[Book] User Experience Management - Skills for leading effective UX Teams
Good reference book for checking from time to time as a guide for the most common management activities.
I want to remark the consideration about the difference between Leadership and Management that is described in different chapters. The attributes for leadership are expressed as follows:
Leadership
Leaders infect others with vision and generate enthusiasm.
Leaders communicate, and communicate well.
Leaders are trusted, and trust themselves
Leaders handle uncertainty and stress with grace and calm
Leaders are proactive, goal oriented, and go after exciting challenges, rather than only being reactive.
Leaders respect and value their followers and those with whom they work.
UX leaders fight for users, inspire with design, and yet never lose sight of business value.
Leaders embrace feedback and get better.
Leaders inspire others to be their best and to improve, and mentor them.
Leaders know how to leverage people’s strengths, and how to work around or manage weaknesses.
Leadership is hard work, but leaders get in the flow.
Undoubtably, it’s something to aspire. And here is the index of contents:
- Chapter 1: Introduction
- Chapter 2: Building the team
- Chapter 3: Creating your team
- Chapter 4: Equipping the team
- Chapter 5: Focusing the team
- Chapter 6: Creating a high performance team
- Chapter 7: Nurturing the team
- Chapter 8: Transforming the organisation
- Chapter 9: Evangelizing UX
- Chapter 10: Conclusions
Puesto que el ser humano - a pesar de sus miserias - tiene una esencial vocación de grandeza, conviene que nos dirijamos a esa grandeza para luchar con nuestras miserias.
Since the human being - regardless of their misery - is an essential vocation of greatness, it is appropriate that we turn to that greatness to fight with our miseries.
J. A. Marina “Los secretos de la motivación” (The Secrets of Motivation).
Do you have a project? Wishes ⇒ Tasks ⇒ Projects
[Book] Mobile First
Brief, direct and simple. The idea: address your business strategy thinking first in your mobile experience. Why? to force simplicity, to reduce complexity, to get our users focus on content, to understand your product as pills of functionality handable by any user. Which user? that one who is in “one eyeball and one thumb” mode. Appealing, isn’t it? Well, it is challenging.
A book full of tips which helps you to understand capabilities and embrace constraints to take advantage until the minimum detail of the mobile experience.
Web App or Native App? Both. Do you want to know more? Would you like to agree or disagree with this argument? Read Mobile First, it won’t take you more than one day to start creating amazing web applications.
Enjoy it!
Two more brief books for my self-enjoyment :)
[Book] Sketching User Experiences
This is a book about process and design. Divided into two parts, Bill Buxton engage you (designers, product managers, business executives, etc.) in a analysis about methods, processes and business careers from a historical point of view.
It brings other fields of the industry into the emerging User Experience with Sketching as the starting point of new ideas and as a way to lead the new product requirements for innovation.
It makes you think about your role and your company culture reminding us:
how important innovation is to the future of your company, the role of design in this, a recognition that innovation cannot be ghettoized in the research or design departments, since it is an overall cultural issue, and awareness of the inevitable and dire consequences of ignoring the previous three points.
Buxton stops when talking about Design when makes distinction between Interface Desgin and Experience Design (may we say design for experience?), when clarifies why Sketches are not Prototypes and disagrees with D. Norman who stated “We are all designers”.
Reducing things to such a level trivializes the hard-won and highly developed skills of the professional designer.
It is not a how-to book, although there’s a complete section about techniques to create sketches, with best practices where the main messages is: think, create, share and test.
Personal opinion
When reading this book I have had always the feeling of mixing things and not going into the real root of any point. I would love to have the two parts of it into two different books with a more deeply detailed materials where to learn more about the author’s ideas.
Nevertheless, for me, it has represented a creative way of learning tips to introduce simple, fast and cheap sketching techniques into my daily work at the same time that I have considered the need of innovation not only in products but also in the process itself.
In order to create successful products, it is as important (if not more) to invest in the design of the design process, as in the design of the product itself.
By the way, digging into his web site you can take a look to this interesting and inspiring device collection (in HTML or Silverlight).
Should the Software Industry learn from other fields?
I’ll share with you an interesting reflection found in the book “Prototyping” by Todd Zaki Warfel regarding why we don’t expect prototyping as stage in the process in software development, regardeless the myth of the “return of investment”:
I think the first reason is that in software development, the emphasis is often placed on the development process and not the design process. The industry doesn’t call it “software design”; they call it “software development.”
In software development, design is often an afterthought. The emphasis is on the technology or features—not the design. In architecture and industrial design, however, the emphasis is on design. Form follows function.
Another reason is that software development is seen as a manufacturing process, but architecture and industrial design are seen as a craft.
