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Creative Spirit

A miraculous thing has happened recently: as I hunker down at home and cook a lot more, I find myself making meals without referring to recipes or insights of strangers on the Internet, relying only on intuition and my ever-growing chaotic web of knowledge of food chemistry, faint memories of past recipes, and one-off tips. It is liberating to be able to go off-script, play around and taste-test, and not question if I did something “wrong”. 

But what does it even mean to do something wrong in cooking? 

My entire philosophy of cooking has changed into an anchoring belief that there is no right or wrong in cooking. There’s never a perfect equation, a process that rings true every time. Even when I replicate a familiar recipe, I am met with subtle differences in the outcome, and each time I am...familiarly surprised. Of course, it will always turn out a little different - every ingredient, every step of the recipe, every state I am in, is boundless with variation that forks off into different results. Take an orange, for example. That orange will have an entirely different flavor profile than that of an orange picked from the other end of the grove. (This actually happened to me the other day. I bought two oranges from the market, and one had a slight bitterness to it that lingered in the aftertaste. The other one was much sweeter, with a tinge of tart, bursting more robustly with juice. Was the former orange picked too early? Did it get less sun? Worse soil? Who knows?) My point is that if you can’t even compare oranges to...well, oranges, how do you expect to have total control over how a dish ends up? I think a lot of the pressure and intimidation from cooking originates in the expectation of the food turning out exactly how you imagine it, exactly how it looks in the photos in the food blog, exactly how you remember it at Grandma’s house. 

![veggies-1-1024x632.png](https://echouser-api-media.s3.us-west-1.amazonaws.com/veggies_1_1024x632_d56659f39a.png)

I’ve faced a lot of crushing defeat from food that didn’t turn out “right” even though I followed the recipe to a T, painstakingly shaving off the top of a teaspoon scoop of garlic powder, nervously watching the timer click as if going over a minute would end in catastrophe and an exploding kitchen, and opening and closing and opening the pot of rice to make sure it’s not overcooking (which I realize I shouldn’t have done...losing all that precious steam that makes the rice so good!) Why was I so afraid? I cooked as if I were serving not myself but the recipe as if it were a religion. I was chained to it. Improvisation? No way. Substitute ingredients with what I have in my pantry? Not a chance. I was cooking as if I had eyes over my shoulder, that I placed there myself. 

<highlight>

>**That calm freedom, confident and unbound by a recipe, felt so far away.**

</highlight>

I would watch people, in awe, cooking with an almost careless confidence, trust in the toss of their wrist as they seasoned, one glance, sniff, touch, gut feeling (that intuition...that goddamn intuition!) to determine if something was done, ready, needs a bit more simmering. I wondered...where did that intuition come from? How long have they been cooking? My greed for kitchen intuition felt so similar to playing the piano, how even after 11 years of playing I felt lost and incapable of playing at all if I sat at a piano without sheet music. My hands felt useless until I had someone else’s creation for me to replicate. It was the same feeling in the kitchen. That calm freedom, confident and unbound by a recipe, felt so far away. I felt like I had so far to go, and I wanted to give up. But in order to survive and save money, I kept cooking, reluctantly eating for a week a failed, disappointing dish or feeling guilty from “forgetting” to eat it and letting it spoil in the fridge. I kept cooking through tantrums - “but I did it RIGHT!”

![fried-rice-708x1024.png](https://echouser-api-media.s3.us-west-1.amazonaws.com/fried_rice_708x1024_30b2716805.png)

Little did I know, despite my insecurities and anxieties in the kitchen, I was still learning and growing. That little by little, I was feeding my web of knowledge with tidbits that might’ve felt arbitrary and insignificant at the time. That cooking even through fatigue at the end of a long day, cooking through frustration and unanswered questions, would prove to be fruitful. I was beginning to see that the beauty of cooking is in its mysterious, fickle possibilities. Every vegetable, fruit, meat, spice, grain will be different from the last. Each stove, oven, pot, and pan is different. Each state of being you are in, each mood, is different - whether you’re rushed on time or can leisurely, lovingly slice against the old cutting board. Whether your friend called in the middle of cooking and you let something char too far in the pan. How the same bottle of olive oil will be different a few weeks later. 

