Definition
UX = Useful, Usable, Delightful
The user experience (UX) is how a user interacts with and experiences a product, system, or service. It includes a person’s perception of:
- value or usefulness: is this useful to me?
- usability: can I use this accessibly, intuitively, and efficiently?
- delightfulness: is it enjoyable to use?
Goal
Pull the interests of users, tech, & business together
Balancing the interests of these three groups is a trick. It requires research, design, iterations, and experiments.
- Users want maximal usefulness. And they want it accessibly and intuitively (and sometimes lowest cost). The higher the value and lower the friction in the other categories is a key goal.
- Tech can unlock opportunities and limit them. It's important to strike a balance of features and polish in the given timeline. AI allows the engineers to solve more of the complexity to make the user's job simper (Tesler's law).
- Business needs to find product-market fit that is long term profitable, while respecting short-term demands.
How the process feels
Volatility: high to low
It starts volatile, chaotic, confusing, even discouraging at first. Then confidence sets in and volatility subsides.
Events often occur that spark volatility again. The most fruitful attitude is to never marry a solution. Marry a problem.
I'm willing to start over: no design is sacred. I just keep updating my understanding of users, tech, and business.
Priority is important
Find the right problem then the right solution. Keep repeating this.
The first diamond is dedicated to understanding: users, their problems, business, incentives, tech capabilities, etc. Ultimately, you want to find the highest pain (or opportunity).
The second diamond is dedicated to solving that important problem. The graphic above is linear, but diamond hopping is frequent. Often, while I'm solution'ing, I'll discover things I need to learn (or relearn).
As time progresses, things change, so I regularly question if we have the right problem and solution. As priorities evolve, this problem-solution relationship should evolve too.
Thinking Styles
Diverge, Converge, Repeat
A Process of divergent and convergent thinking and activities.
- Divergent thinking is learning and solution'ing without constraints. You’re thinking moves ‘outward’ into many possibilities. A creative process focused on open-mindedness and quantity. It's a no judgement zone.
- Convergent thinking is working toward few, refined solutions. A process focused on quality: combining and refining your many ideas from the previous step. Time to edit.
Milestones
From guess to refined solutions
Five key milestones along the winding path of guess to solution.
- Hypothesis: We begin with a guess, hopefully an educated one. The trick here is to hold on loosely while moving forward. Some folks get paralyzed by the lack of 'knowing'ness'.
- Problem better understood: As we learn from more perspectives, that guess is replaced and refined with concrete data. Confidence momentum building! However, confusion, self-doubt, and an overwhelming amount of information precedes this feeling.
- Problem better defined: The big win of the research diamond is clearly and concisely defining the problem. If we can't state it simply then we have more work to do.
- Solution better identified: We conjure up many solutions; drawing fast helps. I type out the problem, big goals, and requirements. I often refer back to research and enter more educational rabbit holes. Eventually, we'll arrive at a few promising solutions.
- Solution refined: Thanks to a smorgasbord of ideas, we can see trade-offs of each approach. We combine ideas, tighten up the design, minimize trade offs, and think through tech implementation.
R&D&T
Research, Design, Test
The four sub-phases that yield the five milestones listed above.
- Research/Test: We're learning everything we can. We're in gather mode. The process includes talking to stakeholders, engineers, users, and subject-matter-experts. Looking through any existing research or usage data. Looking through any publicly available information. It will be a lot, and it will be overwhelming.
- Make sense: After gathering, it's time to organize, group, and summarize our info harvest. It's fun to see themes emerge and aha's firing. Our confidence is building. This is exciting for the team to create a single, concrete definition. Which yields team alignment—often the unsung hero of the entire process. Diagrams aid in communicating the problem.
- Ideate: The title says it all. We chase down many angles of solving the problem. This phase is divergent, so it's all about idea quantity. Judgement-free zone.
- Refine: Hopefully we've produced a few promising ideas. We take the best ones and refine them while noting pros and cons of each. Then we build a prototype to test.
My Holistic Role
A stack of double diamonds
Simply a process of learning and solution'ing using the diverge-converge approach within each.
The activities involved changes based on context (row), but the approach remains the same.
- Concepts: A sales effort to capital gatekeepers like executives, VCs, and key customers. A shortened research-design process influenced by business goals. I learn from collaborators and any information I can find, then design a solution and amplify sex appeal.
- R&D: The typical double diamond you see everywhere. And described in more detail in previous sections.
- Testing: Another pass through the diamonds, but using a prototyped solution (hypothesis) as a starting point.
- Build: Refining the solution for development, which is why the graphic only shows the far right half-diamond. Collaborating with development gets more involved.
- Monitor: The true test. How do real users use a real product in real environments? Establishing tracking technology is the key element. Then sharing the results is a cultural practice. The standard pass through the diamonds of learning and revising the design is employed. Though design changes are more subtle.
- Design System: This is a peripheral endeavor, but a long term game-changer. Design systems are products built as by-products from real products. Slowly growing this library is a culture practice.
- Branding, Marketing, Sales: I often support many efforts branding, marketing, and selling digital products: both internal and external.
Process Deliverables
A nice sequence of deliverables from idea to shipping
Different projects call for slightly different approaches. Generally, I follow this sequence. Each step is scaffolding for the next. New information may require prior steps to be updated.
Real Process
Component'ized activities to contextually move the needle
Good designers know all the activities, and when to employ which to move the the project forward. Sometimes it happens nicely, but often it happens variably based on milestones and funding.
Milestone & Vision Balance
Plug holes then design a better boat.
It’s important to achieve the next milestone. Without it, funding may stop. But too much focus on the short-term blurs the long term vision.
It's important to move toward the big vision. After all, that's what the product/company is built on. But not respecting short-term milestones — knowing they're not ideal — puts the product at risk.
Doing both is challenging. My approach is to know and respect my client's priorities/goals, which dictates my role.
- Short-term: Sometimes I solve short-term needs to stop the bleeding.
- Long-term: Other times (and more often), I'm positioned to rethink everything: a holistic redesign.
- Grand vision: For new projects (or big changes), I help leaders articulate, distill, and visualize their grand vision. Which typically contains concept drawings, UIs, infographics, and a presentation. Together we paint the ideal vision to move toward.
Interested in collaborating together?
Contact me to discuss your UX needs.
hi@thompsoncreative.co
