UX Tuesday

Today we measure the worth of UX designers by the quality and sheer quantity of deliverables they produce. But startups need user experience practitioners who make stuff, rather than documents. Process is nice, but startup reality is really very fast, extra lean and your amazing idea is only valuable if it’s out there in the market.

My top 6 tips working with startups:

1. Manage the product. To succeed you need to keep a firm grip on the essence of the idea and the resulting product. You are most likely the only person on the team who has ‘end users’ in mind. Introduce measures for success. Develop the concept but save the details for later.
2. Make stuff, not deliverables. Think white board sketching with the team instead of wireframe tomes. Cohabit with your developers to shape the product throughout build sprints. Communication is essential to make this work.
3. Don’t fall in love with your design. The product/service will transform rapidly from initial idea to your first beta launch. Low fidelity prototypes help the whole team not to get too attached. Iterate, rapidly.
4. Keep your users involved in the process. Beg, steal or borrow, but make sure you test your ideas. Your target audience rarely understand disruptive products that challenge their mental models from day one. Super saver tip: User research doubles up nicely as QA testing.
5. Be flexible. Know what’s vital, what can be adapted, changed, omitted, saved for later. Make sure you communicate trade-offs clearly with the team. Cutting corners doesn’t equal doing a sloppy job.
6. Don’t be coy. We are all perfectionists, so this advice is not for the faint-hearted. If your initial release doesn’t suck you wasted too much time bringing it to market.

Scream if you want to go faster! Fail early, fast and often has never been more poignant advice. Working with startups is exciting and rewarding, if you enjoy making new ideas happen with a good dose of fast-paced energy, rather than a portfolio of delectable deliverables.

Start ups offer some pretty unique business conditions so it makes sense that some UX Techniques work better for start ups than others.

We’ve been using the Sketchboarding technique for a while now and find that it really helps start ups to really quickly find clarity around what their product is and how customers should move through their website, application or cross channel experience.

There are a bunch of reasons why Sketchboarding is a technique that start ups should have in their UX tool kit.

• it’s fast – in the space of a day or two you can map out, in detail, the key templates and user journeys for your product
• it’s cheap - all you need is pen and paper and time
• it’s collaborative – you can involve all your team and their varying expertise in this exercise allowing the all to contribute to improving the product in a productive way
• explore more ideas – sketchboarding encourages you to rapidly explore a wide range of ideas and solutions meaning you’ll get to a better solution more quickly
• it focuses on the customer journey not the page – it stops you obsessing about the page and helps you focus on the journey/task which will help you achieve a better overall user experience.

Read more about Sketchboarding here or come along to UX Tuesday and we’ll get you started with sketchboarding with hands on practice and expert guidance.

There are a few tickets left for UX Tuesday in June, get yours now or enter our competition and win a company ticket worth £699.

Watch live video from Startup Lessons Learned on Justin.tv

Did you see Janice Fraser of LUXr (an awesome Lean UX Residency program) panel yesterday at the Startup Lessons Learned conference.

Janice and friends talk about:

• the natural partnership between Lean Startups and User Experience
• how User Experience is far more than ‘pretty pixels’ but follow similar iterative cycles
• how ‘customer development’ and user experience are essentially the same thing
• how UXers have a vast suite of tools to help get you out of the building and engaging customers in building your product
• how designers can help you to ‘get on the right mountain’
• how you should ‘write the test first’ when you’re designing
• how UX, Product and Development should be all the same team
• and loads more

Janice also proposes a series of principles for Lean User Experience including:

• Recognise hypotheses and validate them
• FLOW: think/make/check
• Research with users is the best source of information
• Goal-drive and outcome-focused
• Generate many options and decide quickly which to pursue

Well worth your time.

If you think that User Experience (UX) is all about the shiny interface, think again. Actually, a good UX person most often measures success in increased revenue and reduced waste.

The kind of things we contribute significantly to are:

• increased conversion rates – getting more people registered or purchasing thereby increasing your revenue
• decreasing abandoned projects – making sure that your team are working on projects that customers actually care about
• decreasing re-work – making sure that we’re designing the right things, the right way so that you’re not having to re-do things rather than working on great new things
• increasing productivity – helping you to prioritise work/features/etc so that you deploy resources in the places they’ll have the greatest impact on the bottom line

We care about helping you grow your business much more than we care about a shiny interface. Although, we do enjoy delighting your customers when we can!

We care about:

• When people find you, can they understand what you’re offering and how it’s valuable for them?
• Once they decide to sign up/buy, can they complete the transaction without getting frustrated or confused?
• Once they’ve signed up/bought, can they get started with your product/service and get the most out of it, so that they’re most likely to become advocates for you amongst their friends and peers?
• Do you know what you should be spending your time and money on right now to get the best value for your customers and your business? (Do you have a value based framework to prioritise all the work you could be doing?)
• Do you know how to make something so that it’s easy for your customers to use and feels rewarding or valuable?

We know start ups don’t have thousands of pounds to throw at consultants and we know, even if they did, that one off projects are usually just temporary fixes.

User Experience needs to be embedded at the heart of the company to really pay dividends. But you don’t need a full time User Experience person on staff to make this happen.

This is why we’ve started UX Tuesday. A regular, ‘pay as you go’, practical mentoring service for start ups who want to really understand and practice User Experience techniques.

We’ll help you solve the problems you’re tackling right now, but we’ll also help embed a framework for Strategic User Experience in to your organisation and give you the tools and techniques you need to apply them on an every day basis.

You should sign up for our June session now – places are very limited.

Not convinced? Check out this great summary of the ROI of User Experience by Dr. Susan Weinschenk.

You might not be able to afford a consultancy with Dr Weinschenk’s company but can you really afford not to come along to UX Tuesday?