All of these possibilities might sound daunting - it surely was for me. But slowly over the years, I’ve become playful with possibilities rather than resisting them. I became unafraid of trial and error. I began tasting my food while cooking, not just relying on the recipe as the end all be all - but trusting my senses, going with my gut. I was paying attention to why certain ingredients are to be cooked together and how they interact with each other, rather than mindlessly measuring them out and not questioning it. The other day I was making a pasta sauce with browned butter and cheese, and while you can’t go wrong with butter or cheese, it was too heavy and rich. But I suddenly remembered the pack of frozen Russian dumplings from months ago, which had directions to coat them in butter and a splash of vinegar. The acidity of the vinegar had balanced the creamy fattiness of the buttered dumplings, which prompted me, in the present day, to squeeze a lemon onto the pasta sauce, which made it perfect.

<highlight>

>**In order to build a repository of meaningful moments you can pull from, be observant, and curious.**

</highlight>

Cooking is all about these random recollections that just make things click. In order to build a repository of meaningful moments you can pull from, be observant, and curious. Be skeptical and taste it yourself. Instead of fixating on the temperature dial of the stove, watch for when the oil starts to breathe and ripple as it warms. Listen for the intensity of the sizzle when you place the first fish fillet. Instead of muttering to yourself the recipe steps by rote, dig deeper into why they’re in that order - why should I add garlic second and not first? Is it the mince cut? How does the fat in the pork transform the oil bath that the veggies will soften in later? 

Trust that you’re absorbing all this information effortlessly, as long as you’ve shaped your cooking approach into an exploration, a big ole question mark, an easy nonchalance. And one day you will have a light bulb moment over a bubbling pot of slightly sour tomato sauce and remember that a sprinkle of sugar will balance the acidity - and you didn’t even know you knew it. 

![scallop-pasta-1024x898.png](https://echouser-api-media.s3.us-west-1.amazonaws.com/scallop_pasta_1024x898_4cf6cbbd45.png)


Musings in Cooking: No Expectations, Just Exploration

I never wondered about cat furniture design until recently. I took care of my friend’s cat for the past two weeks while he was out of town. To be a good host, I purchased a cute and comfy-looking cat bed from Amazon to welcome my little guest, Gakki.  Its color matches my bed sheet and looks perfect and in harmony. I had the fantasy that we both sleep in our own beds and have sweet dreams. However, the moment Gakki arrived in my room, she immediately fell in love with my old suitcase located in the corner. I tried many ways to seduce her onto the perfect-looking cat bed, but she still refused to even touch it.   I even put some treats on the bed and then put the bed on top of the suitcase, that’s when she finally came over to eat the treats and then hopped off after only 5 seconds. After 20 minutes of effortless seduction, I finally had to admit that she just didn’t like it no matter how good I think the bed is for her.

![Image-from-iOS.jpg](https://echouser-api-media.s3.us-west-1.amazonaws.com/Image_from_i_OS_e6b37b432f.jpg)

>I wished this would happen.

<br/>

![Gakki1-911x1024.jpg](https://echouser-api-media.s3.us-west-1.amazonaws.com/Gakki1_911x1024_1b997c2a19.jpg)

>In reality, Gakki was obsessed with this suitcase

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How frustrating to be a cat's parent at this moment! You spend money on your cats and try to make them happy, and they behave like independent teenagers. They have their own attitude and are creative with new things. On the good side, because of cats’ independence, people might be discouraged and stop wasting money on buying them cute products. At least  I will not buy cat furniture again, because she will never use them properly.

