Interaction Frontiers06 Getting From Concept To Realization

Getting from Concept to Realization The Role of UX in Product Development Pabini Gabriel-Petit

Overview What Is UX? Who Owns UX? Barriers to Shared Ownership of UX Working with Multidisciplinary Teams Defining Product Goals Conceptualizing and Communicating Design Solutions Supporting Your Development Team What Is the Value of UX? Q & A

What Is UX? User Experience Encompasses all aspects of a digital product that users experience directly—and perceive, learn, and use—including its form, behavior, and content. Learnability, usability, usefulness, and aesthetic appeal are key factors in users’ experience of a product.— UXmatters

UXnet’s Definition of UX “ User Experience (UX) is an emerging field concerned with improving the design of anything people experience: a Web site, a toy, or a museum. UX is inherently interdisciplinary, synthesizing methods, techniques, and wisdom from many fields, ranging from brand design to ethnography to library science to architecture and more.”— UXnet

Under the UXnet User Experience Umbrella

Don Norman on “User Experience” “ I invented the term because I thought human interface and usability were too narrow. I wanted to cover all aspects of the person’s experience with a system, including industrial design, graphics, the interface, the physical interaction, and the manual. “ Since then, the term has spread widely—so much so that it is starting to lose its meaning.”— From an email message to Peter Merholz

What Is UX Design? User experience design takes a holistic, multidisciplinary approach to the design of user interfaces for digital products. It integrates interaction design, industrial design, information architecture, visual interface design, instructional design, and user-centered design, ensuring coherence and consistency across all of these design dimensions. User experience design defines a product’s form, behavior, and content.— UXmatters

What Is a Digital Product? Any product that includes digital functionality.

Who Owns UX? “ Designing a product requires many skills, and it is the rare individual who has them all. Design is, therefore, an exercise in teamwork, where each team member brings in a different mix of skills, attitudes, and values. … Thinking that one’s own discipline is the most important of all gets in the way of teamwork. … “ Whose profession is this, anyway? Nobody’s and everybody’s. We are all in it together, we all need one another.”— Don Norman, in Interactions

Who Owns UX? Dirk Knemeyer’s Anatomy of Digital Product Design

Sharing Ownership of UX What’s needed and, therefore, valuable What’s usable, useful, and desirable What’s possible and what’s not

Barriers to Shared Ownership of UX Many corporate cultures create barriers to shared ownership of UX.

Organizations Dominated by Product Management Product Manager UX Designer System Architect

Organizations Dominated by Engineering Product Manager UX Designer System Architect

No C-Level UX Management Product Manager UX Designer System Architect

Barriers to Shared Ownership of UX The communication problems such organizations experience are so common—there are well-known metaphors for them.

What’s Missing? Usability Product

Working with Multidisciplinary Teams “ Our goal is to work in multidisciplinary teams to produce effective, pleasurable designs rapidly and efficiently. … Let the programming and marketing teams know how the product will look and behave at the very start of the project. … Become an essential part of the team, so our input is provided simultaneously with everyone else’s.”— Don Norman

A Team of Equals Product Manager UX Architect System Architect

Sharing Ownership of UX Balance

Collaborating Collaborate —To work together, especially in a joint intellectual effort. Etymology: From Latin collaborare , to work. The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition

Revisiting Dirk Knemeyer’s Diagram

Working with Multidisciplinary Teams Value proposition Holistic product System architecture

Working with Multidisciplinary Teams Product definition Interaction design Implementation of functions

Working with Multidisciplinary Teams Features Visual interface design User interface implementation

Creating Design Synergy Synergy —The interaction of two or more agents or forces so that their combined effect is greater than the sum of their individual effects. Etymology: From Greek sunergi , cooperation; from sunergos , working together. The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition

Defining Product Goals Marketing Requirements Documents (MRD) Usability Requirements Document (URD) Engineering Requirements Document (ERD)

Usability Requirements Derive from known usability problems reported by employees with customer-facing roles, including Technical Support Sales customer feedback user groups Derive from usability testing and analysis of the findings Derive from expert reviews

Conceptualizing Design Solutions Communication Collaboration Cooperation

Communicating Design Solutions “ Design as much detail as possible and document it thoroughly . … The more detailed the design (and the documentation), the more likely it is to survive implementation. … “ The more design we give our clients, the faster they can build, and the more faithful they are to the design. ”— Kim Goodwin, Cooper

Communicating Design Solutions UX Specification: Definitions of Terms

Communicating Design Solutions UX Specification: Dialog Box

Communicating Design Solutions UX Specification: Dialog Box (continued)

Communicating Design Solutions Usage Scenario

Supporting Your Development Team Act as a consultant to the development team and be available to answer questions. Clarify your specifications so they cover the questions developers raise. Provide error messages as needed. Revise your specifications as necessary in light of technical constraints developers encounter. Adjust the scope of your specifications as requirements change.

