Designer burnout
The recording of my session about a crucial skill for all designers - storytelling. It can help improve not only your presentation skills but also the design process.
I’m excited to share with you today the re-recording from the group session I hosted on ADPList on Dec 28, 2023. In this session, we will discuss common reasons for burnout + I will share my personal experience and how to deal with that unfortunate problem. Begin the new year with fresh mind space!
Session goals:
Check the burnout signs and stages;
Learn about what we can do with a burnout;
Get to know the human in you.
Here are some of the amazing resources I used to get prepared:
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Accessibility vs eye candy design
Here we discuss the recent updates to Google Maps' color scheme and the response from users, and consider whether this indicates a new direction for widely-used products.
“Accessibility is not a feature, is [sic] a social trend.”
We, as designers, are working with people and therefore usually aligned with community trends. Whether it would be allowing subscriptions for shopping or keeping an eye on new fonts – we usually try to serve people and businesses appropriately.
And one of the social things that more and more people are talking about – is accessibility. But does the product design benefit from that? Let’s talk about it from different sides.
One of my design-related sources of knowledge is LinkedIn. Here I can follow some of the incredible creators and my fellow designers as well to read fresh updates. There I saw that Google will update their maps to be more accessible and some people can already see these changes within their apps and we are talking here about, specifically, new colors. A lot of people were shocked and I want to quote mashable.com since that may bring some light to the reaction:
“To be more specific about the changes, the most noticeable one is probably that the blue color for bodies of water is now significantly lighter than before. It's almost teal at this point. Roads are gray (they used to be white) and forested areas are a darker green than before.
It's not a huge change, but if you're really used to the way Google Maps has looked for years, it can be pretty distracting at first.
Why did Google do this? Who knows! … but given that Google Maps has always had a better reputation than Apple's equivalent (at least, among the people I talk to), that'd be an odd reason to shift aesthetics.“
What Google did is that they have updated the color palette for everyone so that people with some frequent vision conditions still may use maps in a more effective manner.
Image source: arstechnica.com
Let’s go back to this part of the quote: “Why did Google do this? Who knows!” – pay close attention to this detail. As we can see this source links these updates to aesthetics and I absolutely don’t blame them. At the end of the day, it’s us designers who know more about design guidelines and principles. We cannot expect most people to read into reasons without sharing the said reasons.
We as all people usually react in our own ways to any new changes, even positive ones because our brain is unhappy to re-learn some of the stuff, so that's normal. This is something we as designers always keep in mind while we roll out new interface updates and of course, this is why we do design based on user research, since when changes are for the better, the reaction will be short-lived. And what Google did seems worth for the cause. So we can you know mark this reaction as temporary and by people who don’t know the story behind it. Right?
Well, then I saw this comment by a fellow designer: “Where do we draw the line and call products accessible but ugly?”. That made me chuckle and then inspired the idea for this whole discussion. Because maybe it’s not always because people don’t know the motives behind updates, maybe sometimes updates are just not clicking with people and designers too!
Here I want to quote cmswire.com: “As UX and UI designers, when undertaking a new digital design project, we obsess over understanding our audiences’ motivations, feelings and perceptions. We strive to create experiences that are frictionless, and, at the same time, visually appealing and enjoyable to interact with”. Maybe you have seen this tendency yourself as UX vs UI instead of UX and UI – because let’s be honest accessibility has quite a lot of impact especially on the visual part of the product experience. Because: “A large part of the human – or more generally speaking: primate – neocortex is involved in processing visual information, while information from other sensory modalities is processed in far smaller brain regions” from National library of Medicine. And aesthetics here are on a second row behind proper information presentation. So, where do we draw a line? Should we live in a black and white high contrast world? I support this question since the aesthetical version of product design usually doesn’t have a lot in common with the accessible version of it.
We draw a line based on personas using our product. We have primary and then the rest. Because some products rely on these trendy visual aesthetics actually we can’t deny that.
