Ten Enterprise User Experience Commandments

Editor's Notes

• #2: Good afternoon, everyone! How are you doing? How are your cell phone batteries doing?
• #3: I’d like to start out today by thanking Mike and Tara for inviting me to make the most ridiculous presentation to everyone here today. Where else will you see a tenuous linkage from fancy Fortune 500 User Experience learnings to a Rap Titan’s rules for slinging crack? My user experience team at Emerson is small but mighty. The majority of this presentation wouldn’t be possible without the help from Julie Harpring and Kathleen Dye, and amazing mobile developers, led by Stephen Pickens. I am privileged to work with a tremendous group of Product Owners & Product Mangers - Brendan, Tom, Abhi, Bob, Justin, Tom, Scott, and Greg who enable me.
• #4: I have two degrees in music, one degree in business management, and I’m pursuing my M.B.A. from Syracuse University’s Whitman School of Business with an emphasis in Entrepreneurship. I am currently the user experience leader at Emerson in the connected products division. We make all sorts of IoT products. This is harder than it sounds. At Monsanto, a company I’m sure some of you have organized a march against, I created and led a design practice for digital in the R&D Space. Through user experience and design, we attempted to shorten the product delivery pipeline. At Asynchrony, I worked with clients like Sotheby’s International Realty, Kaiser-Permente Healthcare, Bridgewater & Associates, and The US Army/Department of Defense. I’d like to give a special shout-out to Corey Woodruff for the headshot. It’s from his All of the Faces project, and it was taken at a time when I had way more hair. I’m going to get as much mileage out of this photo as possible.
• #5: My team is responsible for the experience design of Sensi, one of the top-rated Wi-Fi thermostats on Amazon. We’re carrying a 4+ star rating on Amazon, the Apple App Store, and Google Play. That’s hard - and even harder when you consider that we can only control 3/4ths of the user’s experience: App, Thermostat Hardware, and Cloud. I have no visibility into what sort of networking equipment anyone has in their homes, if the routers are compatible (we found out the hard way that Arris Routers installed by a cable provider in the North East who’s name rhymes with Schmomcast were blocking the port we needed to access to communicate with our cloud).
• #6: When I was asked by Mike and Tara to give a talk about User Experience, I couldn’t help but think about how many rules we have out there. What would be engaging? What would be fun? And, how could I speak for 40 minutes without mentioning Apple, Jony Ive, or a land a Steve Jobs quote on how design is how it looks/how it feels? Well, we’ve been making rules and lists from Hammurabi in 1754 B.C. to Nick Hornby’s character Rob Gordon in High Fidelity. We won’t stop now.
• #7: Everyone loves Jakob Nielsen, but would his Ten Usability Heuristics for User Interface Design resonate this late on a Monday?
• #8: Even the best designers produce successful products only if their designs solve the right problems. A wonderful interface to the wrong features will fail.
• #9: John Maeda, former president of RISD, has Ten Laws of Simplicity. He wrote a great book on the subject - really, it’s worth a read.
• #10: While great art makes you wonder, great design makes things clear.
• #11: Who doesn’t love Ben Shneiderman! The man who invented the highlighted link in 1983! Treemapping! Touchscreen interfaces!
• #13: What I want to focus on is User Experience inside of a large company. And who better to explain this than the man himself. What if, let’s say, Biggie’s days were spent hustling inside the concrete jungle trying to climb a corporate ladder instead? Let’s hear from the man who’s been smooth since the days of Underoos.
• #14: I've been in this game for years, it made me a animal. There's rules to this shit, I wrote me a manual. Here’s a step-by-step booklet for you to get your game on track, not your wig pushed back.
• #15: Rule Nombre Uno: Never let no one know how much dough you hold.
• #16: This looks to me like a typical budget. I fight for resources - both human and capital - but never win. Does this look like your company’s budget? Developers get all the cool stuff. Foosball, Ping Pong tables, swimming pools full of Mountain Dew. This forces me to get lean and mean with my UX Team. We executed a study recently at a Lowe’s in Maplewood, piggybacking off other marketing research being conducted in-aisle. We had our screener in place, it was just a matter of peeling off a $25 gift card for about 15-20 minutes at the end of the session.
