Aggressive inclusivitya truly team approach to empathetic design

Kevin Fitzsimons - October 2014

Icebreaker

Adversarial relations…

“Fight your corner…

never let up or they’ll

crush you”“Stand your ground…”

“Daily struggle… keep on the front foot…”

“Make sure you keep arguing the UX

case… don’t let them browbeat you…”

“They might get it eventually…”

What did we want the team to be like?

• All about:

– Avoiding assumed consensus

– Gelling the team from Day One

– Rapidly moving in the right direction

– Establishing empathy with users

• It’s NOT about:

– Specs

– Requirements docs

– Detailed plans

– Detailed designs

– Documentation is risk, not risk management

Bad old days

• PM Spoke to ‘the customer’

• This meant the person who signed the cheques

• Resulted in us building a major new feature

• How many users actually used this feature when it was

delivered?

Empathy with users…

• Don’t just ‘study’ or ‘understand’ customers

– Need to really EMPATHISE

– Real user input NOT ‘user proxies’ or buyers or personas

– Engineers talk DIRECTLY to the users

– Engineers ALWAYS attend field visits

Engineer – Product Manager – Account Manager – Buyer – Supervisor – User

Personas…

Use their key touchpoints

Definition of done…

The WHOLE team goes into the field

• Working with the real users on real jobs

And we do mean the WHOLE team…

• Left to right:

– Graphic Designer

– Software Dev Lead

– User

– Technical Architect

• …on a freezing morning

in Chatham, England

Some context

• What is Confirm?

– Highways asset maintenance management

– Manages over $1bn of infrastructure assets globally

– Over 20 years old

• Existing Confirm Mobile

– Field based extension of Confirm desktop

• What we were doing

– Replacing Confirm Mobile

– Being first to market with a smartphone and tablet offering

– Expanding the customer base

Existing Confirm Mobile

• Some deeply horrible UX

issues

• Runs only on specialised

devices

Field research - in

Field research - out

Up close and personal…

TRULY understand the task…

Field context - empathies

Empathy in action: once I see it…

The empathy thing writ large

Gathering artefacts

Empathy-driven development

• …the team’s workspace lived and breathed the

customer… photos of real users (not personas), their

artefacts… their desks…

Making it real

• JEDUF©

– Just Enough Design Up Front to make a start

• Prototyping was key

• Prototype had several roles:

– UX validation

– User research

– Demos

– Sales briefings

– Communication shared understanding of vision

– ‘Spec’ – supports on-going discussion with Product Manager

Full-team design

Lo-fi prototyping

24

…and we iterated from there

The secret sauce

• We empathise with users

• And we trust each other

• And we make decisions together

• And all this allows us to be truly lean (as in eliminating

waste, for example, personas and throwaway

prototypes)

• And that’s it, really

Final result…

• Standing start to market leader in 9 months

• 18 months ahead of the competition

• Users of competitors’ products requesting demos

• Significant pull-through sales of desktop solution

• Confirm business grew 25%+ in 2013

Side benefits…

• Huge PR side benefits

• Customers see the process happening

• Industry perception of activity and progression

– Clients see progress rather than early announcement followed

by radio silence for 18 months

• See responsiveness

• Engenders trust

• Feel valued

• They spread the word

• Happier to take the product earlier

• Discussions about features fade away

Inclusivity learning points

• Understand the culture

• Speak the language

• Be subversive; bottom up not top down

• Find the hot buttons

• Don’t try to change development practice

• Evangelise by doing

• Be visible

• Make allies

• Be inclusive

• Share ownership of artefacts

• Explain & accommodate… don’t dictate

• They want to learn

• Have ground rules

Developer quote

• “This has really opened my eyes… I can’t believe I’ve

been developing for seven years without doing this…

this is the first time I’ve really understood why I’m

coding something… previously if I hit a problem and

needed guidance, I’d ask the product owner and he’d

tell me how to solve it but I still wouldn’t understand

why it had to be done like that… now I’ve been part of

this I can’t imagine how we ever managed to build

anything useful before…”

Take a bow… the team

• John Castle

• Kevin Fitzsimons

• John Gomersall

• David Haynes

• Keith Manning

• Liz McKenzie

• Paul Miller

• Rob Savage

• Vaughn Stanworth

• Adam Taroni

•Questions?

•kevin.fitzsimons@pb.com