UX in Spain

UX Spain - the first event about User Experience in our country - has been successfully celebrated this week with a pretty high number of attendees, almost 400.

We’ve had the opportunity to meet, know, share and discuss hot topics that concerns to our profession at every level and with a very varied kind of people.

Now that we’re back having our minds in the next #UXSP, we all seems to feel like if the Pandora box was opened. So here are some thoughts and conclusions of this rich exchange of experiences: 

What’s UX?

As the 1-million dollar question with hundreds of doubtful answers, the UX exists and cover many areas, we can spent our whole career wondering which kind of UX we are, but the only interesting question is what’s the UX we do and how it helps to create big things.

Coding, Technology, Psychology, Aesthetic and what else?

Misconceptions only bring poor-quality products, services, UIs … or experiences. Attending to all these conferences has made me remind the importance of understanding and learning always something different, something new, something old and, why not, something “borrowed” of other specialisation, whatever it is.

UX is your business, your company is your business

Honestly, it is the first time I hear about “Intraprenuer” and I love it, mainly because it highlights the power of changing a company for better. We’re on track ;)

Are UX roles real? The talent is searched

Companies that expressed their failure hiring “UX people” where there, by the way, offering jobs. Some old-fashioned discussions where developers (wrongly called  technologists) and designers (probably conceived as visual designers) where both considered in this big world hiding the most difficult-to-admit true: the only thing that really matter is talent, and it’s not something that everybody can have it. Rest of us we’ll think how to be as good as possible.

Share, share, share…

It’s time to share again, to get rid of confidentiality, or shame, or fear, or mistery… it’s time to tell the truth about our failures and success. We have even a bigger responsibility since we’ve had people to admire who made this before. We have to give something to the community as we have received it in the past. 

… and much more

  • User testing not needed anymore, really? 
  • Missing something else rather than web pages, web sites, web architectures, and web design… the app world is coming and we cannot forget desktops.
  • Agile, is it new? Shall we say only Lean UX? The challenge of big teams working smoothly, my favorite 15-mins speech of this event powered by Ujue Agudo and Tona Monjo. The design process matters.
  • Universal design is not possible but disabled users have preferences, as any other users (Thanks to Idioa Soto and Nacho Madrid)
  • Prototyping is your communication tool – use it A.L.W.A.Y.S (Thanks to Dani Armengol)
  • The UX is made for something good (Thanks to elecciones.es and Mònica Zapata)

 

I personally don’t have any user-mantra to repeat again and again when I go to the office every day, but I’m in love of my work because I love create things, I love beauty and great ideas that can positively impact in other people.

That’s all, such simple such pretentious.

That’s the way I honor this profession and makes me get by to the uncertainty and disappointments that, being honest, sometimes just happens. I have seen same vision and feelings in UX Spain and I’m looking forward to repeat it again next year, so hope to meet all of you keeping the same energy.

The real thing with Agile is that never ends. From the moment of your first very rough conceptual prototype to the moment that you ship code you can sell you’re testing all the way through. You’re checking with your customer all the way through. That’s the end state that we’re working towards with our clients is the point where you don’t even have to wait for working code to do the iterations with your customers.
Hugh Beyer – Getting Started with UX Inside Agile Development

[Links] 2011 - A year of UX and more

What we read from blogs we’re subscribed to it’s part of our every-day inspiration.

After a year, I’ve had opportunity to read and discover different posts with a special influence in me, anyhow. The year is ending now and this is the summary of the readings I recommend before 2012.

December

November

October

September

August

July

June

May

April

March

February

January

And one of the biggest misconceptions, or one of the questions I hear constantly, is “How do I write good stories?” One of the points to make about stories is they’re called stories because they were meant to be heard. They were meant to be discussed and talked about, and how they’re written isn’t as big an issue as what people talk about and what pictures they form in their heads.
Read/Listen the podcast of Jeff Patton – Story Mapping for UX Practitioners: Tying Agile and UX Together

[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).

ux heroes

New toolkit for prototyping, diagramming and testing? I want to try it out

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.