But would we consider maps as something essential perhaps? Like a product that covers a lot of different types of users and as something that you would use for the purpose of commuting rather then gaining visual experience. I feel like we need to start introducing some numbers here and I will quote colourblindawareness.org: “Worldwide, there are estimated to be about 300 million people with colour blindness”. Well to be honest that doesn’t seem like a bigger part of potential maps users and I don’t say we not include these types of users, but I do ask – was it the best way for Google to introduce such incredible changes?
I have a Slack example where they introduced some Vision assistive color modes but as a part of themes which means you can select those options or not.
And if you thought that my argument was over that Google should have just introduced new color themes to maps since primary personas probably aren’t experiencing some of the color perception challenges – ha-ha, I am not over! The thing is, as you can see on Slack screenshot above I have picked myself one of the themes that is tailored to Protanopia (where you can better see blue and green) and Deuteranopia (with even more weaker green sensitivity or none). I don't have any of those but I like this theme a lot since I do have really sensitive eyes and it just helps me not to get overloaded.
Going back to Google Maps topic, here is the reaction of another fellow designer to the new update: “But attractiveness or ugliness is subjective Lol! I think the new design absolutely looks better. Makes my eyes feel better too (and I have 20/20 vision, albeit sensitive eyes, and I still benefit). Esp with bright sunlight in the car - I can see what's going on better. So that all makes me super biased as well towards thinking it looks more attractive”. This makes the case for to who may benefit from accessibility slightly wider than people directly needing it.
Should your wow boutique website immediately follow Level AAA of Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) conformance? Probably not. Would your more complex interfaces and/or widely used products benefit from those? I think they would! Since these principles will cover more audience as they intend to. “Accessible websites don’t just benefit people with disabilities, they benefit everyone. Clear standards for colour contrast and font size mean text across the internet is more readable and simple logical menus mean it’s easier for everyone to navigate to the information they need.”
Summary
For last note, consider this quote from Vision Australia: “In the United States there were more than 5000 lawsuits regarding website accessibility in the first half of 2018 alone”. This is one of the reasons why governmental website are required to follow these guidelines. And perhaps Google with maps as such an essential product is moving towards something important too.
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Providing feedback as a manager
Some personal insights to help you work with people who you manage and to give them proper feedback.
“We all need people who will give us feedback. That’s how we improve.”
Despite me doing design work daily, I also handle some management tasks and one of my favorite parts is communication with people in my line management. I get to work with bright professionals, where I learn how to master supporting people not only whom I can teach something, but also the people who can teach me.
If you ever struggle with the manager Imposter Syndrome, know this: you aren’t doing that because you are supposed to know everything. You are doing this because you can be another empathetic mind in the professional life of other people. You can mirror them or prompt the questions, spark and share ideas, and listen to people and their challenges.
I try to achieve different results from my conversations with direct reports on a weekly basis and during quarter reviews – by using different types of feedback. Some of those I started using pretty recently and I hope this will make an even better change.
4 main types of feedbackGeneral feedback
This one has probably the least info since the general feedback is driven by common sense. It should be rightfully suitable for the timeframe events took place or will (if it’s the next quarter/week planning). Signs of good feedback I really like from source mscareergirl.com:
It’s focused on the future – since we cannot change things that have already happened;
It’s descriptive and specific – “It’s easy to look at feedback as a complaint when there’s little information offered”;
It’s personalized – include the motivation and goals of your direct reports;
It’s actionable – saying what went wrong isn’t enough, to provide ideas on how things could be changed in the future.
“Conduct at least 3 exploratory user interviews during the next quarter, to straighten our general knowledge about the product”.
“Keep on building the relationship within the team and product stakeholders via regular communication”.
Performance improvement
This type of feedback for me was at first really foreign – I never wanted to come as the critiquing party. However, now I know how to access this type of collaboration, where you basically focus solely on the potential you see. From the source hbr.org, I have a great quote: “Richard Boyatzi’s recent research on the best approach to coaching has used brain imaging to analyze how coaching affects the brain differently when you focus on dreams instead of failings. These findings have great implications for how to best help someone – or yourself — improve”.
