Getting familiar with UX

When we think about UX, we need to understand the breadth of the discipline. When we talk about it and evangelize it within companies that are new to UX – such as in a 1-2 on the maturity model – we need to always refer back to the user or the customer. Another key point to remember is that Return on Investment (ROI) must always be proven.

This will result in a focus on the direction of the product and engineering groups within the organization as well. By showing depth in the research, and if your team is involved, the solution discovery process findings, you’ll be paving the way for a smoother full-cycle process of UX > Product > Engineering.

As a group of professionals who uncover or discover a hypothesis and then test its efficacy, UXers use methods and best practices to uncover the truth, which can be either positive or negative. Companies just starting down this path will incur expenses in management and individual contributor roles to start with.

So, what are the fundamentals of UX? In loose order of importance, they are research, design thinking, iteration, reporting, design, and testing. And while sprints are moving forward and we’re getting in front of users to test designs and hypotheses, we’ll consistently be watching for the universal criteria for good UX, as shown in the following figure (Credit: Usability.gov):

Figure 1.1 – UX honeycomb diagram

When I teach teams about the values shown in the preceding figure and use them in direct interviews with users, we have people rate them on a scale of 1 to 5, with 1 being the most difficult. We’ve had people ask if they can give 0 or at best 0.5! They dislike the current state of the software used in their work that much, and when we combine these numbers together for all interviews, we create a simple bar chart to show how each value scores. More about that later, in Chapter 17, The Power of Visuals to Support Cognition and Decisions.

If we go a bit further, UX is the ease of readability, the proper placement of a button, or the path from start to finish in a workflow. It’s the empathy we practice with our users so that we get them to be honest and open with us about the problems and pains they’re facing when using the software. UX is about finding what’s not working and creating a solution to fix those problems. It’s about bringing together the corporate view of a need with the contributor view to find the best possible go-forward plan.

The bottom line and key takeaway is that UX is strategy. It’s the what and the why. We’re going to do this and we’re doing it because of this reason.