and cons to be considered before use. All these to capture the user sentiments of long term usage, in order to leverage on hedonic quality (related to user’s intrinsic motivation) of a product which will result in memorable experience and loyalty.

Then there were talks about the tools. Bill Albert of Mach49 shared about the advanced tools that can be used to measure user’s emotion to gauge the experience by breaking down the existing spectrums when classifying emotions and prioritising the relevant ones to UX. Plethora of scientific tools were demonstrated, like Galvanic Skin Response, Electrodermal Activity, eye tracker, pressure sensitive mouse or chair, and facial expression analysis, to name some — but ultimately, knowing the why behind all of the readings obtained is the most important aspect to assess the real user experience.

Another notable talk that attracted my attention was the talk attended by all four of us — about Systemic Design by Peter Horvath of Whitespace. The presentation was very smooth (too smooth even, for me who loves to snap every slide and failed to capture some of the slides this time) and eye-opening, where Peter described the components of Systemic Design and the relations between them. It took me quite some time to absorb the topic of systemic design fully, and how it plays into the bigger picture of UX design.

Overall, the conference was a treasure trove for those who love the research aspect of UX design and have curious minds open to new ideas and concepts — especially for the ones who are fairly new in the field like me.

Closing

So, as we look back at all these moments and learnings from the workshop and the World Usability Congress itself, we realise that design is so much more than just looking good or being functional. It’s about creating connections, understanding each other, and constantly evolving towards the greater good.

At the end of the day, design isn’t just a job for us, it’s a lens through which we view and interact with the world, imagining all the ways it could be better with every new thing we learn, every fresh perspective we take in. It just brings us one step closer to a future that’s not only smart but also kind and inclusive.

So, let’s embrace the complexity, celebrate the diversity, and continue to design not just for the eye, but for the heart and mind. After all, we are designers, aren’t we?

The post Lessons and practical applications we brought back from World Usability Congress appeared first on Stampede: the strategic design & technology company.

We started by understanding how the company divides up its job functions and roles, so we could then find out how each division used IT services and how satisfied they were with them. These findings would then inform the company’s service roadmap to improve the future IT service experience.

Knowing that we had a large target audience of over 4,000 employees in 40 countries, the best solution for us was to conduct a global survey. Now, the million-dollar question: how do we run an effective survey?

Here are five lessons and best practices we gathered from our survey design journey:

1. Break out of the box: Adapt existing research methods to your needs

Effective survey design boils down to being able to capture all that you seek within your survey questions and structure. 

Our survey design challenge was to accommodate: 

• the company’s complex organisational structure, where employees may hold roles that overlap multiple divisions. We needed to validate the assumptions made to ensure that we had accounted for all employee work scopes.
• the fact surveys are usually quantitative and therefore limited in the qualitative depth we can collect

We managed to overcome these concerns by designing a mixed-methods survey. We prioritised which questions needed qualitative questions most, and made them optional so users did not feel compelled to answer them in order to complete the survey. 

The quantitative questions allowed us to collect responses from a large group of global employees, whereas the qualitative questions gave us insights and a deeper understanding of the respondents’ behaviours and thoughts.

2. Keep it short and sweet: Only ask relevant questions

As the employees’ job scopes tended to overlap and extend into multiple divisions, we faced the challenge of making sure each employee only saw questions that were relevant to them. We introduced conditional questions which allowed for this flexibility. We only asked what applied to them, based on their answers given in the key conditional questions. These were placed early on in the survey to accommodate branching off into relevant survey sections.

By asking relevant questions, we will keep the survey short and respondents were more engaged when completing the survey.

3. Simple is best: use plain language

Through our pilot testing, we learned our questions were sometimes too long or used words that were unfamiliar to the respondents. This challenged how we would standardise our typical question structure for the most effective outcome, which was to gather accurate and insightful data.

We ended up just keeping it simple. For question phrasing, we avoided using heavy, technical jargon and chose to use clear, easily understood terms instead. To make sure our respondents understood the question being asked, we included a description and some examples to better explain what the question meant. Keeping the questions succinct also makes it mentally less taxing for the survey respondents.

4. Know your audience: cater to demographic needs

Being familiar with who you are collecting survey data from is important to run an effective survey. Our target audience was a very diverse and international group who were multicultural and multilingual. We discovered from our pilot survey testing that not everyone is proficient in communicating in English, and they preferred using their first language instead. 

In order to not let language become the barrier to getting good user data, we worked with some of the employees to translate the survey into the company’s 7 most used languages: Danish, German, English, Spanish, French, Portuguese and Simplified Chinese. A key factor to note is that when doing translations, the nuance and meaning should not be lost in the process. This is so all users have a consistently similar understanding of the questions.

5. Look and feel matters: design a familiar experience

Survey response rates are another telltale sign as to whether you are running an effective survey. A visually pleasing design improves respondents’ experience and willingness to complete the survey. For our global survey, we used the company’s brand colours to highlight elements and anchor the survey design. The colour usage and font styling helped define the overall survey structure and hierarchy of survey elements, such as the question, description and answer options. 

Another good rule is to keep your related questions grouped in survey sections. This helps the respondents understand what is being asked easily, without breaking their train of thought.

Customise and own your surveys

Effective survey design doesn’t have to be complex; you can tailor your solutions to your users’ needs and capture both quantitative and qualitative data easily. Be ready to explore ways to collect data needed through survey design while understanding the strengths and limitations surveys have as an exploratory and validation tool. When in doubt, test it out and refine your survey design accordingly. 