How can we use it? We can use it in the form of a roadmap or list of tasks, that are usually smaller than the big goal in mind. If you want to improve someone’s product thinking, for example, a great approach would be to have assigned tasks such as having a list with features, product team discovery recordings for each, adding links with requirements, etc, – basically to start guiding the person through smaller steps which will guide to a bigger goal.
However, when you want to balance out the behavior, which you cannot add to the roadmap, you can always use the redirect option for feedback. Down below you can find some feedback examples from workhuman.com:
“I really appreciated your enthusiasm in today’s meeting. However, I noticed that you spoke over some other team members in your excitement. Your input is always welcome, but we also need to hear from others. What do you think?”
“I really admire how receptive you are to feedback. By being proactive and soliciting feedback from your teammates, you’re able to produce much stronger designs.”
“Thanks for letting me know you’re behind schedule on this assignment. Let’s look at how you spend your time and see if there’s a way to tackle tasks more efficiently.”
“I appreciate your willingness to work overtime to meet deadlines, and you have great attention to detail. However, I’ve noticed that when you interact with team members, you’re sarcastic or roll your eyes. I wanted to check in and see if anything was wrong. Is there anything I can do to help you enjoy being here like you used to?”
Kudos
Balance out your feedback! It’s really important to make sure you highlight the strengths of your direct reports – this way you reinforce this positive behavior. Create that connection with your colleagues, because one of the popular reasons for people to seek new job opportunities starts with feeling more alone in the project, feeling less heard and less appreciated. Like their work doesn’t make any difference.
My general rule of thumb is: if you ever feel like you want to share kind words of appreciation with your manager, colleague, or direct report – do it now. This feeling will be gone in 5 seconds and then no words would be exchanged. Letting know other people you value their work and time only happens really during those short gratitude spikes. Sometimes I love to create Slack messages with a delay, if I feel like this message would be perceived better at the end of a colleague’s presentation, for example.
“You always have such creative ideas during our meetings and brainstorming sessions. I appreciate your input.“ – from workhuman.com.
Promise (collective effort)
This type of feedback was super new for me, but I recognized the need during my 1-on-1s sessions with colleagues. Some of the issues they face cannot be resolved only by encouraging your direct report to change things, sometimes you as a manager need to talk to other parties to resolve some communication issues. This could be about processes, work transparency, etc. We want to keep everyone informed on the situation, this is why this effort is collective and I usually specify this explicitly in my reviews.
But what is the promise part? It’s simple – we are letting know people that we hear their struggles and they are not alone in those.
“We will work on clear design deadlines and roadmap to create more predictability in workload and planning during next quarter”.
Summary
I will end this article with yet another quote: “Constructive, empowering feedback is more about asking questions than providing solutions” – by Michael Gough, VP of Product Design at Uber. We are all here to learn and we all try to guide through this life and our jobs to the best ability we can. Let’s make our communication kinder, let’s not withhold kudos, yet let’s not be afraid to aim all of us toward greater goals and results.
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Stakeholders&Stakeholders
In this article, I aim to address the crucial aspect of daily design work, which is communication with stakeholders and ensuring they are kept in the loop. At the beginning of this article, I have more questions than answers, so I invite you to this research and discovery to find a strategy together.
“To keep everyone invested in your vision, you have to back up a little bit and really analyze who the different stakeholders are and what they individually respond to.”
In this article, I aim to address the crucial aspect of daily design work, which is communication with stakeholders and ensuring they are kept in the loop. At the beginning of this article, I have more questions than answers, so I invite you to do this research and discovery together to find a strategy.
The second step for proper research after selecting the topic, as epidemicsound.com recommends, is “Developing the idea and gathering data”. The idea I try to follow is how to communicate better with key people? How to make sure I understand their goals correctly? How to know with whom to keep more contact, and with whom less?
We will tackle these questions one by one.
How to communicate better with key people?
By key people I mean stakeholders, of course. Let’s start with definitions first.
