One summer weekend in 2024, a bunch of people came to Pabenicky mlyn to talk about UX. This is just a taste because I haven’t been given a time-turner yet, so I haven’t been able to attend all the parallel sessions.
UX Metrics
Rosta introduced a pyramid model of UX metrics with 3 layers that spells ‘BESt’. B for Behavior on the top, followed by E for Experience in the 2nd layer and St for Standard at the bottom.
At Rosta’s work, they discussed and workshopped different metrics that would be suitable for them. HEART, CASTLE, and SUS all fell short for different reasons.
Eventually, they settled on:
- Behavior: Monitoring of adoption and retention (easy to measure continuously).
- Experience: Yearly surveys to gauge user experience metrics such as appearance, cognitive load and more.
- Standards: Yearly audits of accessibility and design system adherence (harder to measure).
Benefits:
- Evaluate the added value of a designer on product: The value of a designer on a product can decrease over time, leading to diminishing returns. To maximize impact, it may be more effective to assign the designer to a different product where their expertise can bring the most value.
- Set design priorities: Focus on improving a specific metric for one product.
Conversations and empathy
Jan and Marek led an interactive session focused on the different categories of conversational contexts, followed by empathy.
Conversational contexts
Different categories of conversations have different set of rules (small talk, interview, negotiation/argument, discussion).
Small talk is about neutral topics, helping us gauge the baseline of how someone talks. Through these light conversations, we pick up bits and pieces about people, making it easier to connect with them
Types of discussions:
- Operational: eg. “buy milk”; “ok”
- Problem-solving: finding solution
- Sharing: one person expresses thoughts or feelings, and the other listens
- Future planning: what are we going to do
Operational and problem-solving discussions don’t build relationships but sharing and future planning does.
Don’t confuse problem-solving with sharing and vice versa. Ask them if they want you to merely listen or suggest solutions.
Four-ears model (CZ) suggests 4 levels: factual, self-revealing, relationship and appeal. This creates a room for misunderstanding when people misinterpreted the intention of conversation (eg. factual ‘trash can is full’ vs. implied appeal to take out the trash).
Empathy
Why empathy? For building relationships with stakeholders, with the team, during customer interviews, user testing, facilitation or negotiation.
Empathy is a competency that you can build and improve.
Use labeling “it seems…”, “it feels…”, “it sounds…” without “I/you”.
Reframe why questions into “what makes you say…” or similar, as whys can be annoying.
UX maturity audit
Mila presented a case study about a UX maturity audit conducted for a fintech company.
They engaged people from the company in the process. First, they’ve created a survey based on NNg/’s UX Maturity Quiz. It revealed varying perceptions of maturity across different roles within the company.
Next, they conducted interviews asking participants about the design process, and having it explained as if they were a new hire.
They collected numerous findings and categorized them based on NNg/s 4 Factors: strategy, culture, process and outcomes. Workshops were held to prioritize findings through voting or by looking at how frequently were mentioned during interviews.
Finally, they created five action plans to enhance various aspects of design maturity in the company, each assigned to a specific owner.
UX maturity models might be misleading. They depict design maturity as a linear process without regression. Additionally, maturity may vary across different parts of a company.
Just like you can’t force a child to mature, you can’t command a company to advance in design maturity; you can only create a supportive environment for growth.
Let’s just try all the buttons: UX for physical products
Stanka shared a funny story about trying to use a new microwave oven.
Try it – how would you start microwaving?
The icons aren’t clear and lack text labels. The most important button (the one that starts the microwave) doesn’t even look like it can be pushed!
Bringing a physical product like a microwave oven to market can take up to 3 years. Often, a UX designer is brought in 2 years into the process (and only if there’s a display). By then, most design decisions have already been made, making it difficult to significantly improve the user experience.
What can you do?
“Infiltration“: Chat with colleagues during lunch breaks, make friends and get yourself invited to earlier meetings and access to product roadmap.
“Annoy“: Evangelize good design practices and emphasize the value of an amazing user experience as a key to brand loyalty.
“Pain“: Let stakeholders observe the struggles users face when trying to use the company’s products.
Designing physical products requires knowledge in a wide range of fields, including ergonomics (like distances, materials, shapes, and finger target areas), accessibility (covering a spectrum of disabilities, including situational ones), technology and its limitations (such as burn-in and overheating of displays), psychology, and more.
Simply adding a display to a product doesn’t automatically make it easier to use, as was the case with a poorly designed PPL box. It had a matte, smudgy display that was placed too high for shorter people, along with a tiny keyboard with poor color contrast.
Always test prototypes in real environments with real users.
Getting participants in B2B
Igor explained how they gained access to users (participants for UX research) through their partners.
In short, they invited their strategic partners to evaluate their business cooperation so far. Together, they reached a mutual agreement on how the research would be conducted and established a communication channel for partners to share the challenges faced by their clients.
Second brain
Matej has continued to evolve his personal knowledge management system he introduced at RealUXCamp in 2023.
There is no single “holy grail” app – it’s a highly personalized system of tools, processes and data. Capturing everything without prioritization brings little to no value. However, if you invest time and effort, this system can help you focus on what’s important, organize your thoughts, support your learning, and assist in managing tasks.
Capture quickly and move on. Then, organize and distill key information in a thoughtful manner. These are two vastly different mental states, so use the right tool for each.
A daily note is a place to plan your day using calendar, todo lists and other sources. It can also serve as a quick inbox.
When it comes to processing your inbox, try using a just-in-time approach: organize your notes as you need them.
Integrating design system with existing product
Monika and a few other people who knew what they were talking about discussed this topic, and I was all ears!
People are an important piece of the puzzle for the success of a design system. Build relationships. Get buy-in. Clarify who will be involved, when they will be involved, and what their responsibilities are. Treat the design system as a product and have a product owner.
Develop components that are essential for real projects. Collaborate with developers to agree on naming conventions, as they are likely already using a front-end framework with established naming guidelines. Media queries, container queries and breakpoints are also worth discussing with developers.
Audit the use of a component in a product: identify what component is used and where it is implemented. QA usually knows and can assist.
Use examples of components for inspiration on how to structure your own, or adapt them to fit your needs.
Components in a design system evolve over time and have their own lifecycle. It’s important to establish a method for tracking the status of each component, such as live, deprecated, in development, or experimental.
Here are two approaches to implement this:
- Use colored backgrounds: Place components on frames, sections, or groups with distinct background colors. This visual cue will appear in the assets panel, making it easy to identify the status at a glance.
- Maintain a separate document: Create a dedicated page (e.g., in Confluence) to document and track the status of each component.
During the implementation, provide design support as you would with any design. Once implemented, perform a quality check but don’t get stuck on minuscule differences measured in a pixel or two – users won’t notice. There won’t ever be a 100% match between Figma and implementation.
During the gradual deployment of a component, you might notice a inconsistency. Since it takes time to roll out the changes everywhere, you may see a mix of the old implementation and the new component throughout the product.
Provide onboarding to help people understand how to work with components. Your documentation can live directly in Figma as component descriptions or your a separate doc.