Happy designing and researching!

The post Designing Better Surveys: Obtaining Qualitative Insights through Quantitative Means appeared first on Stampede: the strategic design & technology company.

We quickly realised that people have yet to understand the difference between reliable and unreliable data and the difference between factual evidence and opinions. Most businesses are making decisions based on users’ opinions which likely lead to a really frustrating product development journey. We’ll talk more about this later in this article.

Now, user research is not rocket science, but just like any other skill, you need to practise in order to get good at it. For some reason, most companies will send their least trained employees, or even interns, to go out and talk to customers. For them, if you can talk and ask questions, you can do user research. “This is the set of questions, now go wild!” is often the attitude, but really, there is an art to interviewing and doing user research that yields truly useful results.

This article is about avoiding these fundamental mistakes so that you get reliable, useful and usable data. We’ll first discuss common mistakes and then we will go through small steps you can take to improve your practice.

Mistakes

1. Collecting opinions, not facts
2. Imposing Quantitative methods on Qualitative data

Steps to improve

1. Using Themed questions
2. Insights: more than just findings

Collecting opinions, not facts

In user research, the people you are talking to and interviewing are naturally inclined to be helpful and will give a lot of feedback that they think is important. Be wary, though, as a lot of the “feedback” you get is actually opinions if you don’t ask the right questions or if you ask in the wrong way. One of the most common research mistakes that people make is to interpret opinions as facts. Opinions are dangerous because they change, are subjective and are inconclusive. If you build your products/services based on them, your product can become irrelevant pretty much anytime because opinions shift and are heavily influenced by how a user feels at the time. The focus should always be on how users use your product instead of what they think of it.

Facts, on the other hand, are concrete. You want to dig into the facts of users’ lives – pain points, behaviour and what solutions they deploy. The focus should be on understanding if there are any existing habits, like how they usually tackle a problem, or technology that you can ride on for users to easily adopt your solution as part of their routine. These all need to be taken into consideration as you design the solution. It is the holistic journey of how they will adopt your solution and not about whether they like it.

In order to collect facts from a user, you need to ask the right question. I usually divide my questions into three parts and types: context specific, product specific and opinion-based. Most of my focus will be context and product specific as useful insights will mostly come from these two areas. I often ask for examples so users will tell me stories which are facts. If I have extra time to kill, I’ll squeeze in some opinion based questions. Let’s run through an example:

Research Goal: Find out how might we improve Jira as a product for task management.

The first two types of questions will give you richer data about a user. It allows you to:

1. Imagine/understand how your users use your product as part of their daily routine
2. Decide on information hierarchy, i.e. prioritisation of what to show or provide your users with, as you now know what important information they need to complete their tasks
3. Decide on your non-negotiable features and “nice to have” features

Qualitative vs. Quantitative Data: More does not necessarily mean more

Most companies are familiar with quantitative rather than qualitative data which means that they are skeptical of research that has a small sample size. After all, when learning about research and statistics in school, we were always taught that a larger sample means more reliable results. As a result, and from my own experience, most teams resolve to increase the number of research participants to double, or even triple that of a qualitative study. The outcome is often remote, unmoderated testing or well-curated surveys where the focus is on getting a large number of responses rather than getting rich, quality data. What’s worse is when they quantify the results and turn them into graphs making things look more scientific than they are.

It is not that quantitative data is bad, but you shouldn’t try to use quantitative methods on qualitative data. You need to first understand the differences between the two and what they can be used for. Quantitative is used to segment and identify your target market and qualitative is used to gain an understanding of the underlying reasons, opinions and motivations of your target market.

Using quantitative methods on qualitative may mean testing the product on and talking with more people to get more results but this does not necessarily lead to more insights, just a lot more work. Be aware that there is a difference between the two types of data. If you want to understand the user beyond the surface, you should focus more on qualitative data. It is not just about what they say and think, but finding out what they feel and discovering their unmet needs. This is something that you almost certainly cannot achieve through a survey.

Doing better research

It’s not hard to change your research methodology a little to get better quality data. Here’s a couple of suggestions.

Using Themed questions

When you design your question guide, start with broad themes. Then test it.

Themes will help you create categories on different kinds of data you want to collect. Once this is done, flesh out a few questions under each theme and test it with people around you. From their answers, you will know the questions to ask to solicit relevant data. Let’s look at an example:

Research question: How might we help our youths get better at saving money?

Insights: more than just findings

Good researchers are great at spotting patterns and findings. Great researchers take the results, analyse them and can derive insights to inform breakthrough solutions. Deeper insights are truths that are unearthed by continuously asking “why” to get to the heart of the problem.

Identifying the difference between a finding and an insight is like a muscle that needs to be strengthened. The key is to always be curious about the deeper meaning of someone’s behaviour. “People watching” is one of the best exercises to train your eyes to identify interesting findings that can lead to deeper insights. When you are in a public space, observe what people around you are doing or carrying. Question why they’re doing this and if you are bold enough, casually chat them up to understand them better. If this is too much of a challenge, try observing and chat up your colleagues instead.

Example of Findings vs Insights

Small steps, quick wins

Overall, the good news is that user research is just like any other skill; it requires practice to get better. These are small, easy steps you can start adopting as part of your practice. If you take small steps to avoid these fundamental mistakes as a part of your current user research practice, we are sure that the time you invest into talking to your users will be more productive and will yield better results. Let’s move the needle on the user research scale from “awareness” to “nailing it”.

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