“Stakeholders have an interest in the success of the project and can be within or outside the organization that’s sponsoring the project. Stakeholders are important because they can have a positive or negative influence on the project with their decisions. There are also critical or key stakeholders, whose support is needed for the project to exist.” - ProjectManager.com
“Stakeholders are people, groups, or individuals who have the power to either affect or be affected by the design project you're involved in.” – interaction-design.org
These definitions provide us with a better understanding of our relationship with stakeholders, which is mutual. We strive for their success, while they can also support our initiatives and become our allies. What are the examples of stakeholders? In the design domain, of course.
Clients/Customers: the pool of individuals who have hired your company, team, or you are considered Leads. The situation becomes more complicated when there is a main individual who hired your company, as well as additional local leads with whom you are directly involved in a project – you have to balance these priorities.
Product Managers: despite the fact that Product Managers are expected to have more design thinking, sometimes you may get unlucky and have this stakeholder pretty conservative, and also keep in mind global design vision at the same time. Or maybe things are simpler for you and that’s good.
Designers: your team! Yes, you want them as an ally. Especially the Design system team, if you know you know.
Users: we are designing for users since we are their voice! It’s a constant balance to include our users in designs, minding business objectives at the same time. However, we do not usually map this group.
Domain experts/SME: same as with users, but with more nuances in cooperation. This could be a great source of knowledge, but also check if this person is more conservative or open to designing experiences differently from what they know.
Development/Engineering Team: you know the drill. Your designs and ideas will be implemented by these people so it’s good to keep in mind them and possible product limitations.
Business Executives: most of the time those will be covered by Client/Customer Leads, but it’s always important to know this agenda. It may help you in supporting your Leads better.
At this given moment it’s good to start collecting all the stakeholders you have within your product or project, or more globally in a table, for example. At my current company, we started tracking stakeholders, associated products, and how often & who communicates with them in Google Sheets.
But sometimes when you do this – you are left with a huge list of people to keep in mind. It is impossible to do it all at once, so we may need to know now who needs more attention. Calls, messages, newsletter, weekly, daily – you name it.
How to know with whom to keep more contact, and with whom less? How to make sure I understand stakeholders’ goals correctly?
This would probably be the perfect time to start prioritizing the stakeholders you’re working with. Most of the sources I went through refer to the influence-interest matrix method.
From abacademies.org we can learn that Stakeholders may have next interests:
Economics (ex., proper compensation package for workers, attracting more customers);
Social amendment (ex., social climate, work culture);
Work (ex., involving staff in decision-making);
Time (ex., relief programs for caregivers, meeting deadlines);
Environment (ex., market state, global economy state);
Safety and security (ex., work safety initiatives);
Physical & mental health (ex., day offs monitoring).
To be able to define these interests, I like the list of questions that may help you understand each of your stakeholders more from mindtools.com:
What financial or emotional interest do they have in the outcome of your work? Is it positive or negative?
What motivates them most of all?
What information do they want from you, and what is the best way of communicating with them?
What is their current opinion of your work? Is it based on good information?
Who influences their opinions generally, and who influences their opinion of you? Do some of these influencers, therefore, become important stakeholders in their own right?
Our main goal is to help our stakeholders achieve their goals because this way we achieve our goals too. This also helps us to answer my “How to make sure I understand their goals correctly?” question above. Basically have 1-on-1s to learn more about the person in front of you.
Now over to the power axis. From policy-powertools.org we see that: “Stakeholder power can be understood as the extent to which stakeholders are able to persuade or coerce others into making decisions, and following certain courses of action.”
By the way, I highly recommend you visit the link above since it contains absolutely stunning work on stakeholder analysis. From there we learn a variety of power stakeholders’ levels and purposes:
Broad-level strategic process - to scope, build momentum and monitor a process;
Institution or business - to examine the health of an organization and plan changes;
Project or program – to design, steer and monitor a project;
Particular decision – to predict the consequences of a decision, and plan to deal with them.
This list illustrates levels from the highest scope to the most project-based one. Please mind that stakeholders may hold multiple levels all at once. For me, this list is probably the most useful one because it helps to build communication around more global processes with certain stakeholders, and really down to work with others.