Supporting Your Development Team Gives you opportunities to sell your design to the developers and ensure they understand it. Helps you to understand engineering constraints better. Encourages developers to perceive you as a member of their team. Makes it more likely that the developers will build to your specifications.

What Is the Value of UX? “ Too many companies believe that all they must do is provide a ‘neat’ technology or some ‘cool’ product or, sometimes, just good, solid engineering. Nope. All of those are desirable (and solid engineering is a must), but there is much more to a successful product than that: understanding how the product is to be used, design, engineering, positioning, marketing, branding—all matter. It requires designing the Total User Experience. ”— Don Norman

The Value of User Experience “ Key objectives always seem to focus on the big three: usability, usefulness, and appeal (or desire, delight, or other approved words of emotional rapport). Key concerns revolve around including all possible stakeholders; merging design with business and marketing, not just engineering; showing return-on-investment (ROI) value; valuing storytelling and story ‘selling’; and looking for very innovative or radically creative or disruptive (in a good sense) solutions.”— Aaron Marcus, in User Experience Magazine

The Value of UX “ The feature wars are over. The new software upstarts have a powerful one-two punch: cheap startup costs and drop-dead ease of use. …it’s the new design movement that could prove more important. In fact, it could end up reshaping the user experience across corporate America. “ Good design is becoming more than a nice-to-have feature. Thanks to slick Web sites like Amazon.com, people are coming to expect software that takes no or little training to use.”— Sarah Lacy, in BusinessWeek Online

The Value of UX “ It shouldn’t come as a big surprise that on-demand software is focused on the user experience. The down side of letting customers pay by the month is that they can more easily switch to a rival. So on-demand software providers have to keep their customers happy with uncluttered, user-friendly designs….”— Sarah Lacy, in BusinessWeek Online

The Value of UX “ In this era of global competition … , a good—even great—user experience is an essential component of a quality software product and provides a sustainable strategic advantage that differentiates a product from those of a company’s competitors. Thus, user experience is a core competency within today’s software companies, and an expert in UX strategy and design is an indispensable part of a software product team—just as the product manager and software architect are … .”— From UXmatters

The Value of UX “ From the perspective of users, the user experience is the product. Therefore, to understand the true value of UX, executives must look at their products’ brand equity, which contributes to a company’s bottom line and ensures its long-term survival.”— From UXmatters

About Pabini Gabriel-Petit Founder and Principal User Experience Architect at Spirit Softworks LLC—a Silicon Valley user experience design and strategy consultancy Formerly User Experience Design Manager at WebEx Designed the award-winning Meeting Center and Training Center Over 15 years of experience designing digital products; 20 years, in the software industry Clients—Cisco, Tellme, WebEx, Chemdex, Whistle, Kaleida Labs, Apple, and Ashton-Tate

About Pabini Gabriel-Petit Publisher and Editor in Chief of UXmatters —a Web magazine focusing on user experience design Interactions Editorial Board Member Interaction Design Association (IxDA) Board of Directors Co-Chair of BayDUX UXnet Local Ambassador for Silicon Valley BayCHI IxD BOF (Birds of a Feather) Leader

Organizational Affiliations ACM SIGCHI (Special Interest Group on Computer-Human Interaction) www.sigchi.org BayCHI—San Francisco Bay Area Chapter of ACM SIGCHI www.baychi.org BayDUX—San Francisco Bay Area UXnet Locale www.baydux.org IxDA (Interaction Design Association) www.ixda.org UXnet (User Experience Network) www.uxnet.org

Web Sites and Email Addresses Spirit Softworks —Transforming the user experience www.spiritsoftworks.com [email_address] UXmatters —Insights and inspiration for the user experience community www.uxmatters.com [email_address]

Interaction Frontiers06 Getting From Concept To Realization

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