• #17: Low cost solutions are all around you. We recently ran 8 participants through a half-hour usability session using the tools/services you see here. InVision is a prototyping tool that has a ‘free forever’ tier. We pay for an enterprise account. Lookback is a tool used to record user sessions. It is free with a limited feature set (but totally worth the low monthly subscription cost if you run a lot of tests) We design almost exclusively in Sketch - and for $100, why not? It makes cutting assets for Android/iOS so much easier, and has nearly eliminated all Creative Cloud use from my team. Sorry, not Sorry, Adobe. We all love Slack, right? There’s a free tier, but I’m sure you already know that. Finally, Amazon. We use a S3 Instance for storing usability session artifacts, and we’ll shoot over $25-$100 in gift cards for session participants depending on the duration and depth of the usability evaluation.
• #18: Lookback and InVision are amazing. The integration is seamless, and both tools can be had on a free tier to try out. But, I guarantee you that you’ll end up wanting to expand beyond the free tier before you know it!
• #19: On your left, you can see the screen being tested. On the right you can see our test participant. I strategically inserted the guardsman emoji to conceal the participant’s identity. This all happened in-aisle at Lowe's in Maplewood on a Thursday afternoon. Lookback recorded his facial expression, his interaction points with the prototype, and synced them up side-by-side. I can’t say enough great things about Lookback and InVision. It’s really the best, you guys.
• #20: Number two: Never let ‘em know your next move.
• #21: You know what I never had access to at any point in my career until now? A legal team. [CLICK] And that legal team makes my inner 12-year old wet his pants with giggling. If you have an idea that could be valuable to the company, it’s worth protecting. And, if you work for a large company, odds are, you have a legal team that can help you determine if you have freedom to practice - that is, freedom to manifest your idea in software or hardware without infringing on anyone’s intellectual property. This is actually pretty damn important. The moment you show your design in the pubic sphere, you start the clock on your IP protection. So you better be pretty sure that what you’re showing without a NDA in place is something you can file quickly with the US Patent & Trademark Office, and have protections in queue, just in case. This presentation is legal-approved.
• #22: Emerson’s thermostat play exists in a very crowded category that’s only getting more complex. My boss Greg accepted his job to lead product development of a connected thermostat the same day that Nest launched. Fate can be so cruel. Nest continues to define the category with Ecobee, Honeywell, and Emerson’s Sensi thermostat lagging behind. There is one patent troll (not pictured) that has locked down all of the cool features and has generally made it hard to deliver great features. It’s weird to have your innovation engine governed by prior art.
• #23: Number three: Never trust no-bod-y.
• #24: Show of hands: how many of you know someone like this? I’m sure there’s more than one person in the room who works with someone who makes a delicious mug of pumpkin spiced weak tea. Point being, you can’t make decisions in a vacuum. Get out, talk to people. Have a process and follow it. Assumptions are cool, but actionable insights are cooler and infinitely more valuable.
• #25: If your product owners or shareholders are introverts, I find that beer helps a lot with overcoming the fear of social interactions. Trust me. And, bars are a great place to show off your product to unsuspecting patrons to capture real, honest opinions. Sometimes, you can even get drunk usability evaluations if you hang out at the right places. If you’re developing a mobile application, the barrier to entry for a quick, guerrilla usability evaluation is usually, “I made an app. You probably have apps like this on your phone. Can I ask you a question? It won’t take more than a few minutes…” Hell, you can even buy someone a drink for their time.
• #26: Don’t let Product Managers or Product Owners pull out the “Yeah, but…” card. If you’ve been following along with Biggie, you know that it’s not ok. There’s only one cure for people with a bad case of the “Yea Buts”: Data. Cold, hard data.
• #27: Numbers in their purest form are hard to disprove. Find your single source of truth and speak it. In this case, we had user activity overlaid in a heat map with key interaction points in our app. We stopped a “Yeah But” cold by proposing an A/B Test and had data as our single source of truth. Aligning on KPIs - Key Performance Indicators - before running experiments is key to agreeing to the outcomes. What do you hope to prove with your learnings? How do you know when you’re successful?
• #28: Number four, I know you’ve heard this before: “Never get high on your own supply”
• #29: Just about every book on product development will tell you that you need to get out and talk to near or actual users of your products. This is great, right? You need to experiment to gain real insights. FINALLY, people from a position of influence are learning! (Had to hard pivot thanks to C. Todd’s presentation) User Experience professionals get this - it’s what we do - but now that business books are being written with this in mind and read by business people, it’s up to us to demonstrate our value and help prove out the company’s investment in User Experience was a good one. Especially if we want to grow our share of the budget pie. You end up wearing two hats: Experience Designer and User Evangelist.