To answer my question, I would say those project-related things should be communicated most often, sometimes daily during the design and development stages, when more global things tend to require much more time so the communication here can be managed on a weekly/bi-weekly basis.
If we back to the matrix itself, here is the last bit of info from interaction-design.org that we should keep in mind based on which quadrant your stakeholder belongs to:
Manage Closely: greatest efforts to satisfy these stakeholders during the design process;
Keep Satisfied: put in enough effort that they remain satisfied, yet take care not to overdo it;
Keep Informed: keep them adequately informed of what’s going on;
Monitor: don’t bother them with excessive communication; it’s a waste of your time.
And bonus thing to think about building relationships with stakeholders from the same source:
How can you win over their support?
If that doesn't work, how will you manage their opposition?
Who else might be influenced by their (negative) opinions?
Because despite interest and power matrix, you sometimes may find yourself in situations where the personal agenda of certain people may actually harm your project and processes, so you may build a separate strategy of keeping them in the loop but still try to win support from counterparts to sustain highly quality work. I would highlight that in the stakeholders’ table with influence reputation, which may be lower or higher. It’s not me taking inspiration from the Sims 4 reputation matter, no.
Screenshot from Sims 4 game with game character reputationSummary
Talk with stakeholders and asks them specific questions to learn more about their interests. Also map them accordingly to the level of their power based on how globally they tend to work across the company or project, the more granular it is, the more constant communication it may require. And based on my experience at my current company having a table with key contacts, how of you talk with them, what products/level they are responsible for, and who is the contact person/people within your company who communicates with this stakeholder – is really helpful. Bonus if you regularly collect NPS from them and mark their reputation.
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Storytelling for designers
The recording of my session about a crucial skill for all designers - storytelling. It can help improve not only your presentation skills but also the design process.
I’m excited to share with you today the recording from the group session I hosted on ADPList on Feb 7, 2023. In this session, we will discuss one crucial skill for all designers - storytelling. The more mature the designers become, the more they will tell you about their decision-making through stories. We will look at the stories, what they consist of, and how to improve this vital skill.
Here are some of the amazing resources I used to get prepared:
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How people perceive the design
The recording of my session was about human cognitive perceptions and how that impacts the design.
I’m excited to share with you today the recording from the group session I hosted on ADPList on Jan 17, 2023. In this video, we will look at how and why people perceive the design in a certain way, how it connects to heuristic principles and how our brains are wired from the early period of history.
Here are some of the amazing resources I used to get prepared:
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User interview guide
My personal complete guide for the user interview process, based on my experience as a Product designer.
“A problem well stated is a problem half solved.”
If you ever get your hands deciding product issues or features - that article may be for you. Here we will try to look into essential part of any product research, such as user interviews.
Assumptions vs. Data
Let me save you a couple of bucks on different courses and tell you this - successful products are those that meet crucial customer requirements. They must assist a particular user job or pain.
How many times have you heard about a business that was so exciting on a paper, but when it hit the market - no one was buying it just because no one needed it? One of the great examples is the New Coke controversy. In the 1980s Coca-Cola was losing its profits to Pepsi and decided to renew the classic Coke recipe. But, unfortunately, the public reaction was so bad that they returned Classic Coke taste in just six months. Of course, I’m not telling you that Coca-Cola hasn’t investigated the market, but they definitely solved the problem no one had. And it happens too often. We find the problem, get attached to it, and then realize people won’t buy that solution.
We won’t mention more nuances to that topic, such as possibly hitting the wrong market segment or incorrect pricing policy. But believe me, false assumptions about your customers are crucial in product&design.
Take a look:
Statement: we want to increase website traffic.
The solution that we did: more advertisements.
The real problem was: the cookie popup would overlap the whole page on some devices, which was impossible to close. And people left the website.
And it’s not a unique case. You need to hear stories from users to gain these insights. For example, we may sometimes polish features that aren’t bringing any added value. To avoid this, it’s better to design and improve the product using user data rather than assumptions.
