Survival Skills for Lone UXersSlipping UX Into Your Organization

Jennifer Jefferson @uxjenn

David Coucheron Concertmaster Atlanta Symphony Orchestra

This is the experience.Get out of the way.

3 Survival Tips

Do what you can, when you can.

Create your own team.

Always fight for the user!

Do what you can, when you can.

–Charles Eames

“The details are not the details. They make the design.”

Experience = Everything

• Consistency (trust)

• Speed

• Errors

• Good content

• Visual design

• Functionality

• Usability

My Story

Day 1: We’re in the middle of redesigning our website!

But you can’t make the decisions and we are not going to test anything - wireframes are enough. Oh, we’re behind schedule too…

Photo credit: Marc Baptiste

Why redesign?

Having an inconsistent UI made our site look

untrustworthy.

I did what I could.

There was no time for a complete redesign of the

commerce pages before the big sale and before the new

main site was developed.

I did more.

Finally, a design that was consistent, usable, speedier,

and much more useful.

Usability Issues

You can’t test or fix everything, so focus on the obvious and most glaring problems.

It was oversensitive and caused multiple usability

issues.

Dropdown Menu

“The menu keeps popping out while I’m trying to use the site.”

“It’s too sensitive and I can’t click the link I want.”

“I hate using this menu, it’s so frustrating!!!”

78 customer service complaints, co-workers complained, and some vocal customers emailed me about the dropdown menu’s usability.

Did a few usability tests to validate the reported issue and found it was a HUGE problem.

Found a good design pattern on NPR - a pushdown menu.

Our menu now required a click or touch to open and close.

0 complaints about the new pushdown menu.

Tested the new design and the usability issue was gone!

We consistently had too many error messages and

a super slow site.

Slugs & Other Bugs

“Your site is worthless; a high school student could do better” –Angry customer via email

“Do you actually want me to buy tickets on your site?”

–Frustrated customer via Facebook

“Can you just do my renewal over the phone? Every time I try to use the site I get

an error.” –Board member called our fundraising department

Errors will always be a problem as a result of technical debt!

We significantly reduced errors and sped up the site over a long

period.

Create your own team.

–African proverb

“If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together.”

Lead your peers to understand and care about UX and you will be able to make a difference.

Customer Service

Box Office

Marketing

PR

Education

IT

Agencies

Customer Service, the Box Office, and Ushers were my front lines to

our patrons.

Feedback Funnel

• People called to complain, visited the box office and subscriptions office, and made remarks at concerts. This is where I got my jewels for user issues.

• Secret: Their favorite person to complain to was our president!!!

Quality Assurance (QA) Testing Sessions helped my team understand UX.

Developing a content strategy with the PR team

gave me “additional headcount” and waaaaayyyyy

better copywriting!

Stakeholder interviews helped me develop

empathy for my users – other departments who owned their section of

the site.

I worked with an agency who cared about the user and

who wanted to do a great job.

Whiteboard Session

Thoughtful IA

Always fight for the user!

–Steve Jobs

“If a user is having a problem, it's our problem.”

Excuses…

“That’s just a cosmetic change. We will fix it later.”

“But it works on my computer! The user

must be stupid.”

“We don’t have time to do usability testing and

we can’t afford it.”

Patience

Diligence

Education

Teamwork

If I’m not representing the voice of our user, who will?

Photo credit: https://genevaanderson.wordpress.com/category/classical-music/

In-Depth Thinking

• The User Experience Team of One - Leah Buley

• Undercover UX - Cennydd Bowles & James Box

• Rocket Surgery Made Easy: The Do-It-Yourself Guide to Finding and Fixing Usability Problems - Steve Krug

• Just Enough Research - Erika Hall

Do what you can, when you can.

Create your own team.

Always fight for the user!

Jennifer Jefferson @uxjenn jenn@uxjenn.com