• #30: So, we grind grind inside the office with design sprints involving cross-functional teams with stakeholders from all over the company…
• #31: And outside of the office. The photos on screen were from one of the most interesting work trips I’ve ever taken. We were attempting to validate a business model for a new product. We created a brand identity from whole cloth, rented a mall Kiosk space in Riverside, California, and sent out a crew to see just if we could validate purchase intent somewhere other than in our backyard. As a quick aside: I love intercepting people in airports for quick and dirty usability evaluations. It’s a totally captive audience. We picked Riverside because it’s home to the second highest energy cost per capita in the United States behind Maricopa County, Arizona (Phoenix). We went in late August, and it was miserable. But not because of the heat.
• #32: It was miserable because it was nearly impossible for anyone in a mall get people to talk with me. We had a Mac Mini with us, so we were able to edit the messaging in real-time to try to find something that stuck. Nothing stuck. We had come up 100% lame. Believe it or not, I couldn’t give away $25 cash, no strings attached. We were at the hotel bar nursing our ego and decided to run some Facebook ads. Turns out, we had a hit. It took being 2,000 miles from home to get something to work that we could have done remotely, but it happened. We got a call, and had an appointment. Tried to sell and the guy bought in. We had validation. But no product. We had to let him down. The trip wasn’t a total wash, though: In-n-Out
• #33: Number Five: Never sell no crack where you rest at.
• #34: Just like Biggie’s previous commandment, ‘Never get high on your own supply,’ It’s important to get the hell out of the office and meet with real people and real partners. We recently went to Apple to meet with their MFi Program manager and demo our hardware + software integration. I’ve got a photo here from our User test at Lowe’s. Getting out of the confines of your office to get feedback is very important.
• #35: Recently, I trained a cross-functional team of stakeholders from my division on how to conduct a usability study. We had a complete discussion guide to use, devices to test on, and about 81 participants to run through in a marathon, 6-hour long session. We tested on our top-10 devices per our analytics from AppSee. I had product owners, product managers, agile engineers, customer service, and a handful of interns out to execute. It was bananas.
• #36: We had 81 participants through in 6 hours, The participants were paid with Amazon gift cards, and we ordered 60 pizzas to feed everyone. The total cost was $2,625 for chapters full of insights. 10/10, would do it again.
• #37: Number six: That goddamn credit? Dead it.
• #38: Biggie literally meant to not take any I.O.U.’s. Can you tell that I really wanted to use some stock photography of things that never actually happen at any job, ever? Framed up in the context of Enterprise User Experience, this rule cuts two ways: Don’t make promises to others that you can’t keep. Deadlines are sacred. Don’t let other people make promises to you that they won’t be accountable for.
• #39: Seven: This rule is so underrated, Keep your family and business completely separated.
• #40: I have a stupid schedule. I’m never at my desk. And, if I didn’t have an Apple Watch vibrating my wrist, I’d be chronically tardy. I did something very early in on my career: made time for myself, and made time for my family. If I didn’t do this, I’d have meetings booked over me all day long.
• #41: These next two commandments we can gloss over, for obvious reasons. They deal way more with the gritty part of Biggie’s other career.
• #43: Biggie played a different, rougher game. Thankfully, all I have to do is navigate around my outlook calendar and nobody dies.
• #44: Number 10 (abridged): If you ain't got the clientele, say "hell no!”, ‘cause they gon' want they money rain sleet hail snow. I know that Tom mentioned “Leading with Yes” in his presentation, but in enterprise, No is just as important as Yes. Stick with me. A cautionary tale about overextending yourself: Saying no is always an option. Just ask Ken Norton.
• #45: Ken is a Product Manager and Google Ventures Partner. I guess he’s also technically a competitor, because he brought Nest to Google Ventures, along with other giants like Slack and Uber. Ken has a tremendous newsletter about product management called “Bringing the Donuts.” It’s worth the space it occupies in your inbox.
• #46: If you’re a product manager or leading a product team, you can probably relate to the many times when a HIPPO (Highest Paid Person in the Org) requests a change or a new feature based on an assumption. Instead of clearly stating, “You know, that new feature isn’t a priority for us, in terms of the next six months,” you might say, “Okay, we’ll look into it.” “We’ll look into it” is the WORST THING YOU CAN SAY. You can bet that’s going to bite you in ass. Six months later, that same HIPPO will check in on that feature you were “looking into” and learn it was an empty promise. This is tough to navigate because the assumption could very well be valid, but it’s just may not be a high enough priority.   There is a positive power ascribed to the word “no” - it needs to be in your toolbox.