Lean User stories & Personas at UX Open 2013

Editor's Notes

• #2: What's the use in doing products no one likes to use? We need to focus on only making products that are of use in reality.I’ll talk about how to work with simple Lean User Journeys and Personas to drive your product development towards a successful product.
• #3: MeInterviewing a user at work. I currently work as a consultant for Volvo Trucks Cab department.I have worked with UX and interaction design for 16 years, doing all sorts of projects. For airport and traffic surveillance, telecom and healthcare but also for governmental web services like Gymnasieantagningen for Götalandsregionen.
• #4: In the early days of usability our work was perceived as expensive and troublesome. People didn’t really understand what our work was good for. UX was something that was ‘nice to have’. Our input to the development always came in to late to the project.“Well, Maggan, nice to know that no one will use this function the way it is made… But it is to late to change anything now…”
• #5: Nowadays we focus on bringing the right info to the project as early as possible.Our info on how the usage of the product is crucial to the success f the product.We call this new way of thinking Lean UX, which is aligned with the ideas of Lean Start up.
• #6: Lean UX contains of three building blocksLearnBuildMeasure…it is a continuous loop. When you have measured what you have done, you learn and start over again. Your product grows in a true successful agile way.
• #7: We as humans can’t help it, the experience of a product comes via our senses. It can only be felt while interacting with the product. You can try to design for a positive user experience, but you can not blame the user for not getting the positive user experience. Either you did right or you did wrong, think about the new ios7 for example. Did you have a positive user experience? Is it your fault if your experience wasn’t any good?
• #8: What is it that makes products enjoyable to use?Here you see a truckdriver interacting with his smartphone while he is driving. Is he having a positive user experience?Of course you could improve his interaction with a better designed GUI, with larger fonts, less text and large clickable areas…
• #9: That will make it a bit more enjoyable to use, but there is also something else. You have to take care of things that matters to him, not you.
• #10: You have to take care of things that matters.And in order to understand what matters to your users, you have to know their context.
• #11: That means that you have to predict your users future use of your product. How do they do similar things today, monitor them and interview them. Where could your solutions give value to your users?
• #12: Your product is only valuable to your users when it is in use. If you as a customer buy something and then don’t use it as much as you thought you would, then there is no good return on investment on it. This applies to non-customer products as well. If you as an provider spend a lot of money on a service or product to your users in order to make them do something using that product, there will be no return on investment if they do not use it.
• #13: I started to use ‘user journeys’ in my product development projects a few years ago, not only for service design (as it was originally made for) but also for products in both hardware and software. I use them together with personas in order to describe the target group users as they are and how their context will be using the product in the future.
• #14: I like to make my personas as easy to use as possible for my team-mates. They do not have time to read a lot of documents from me. They need something quick and effective to understand the target group users, to have empathy for them. My aim with personas is to visualize/market the users inhouse in the company.
• #15: When I made that persona template you saw in the last slide, I was influenced by this blog post. I really like the idea of infographics on personas.
• #17: But I think that every persona need at least one user journey through your future product. What are your thoughts on how you think your user will interact with your product in the future. A users journey describes a target groups experience of your service or product, in the future.Each interaction point is a point where you think that the user will interact with your product and get some value from doing so.
• #18: Describe the value you want to offer in user stories, in a context.
• #19: Do lo-fi sketching on different solutions on how to solve this. Always keeping the user story, the user journey and the persona in mind.
• #20: And then try verify that your solutions will work in reality, for users and possible to create technically for your team. If your team can’t create the things you design, then there will be no product – only end up as a nice designsolution in your portfolio…
• #21: The focus in the project is to create a successful product, did we think right or wrong with our design? The earlier you find out the better. There is no need to spend time and money on something that will not work.Measure – and learn – and start building again.Building on paper is a cheap way to save time and money in some of your early iterations.