Whenever you are having a product meeting, always watch out for assumptions. They may come from anyone on the team, and our job is always to question things. It may be annoying, but we keep the product and users in mind here. A question such as “Why” would go a long way. The key is not to oppose everyone but to ensure the decisions are made for the target audience, not the team.
Compare these two situations:
- I think we need a new label here. I want to see “Done” on these documents.
- Why do you think users may benefit from them?
- Because I think it’s a mess right now.
- I think we need a new label here. I want to see “Done” on these documents.
- Why do you think users may benefit from them?
- Because our users want to see unfinished documents at the top of the list, and this badge may help them identify which are which and filter by that.
It may look utopian, but this is what makes some products great. You use real data and create stories. And support all of them in your decisions.
To have more situations like in the second example, this is where we need research. We need to gather that data from our customers to solve the right problems.
User research comes in many forms and shapes, and I recommend you on reading this article by Maze: The ultimate guide to UX research.
The two main types of research are qualitative and quantitative. Usually, you discover things via the last one and then validate your hypotheses using qualitative methods. Deciding which type of research you currently need is a topic for a whole other article. Here we will focus on the user interviews type of it.
A user interview is usually a conversation that may happen online or offline. You would typically have a script to guide this communication, but you are not obligated to follow it strictly. The beauty of meeting with a customer is that you never know where it will lead you.
General advice for user interviews:
Do not interrupt
Avoid using closed questions to which the user can respond Yes or No
Avoid providing an answer in a question itself
Try not to judge
There are never too many Why questions
User interview helps you to find users’ motivation, routine, buying choices, etc. In addition, you get to see how they work, spend money, and what they love. For that, it’s essential to build trust during such sessions.
Finding participants
The most popular resource for finding participants is User interviews. Here you can set all necessary search properties to find the correct customers. Also, this website supports search for professionals, which are the users with a specific job title.
The important thing here is to create a suitable screener to filter through all the potential interview participants. Avoid having too many questions here. I usually like to have 2-3 closed questions and one with a short answer, which gives me an insight into whether this participant suits my current research or not.
Example of one of my research screenersHowever, you can also search for candidates on Facebook and LinkedIn. For these purposes, you might need to write a cover letter. Feel free to use the example down below:
Hello {participant name}, my name is {your name}, I am a {your role} at {your company name}.
We are currently discovering a product where {user can make regular rent payments}. Would you be interested in talking about this experience? The interview is rewarded and will take {60} minutes over the {Zoom}.
You won’t need to share any sensitive data. Please let me know if you have any questions!
The interview reward could be held by a website such as User Interviews, or you can do it manually. I usually opt for gift cards of the user’s choice. Prices can vary from 10 to hundreds of dollars. It all depends on your target audience and budget.
Also, if you need to talk about a specific product, you may need to have participants sign an NDA. Here is a good example written for user testing.
Interview script
It’s a rule to have a script for each interview. However, you are not obligated to follow it strictly. You need it to avoid getting lost in the conversation and follow the research purpose. Its content will significantly depend on your research goal - getting to know how users use the product, how they solve current problems if they have any, validating their user journey, or learning more about their buying decisions and payments.
I will provide you a general template, feel free to edit it as mush as possible.
Intro
Hi, {respondent name}. Thank you so much for agreeing to have this conversation. My name is {your name} and I work as {your title} at {your company name}. And I’m here to learn more about {how you make investment decisions}. I am working on a product that may help people like you, and I want to know more about your experience.
The interview will take no more than {60} minutes. Please feel free to skip any question if you feel like it, and we can interrupt the interview at any given point or time.
Can I record our meeting? The conversation will be used only for discovery and shared within my team.
Start recording
Base
1. Tell a little about yourself
2. Recall and describe the last few cases when you {encountered problems/used this product/flow}. Describe how did you cover your need?
3. How many times in the last {week/month/hour} did you {encounter problems/used this product/flow}?
4. In what cases do you usually {encounter problems/use this product/flow}? {What emotions did you experience when you faced these problems/flow}?