In the following pages we’re introduced to the concept of Design studio, which is very common in other design fields:
In studio classes, you design or prototype and present to your peers. Your peers critique your work, highlighting the strengths and areas that still need some work.
Prototypes are not just a tool to communicate or to describe ideas, but also a work methodology, a phylosophy where sharing, colaborating and criticizing can speed up the process, prevent future failures and empower peers into trust and success.
It’s not a believe, fortunately I could check it by my own in my short experience, so the answer from my viewpoint is clear:”Yes, the software industry must learn a lot from other fields and design can help to lead that subversion”.
HTML5 & CSS3 for designers
“Start now”, with this statement Dan Cederholm, the author of “CSS3 for Web Desginers” book, encourages us to work with the evolution of web markup style. And his not alone, with the same spirit, Jeremy Keith show us the history and the ‘whys’ of the new version of HTML.
But, is it now the right time? Even if we don’t believe in the consensus, and the first standard recommendation is planned to 2022, even if it’s really up to the vendors to support the new features and still you feel there are not enough of them to make the web styling really cool, even if you have worked with XAML and have in mind “why they don’t just copy it”, and even if you feel that it is a kind of “back to the future” the answer would be “yes”.
This is, as always, a business, the web browser war never counted with designers and developers’ desires, but they used our work to justify their steps ahead. It is like when one of those big companies - I won’t say the name - creates a copied technology to gain developers to gain terrain (to gain money) and it is supported just meanwhile there are someone who keeps on trying it: at the end, if there are not enough people using that “new” technology the company will says “bye” progressively in a gentle way - if you don’t believe me, tell Silverlight developers (oops).
This is only my personal view, I think that if the most of websites are built in HTML documents and are styled with CSS, the evolution of both are the right way to go. It will be slowly and plenty of complaints but always is like so. Is it risk? maybe, is it familiar? of course it is; is it RIA? hummm… we will see it, if we start trying it today.
Personas’ Remote Research
To build a persona can be tricky; you can just look how actors need months to put in the shoes of a their new characters. In UI design, personas’ creation is part of the analysis stage: they will be used to define requirements, to prepare user tests, to support decisions and to establish a meeting points between designers, developers, and stakeholders.
What is a persona?
Personas are fictitious users you create based on your user research. Personas summarize your user research findings and provide a practical approach to understanding the requirements of your target audience and keeping user perspectives in mind when designing products and creating documentation for them.
By Niranjan Jahagirdar and Arun Joseph Martin for UX Matters.
I wanted to include this definition just as an introduction, because what matters to me now is how to perform personas’ research when you cannot access to any focus group, you cannot do direct interviews or observe users.
Beyond the discussion about whether this artifact is useful or not, I think that even for large organizations is a wothwhile investigation which will help to the team to be closer to the real and target user. So, this is basically my suggestions whenever you need to face a persona’s modeling:
- Identify primary and secondary individuals to give importance to product requirements
- Identify behavioural variables and patterns by reading blogs, analysing the professional/gender/demographics statistics associated, and understanding the complexity of their tasks beyond the technology
- Undestand how business rules, and work environment can affect to the performance and frequency of their tasks
- Learn how subjects like politics can affect to the user daily work (tasks, goals, attitudes and motivations)
Tips from above are not new, you can find more precise ones in the Chapter 5: Modeling Users: Personas and Goals, of the book About Face 3.
Creating persona’s is not an obscure or expensive procedure but a powerful tool wich will help designers to make decisions confidientially.
[istartup] books of interest
Some reading before starting up a business:
- Drupal E-Commerce with Ubercart 2.x
- Buylogy: Truth and Lies about why we buy
- Lovely Package ideas blog
[Book] Emotional Design: Why we love (or hate) everyday things
The Norman’s book Emotional Design: why we love (or hate) everyday things is certainly praised by designers and non-designers.
Truly, it has made me a better person (I would never say that I’m now a better designer since I’ve just read a book). But yes, that’s the positive feeling you can get after reading it. You will feel like an alive and creative animal which understand the emotions through design and technology.
The book is full of examples, (figurative) pictures, experiences, and situations to illustrate why without emotions, your decision-making ability would be impaired.
There’s a kind of anachronistic tone in his view of design. He splits it in three different levels:
- Visceral: visceral design is about the initial impact of a product, about appearance, touch, and feel.
- Behavioural: is about use, about experience with a product: function, performance, and usability.
- Reflecive: is about long-term relations, about feelings of satisfaction produced by owning, displaying, and using a product.
explaining why attractive things really work better: beauty and usefulness are inside everyone’s mind when we look at objects. Even if we would dislike something there’s always a strong emotion behind which affects to the interaction and the perception.
So interesting, so recommended… and ready for the next one.
