The best kind of user testing! (image credit ohsosweetbytiphanie.com)
Memory Lane
After a grueling Alpha release that left everyone a little battle scarred from shipping on time, I started to reflect on my past experience in technology and recalling why I'm a Designer. This led me to give a quick virtual pep talk to the team to show appreciation for all the hardwork and remind everyone who we do this for. The following is an edited transcript (to protect the innocent)...
Ten years ago I was in so much pain from developing "dotcom" products that I clearly knew were awesome ideas delivered in a horrible fashion that I decided to make a change in my career (I was a UI Engineer at the time). My education in art helped me have deep empathy for the importance of aesthetics but even more important, for the power of the "message" conveyed to the observer. I read this book called "The Elements of User Experience" written by Jesse James Garrett (dude that coined the term "Ajax"). After reading many books and articles on a design movement called UX, I decided to clarify something that kept bugging me, so I emailed the author never expecting a response (see screenshots). He was nice enough to respond with a short reply, but it was his short concise response that made it "click".
Aha Moment
“Spend less time designing and more time asking questions.”
Jesse James Garret
I realized that the structural areas of the experience (how to build it) didn’t address the process of determining what to build and, more importantly, why to build it or who to build it for. These elements were about the process to make the cake, but they didn’t define who or what the cake was for. However, it did provide structure to ensure the right information was being collected before moving to the next step much like a recipe provides the proper steps to make a dish to increase the odds of it being delicious.
I spent countless hours with startups guessing cake flavors for customers who hated cake LOL—or, at best, felt indifferent about it. The irony was that while I wanted to switch careers, I was still stuck in “baker” mode.
Since then, I’ve built a career delivering products I’m proud of—simply because I realized I needed to spend less time designing and more time asking the right questions.
Take the time to focus on answering who your customers are, why they need a cake, and what kind of cake they want. Honestly, designing the cake is the easy part. The real challenge—and what truly matters—is having the patience, trust, and support from everyone to ask and answer the right questions before we put “batter to bowl” (or mouse to screen). The Elements of User Experience matter because it structures the type of questions you should be answering before moving to the next stage (a topic for another day).
Pat Yourself on The Back
I'm extremely impressed by this UX team from leadership to designers! The balance the designers need to "sprint" from customer needs to engineers waiting for something to bake can be maddening! I've been in many design teams, and we have something special here. This is a very long way of thanking the Designers and UI Devs in the thick of helping us take the "Experience" to the next level. Internally, we most definitely need to eat our own dogfood, but our customers should only eat delicious cake :).