5. Do you need help with {encountered problems/flow}? Or do you manage on your own?
6. How do you deal with {encountered problems/flow}?
7. If you had to {encounter problems/use this product/flow} now, what would be your steps?
8. What are the advantages of this solution? What are the cons?
9. How much did it cost you? How much are you willing to pay for a solution to {encountered problem/product/flow}?
10. How did you try to eliminate the disadvantages in the process of {encountered problem/product/flow}?
11. What would an ideal solution look like for you?
{Add specific questions related to the flow or product. Try to ask more the why questions.}
{Questions from other interview research participants.}
Outro
Thank you so much for your participation. I’ve learned today some great insights. Could you please tell me if I can keep your contact for future research and/or testing?
There could be multiple people present during the interview. However, avoid too many. Also, it's better to have only research team members present (avoid inviting anyone who might not be able to avoid judging or is holding too much onto the current experience). Usually, one person leads the interview while others observe, make the notes, and have additional questions at the end. It's recommended for the interview to be conducted only by one person to avoid confusion.
One more thing. Sometimes people refer to the famous quote by Henry Ford “If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses”. However, the research goal, in that case, would be to learn that people want to access places faster or any other pains and jobs.
Working with the results
After you have finished with an interview, it’s usually good to have a quick recap for 15 minutes to make some notes, especially if you had colleagues on the call. But after everything, it’s time to work with the data.
You would usually end up with a video or audio track of your interview, which you now have to transcript. There are many excellent resources for that, such as Trint or Descript. You can pick whatever suits your taste and budget. As a result, you will have your interview as a text.
I’m a big fan of Value Proposition Design Canvas (VPD), which helps you to highlight essential steps in a user interview text. The key items here are jobs, pains, and gains. Those are data snippets you can use for your product and design purposes:
Jobs: “I open the app”, “I go to work”, “I order pizza”
Pains: “It takes 2 minutes to load”, “I wish they had this feature”, “It’s too expensive for me”
Gains: “That really helps me to do my job better”, “They always have great discounts”, “I use this app for 3 years now”
Sometimes you need the context to distinguish one or another. For example, the phrase “it costs 10 dollars” tells us nothing, but the facial expression and voice tone can indicate what it is for the user.
You can create a dedicated Miro or FigJam board and put those quotes onto the stickers. You will also notice that some of them are repeating themselves, and you can group them into meaningful topics.
Example of organizing data from the interview in MiroHere comes the fun part: you can create your product or feature around jobs or pains. Both methods are valid, and the only difference is the expected decision lifetime. Products built around jobs tend to live longer since users can adapt to the pains and aren’t always willing to pay for them.
As a designer you can probably stop here and use this data for improving your designs, as a product manager you can do the full VPD by adding painkillers, and gain creators and products/services. You can find more about it here.
Usually, for one research iteration, you can aim for 5-7 participants for user interviews. After a certain point, the answers tend to repeat. As a result, you have the data to build your products and designs upon.
Conclusion
I hope this article showed you why user research is essential and how to conduct user interviews. Do not worry about feeling like you are nosy - people enjoy talking about themselves and their experiences. I once had an interview at work where the participant said that it was the first time in 10 years that someone listened to her about the product. We can make a significant impact and create valuable products for the people. This is what I stand by.
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UX Writing
A brief guide to UX writing for those who are not writers, where I share my personal experience of working with design documentation.
“Work on text early because text problems often reveal design problems.”
So my team has the Design system. We maintain it itself and its documentation. Everything was working great - we had our components, patterns, Storybook snippets, usage examples, etc. We had the rhythm.
However, once we noticed that all the designers in the team have different button naming, error messages structure, etc in their designs. Also, that revealed how different teams have been using different/same terms across the product, sometimes even for the same persona. It was pretty chaotic, to say the least, and we realized that we need a middle ground. This is what happens to be the UX Writing section in our documentation now.
