Do You Know Your Users?

Persona-Based Design for the Enterprise by:   |  Posted on

You think you’re just like everyone else. You think your thoughts, opinions, values, and habits are just the same as other people. Psychology calls this the false consensus bias1 because we assume much more commonality than reality warrants.

False consensus bias contributes to making bad decisions when we design software.

Alan Cooper noted this type of bias while wondering why otherwise smart, talented people often created such crappy software. He invented the persona-based design methodology to help facilitate insight into a product’s users and remove the designer’s bias. He wrote about the method in his seminal 1998 book, The Inmates are Running the Asylum.2

Have you ever heard anyone on your team say, “what if the customer wanted [some feature]?” Cooper used the term “the elastic user” to reference this shape-shifting, need-changing user who encompasses all edge cases. Good decisions can’t come from elastic users.

Imagine hotel software that is supposed to be suited for a hotel accountant, a front desk agent, and a retail worker in the hotel gift shop. The accountant is heads down in numbers and needs to focus. The front desk agent needs to be able to smoothly switch tasks and be friendly and helpful when guests walk in. And the retail worker may not be in front of a computer at all. Personas can help designers understand the nuances and needs of these different types of workers and create software that fits with their needs. Continue reading Do You Know Your Users?

UX Design Careers in 2018 and Beyond: The Future of the UX Designer

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At the time of this writing, a search for UX design jobs on job finder Glassdoor reveals almost 20,000 open positions in the United States alone. By another source, the number is 24,000, with a 22% projected growth rate in the next ten years.

Infographic showing different statistics about UX Careers such as locations, skill sets, and job titles. Salaries vary between USD$60,000 to $127,000 annually, with the median salary for 2017 being $77,000. With a significant spike year-to-year, the median salary in 2018 is $93,000 in the States, with the coasts offering the highest paying positions.

Onward Search provides a useful overview of the UX design job market in infographic format.

If we go by the stats, the market for UX designers could not be hotter. And, yet, those at the forefront of the field are rapidly calling 2018 the beginning of the end for the UX design job title.

Have we reached peak UX design already? Is it at the maturity stage in the life cycle?

And if it is, what’s next?

Continue reading UX Design Careers in 2018 and Beyond: The Future of the UX Designer

Content Recommendations and the Creation of Emotions

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This article investigates content recommender systems. Because Netflix is probably the best known recommendation system and numerous articles have been published about their system, I will concentrate on their content recommendation mechanism as representative of the type.

I will show that the Netflix mechanism contains characteristics of updated theories of emotion—mainly constructed emotions theory—but it still lacks several essential components.

The lack of these components can explain some inaccuracies in Netflix recommendations and can suggest broader implications.

Emotions: A background

The traditional view of emotions (Paul Ekman
[1], as an example) is that people are born with a set of emotions—fear, anger, sadness, and the like.

Because we are all born with emotions, the traditional view is that these basic emotions are similar across all human beings.

Lisa Barrett’s recent research [2] has uncovered difficulties with this traditional theory.

One of the leading new theories is the constructed emotions theory. According to this view, emotions are learned, not born. Different people, therefore, have different emotions; cultural environment influences these emotions.

No emotion is universal, meaning some cultures have anger, sadness, fear, disgust, happiness and so on, and some cultures don’t.

The process of emotion begins in the brain. The brain tries to identify the physical environment, to understand what this environment has signified in the past, and what the cultural norms are related to this scenario. Following this analysis, the brain suggests an emotion most suitable to this context.

The context itself is also a factor; a different environment with identical traits would produce a different interpretation and thus a different feeling.

A simplified history of recommendation systems

A content recommendation area—such as Netflix’—shares general characteristics with the emotion analysis field.

With recommendations, we try to understand what the next thing a person would want to do or feel—such as when a person wants to feel frightened.

The prevailing opinion has been that as information accumulated by the recommendation system increases, accuracy will increase: More data, more accuracy. However, in the video recommendation field, the recommendations remain inaccurate despite the enormous amount of data available.

In a recommendation system, the system must analyze both the user and the content. My claim is that the main effort is focused on understanding the user rather than the content.

If we use the wrong method to understand what people want, no amount of data will make it more accurate.

Therein lies the problem. Continue reading Content Recommendations and the Creation of Emotions

Trusting the Process

Three Ways We Get Clients Comfortable Working with Unknowns by:   |  Posted on

I am a firm believer that success starts with the statement of work (SOW). An appropriate and attainable SOW determines whether my team of UX designers and researchers get the time and activities we require to fully understand a client’s needs and fashion a suitable solution.

Regrettably, we often work within overly prescriptive SOWs that dictate a solution before we have a chance to understand the problem. One reason projects are poorly scoped is our clients’ discomfort with ambiguity. Clients understandably want to know what they are getting for their investment: Who will be on the team? What will they deliver? How will they deliver it? How long will it take?

But prematurely-fixed outputs confine the value of design strategy. Designers need flexibility to define the solution once they have complete information.

In design school, when a classmate was uncertain about an ambiguous direction, we urged them to trust the process. This platitude served us well as students, but it is not as persuasive in the boardroom. Our clients need more.

In this article, I’ll discuss three methods we use to reassure our clients when trust the process isn’t enough. Continue reading Trusting the Process