I was assigned to create such a section and with the help of Google search and the Udemy course “Introduction to UX Writing” I had to do something. I am not a writer by any means, so the bits of advice below fully emerged from what I’ve learned and they are not definitive.
But I hope they might be useful for the same non-writer designers as me.
Structure
Writing section in our team’s ZeroheightI decided to create 4 sections for Writing:
The tone of voice: a very short description of the product writing direction. Some products may want to appear super friendly and casual, some would like to be professional and clean, and some could be secure and supportive. That heavily depends on your product needs, which could be discussed with stakeholders and the marketing team. However, this section is not for marketing material, this is the UI guidance for the designers.
Principles: this is what happens to be generic settings for writing a good UX copy. Could be applied anywhere.
Guidelines: all the examples in different contexts for the product. Here you can list all the topics that designers will reference.
Punctuation: generic grammar assembling for the punctuation. We have it here because we have an international team.
Tone of voice
When I was thinking about that section, I actually imagined our product as a real person to whom our users would speak. Would that person rather be more professional, more corporate? Or maybe more friendly? Feel the difference yourself:
- I want to create a new meeting.
- Sure, when will it happen? Who is going to be present? Any specific topic for the meeting?
Or:
- I want to create a new meeting.
- Sure, please provide the date of the meeting, title, and agenda, and add any necessary guests.
There is no right or wrong way to set the tone of voice for your product designs. It heavily depends on the product's nature, market, personas, etc. Usually, a call with stakeholders and/or the marketing team helps to pick it.
Principles
Those were mainly taken from the course I mentioned in the introduction. Those are just general bits of advice for writing any UX Writing.
1. Necessary
Try to avoid putting in information that won’t have an impact on the user. Unnecessary writing causes a cognitive load that can be avoided.
2. Clear
Clear UX Writing allows accessibility and inclusion. It helps the user to feel confident about what just happened and how to proceed.
3. Concise
Good UX Writing means users use the interface, rather than read it. Concise UX Writing also reduces the cognitive load, which is especially good for the loaded interfaces.
4. Useful
UX copy should guide users on how to use the product in different contexts and how to continue their journey toward certain goal.
5. Conversational
When the software was in its early stages, a lot of writing was done more in a machine-like way. Programs couldn't take up a lot of memory, plus the user-centered design wasn’t the priority. We as humans were learning about how to operate computers and make them useful for our daily needs. However now, when software becomes available to a much broader audience, we want to make sure that our users understand what they’re seeing. Not everyone is profound about technical jargon and they don't have to. It's the interface that adapts to the user, not vice versa.
I also highly recommend reading this article about the differences between conversational and casual writing. Since “it’s usually still best to avoid slang for the sake of inclusivity and translations”.
Guidelines
This section is fully about practice. Guidelines will be used the most by designers to provide answers to very concrete nuances.
1. Avoid blaming the users
Yes, people do mistakes. They type in the wrong password or forget things. And it’s not particularly nice when the form says: “You are to blame”. I really like how Kayla described it in this article: “Bad products make users feel stupid. Normal users blame themselves, not the bad design”. Always test your copy for blaming-free communication.
2. Use simple tenses
UX copy isn’t about being grammatically perfect, but about guiding the user towards their goal. Simplifying the language is the key.
3. Use active voice
Heavily related to the previous point. Use an active voice to make your writing clearer and more concise. Words like “was” and “by” may indicate that you’re writing in passive voice.
4. Begin with the objective
Start the UX copy with the goal, when it describes a goal and the action needed to achieve latter.
5. Use numerals
Use numerals unless writing copy that mixes the use of numbers, such as "Enter two 3s".
6. Avoid using articles for Button labels
Button label space is usually pretty limited. To make the best use of the area and cognitive load, avoid using articles a/the for Button labels.
Also consider adding these to your documentation:
7. Capitalization
8. Date and Time formats
9. Telephone numbers
10. Money
11. Truncation
12. Component links (components that have specific writing guidance)
I plan to cover those topics in the nearest future.
Punctuation
This section is all about punctuation, such as periods, colons, apostrophes, lists, etc.
Here are some good examples:
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