![DesignThinkingStages.webp](https://echouser-api-media.s3.us-west-1.amazonaws.com/Design_Thinking_Stages_4002f8d5ee.webp)

This frustrating experience made me wonder how to design something that cats would love to use. As a user experience designer, I truly believe human-centered design is a universal approach that can be applied to any physical, digital, or service design process. Human-centered design is all about building a deep empathy with the people you’re designing for; generating tons of ideas; building a bunch of prototypes; sharing what you’ve made with the people you’re designing for; and eventually putting your innovative solution out in the world. When it comes to cat furniture design, the users are not human but cats. The first challenge in designing cats products is to building a deep empathy with the cats. So, would the product designer follow an approach called cat-centered design?

<highlight>

>**Fortunately, I got a chance to connect with Jackson Cunningham, the founder of a high-end cat furniture company, [Tuft and Paw](https://www.tuftandpaw.com/). He told me that they do apply “cat-centered” design process even if they don’t use this term. And they do follow the five stages of human centered design to design the cat furniture.**

</highlight>

The first stage of the cat-centered design process is to start with a problem and gain an empathic understanding of the problem you are trying to solve for cats.  To find out more about the problems with my human clients, I usually do interviews, surveys and observation. Since, we can not engage with cats in conversation, the best way is to spend time observing them to gain a deeper understanding of the issues involved.  For instance, cats seem to enjoy destroying the couch by scratching it. Do they mean to destroy furniture? Why do cats scratch? Empathy allows designers to investigate assumptions and gain insight into cats’ needs. I started observing Gakki when I was with her. She is an energetic cat and enjoy spending her nap time on my chair , bed and old suitcase.

![cat-in-box-1024x683.jpg](https://echouser-api-media.s3.us-west-1.amazonaws.com/cat_in_box_1024x683_8c5ffb4e97.jpg)

Designers gather a lot of information from observation, and it is time to do something with it. During the define stage, researchers and designers analyze the observations and synthesize insights in order to define the core problems. They consult cats behavior experts to learn the reasons behind each observed phenomenon. Conversations with experts help the designers to gather ideas and establish features and functions that can solve the problems.

Let’s apply these steps to a known observation: cats like to squeeze in tiny cardboard boxes. There are two useful insights we can take from this behavior. Most cats enjoy playing with cardboard as a material because they can dig their claws into it to scratch or stretch. Additionally, the enclosed space can make cats feel safe inside it.  Another cat owner’s problem is that a cat scratches the carpet. But this is not the cat's fault—the cat doesn't know it's ruining the carpet, they only scratch because they are trying to get a horizontal stretch. If you use techniques to teach the cat to use the new post, they will no longer scratch the carpet. Inspired by this approach, I analyzed and made the assumption based on my observation. Since Gakki spent most of her time lying on my chair, she might not like the soft cushion in bed.

In the ideate stage, designers can start asking questions “How might we…” to help look for ideas for design opportunities. Before generating ideas, they do a competitive analysis. They collect the information on the best and worst products, and interview cat shelters and veterinarians to analyze what makes them good or bad. It is important to get as many ideas or problem solutions as possible at the beginning of the Ideation phase. Designers sketch out design ideas during the brainstorming session. Later, considering the product constraints, they should pick some design ideas to create prototypes and test.  

The team produce a number of quick and inexpensive prototypes. The purpose of building a prototype is to test if the design can solve certain problem. So, they need to define what they want to test before prototyping. I did a quick adjustment on this bed, which is to remove the cushion.

The most challenging phase is the test stage. It’s not easy to do usability test with cats. The Tuft and Paw team test inside a cat cafe or cat shelter; and they use some tricks to encourage cats to interact with the prototypes. Cats have all sorts of preference (angle, material, and size), but you can get most cats to scratch on a scratcher by sprinkling catnip on it, or spraying it with catnip spray.  If that doesn't work, you can try dangling a wand toy (or treat) just over the top of the scratching post so the cat has to reach up to get the toy or treat; in the course of getting the toy/treat, they usually realize that they're leaning on something that is fun to scratch. Positive reinforcement (with treats, sweet-talk, petting, or play) will let the cat know that good things happen when they use the product, and that always helps establish a new habit. I put her toys and favorite treats inside the bed, and placed her in front of it. Bang! She stepped in the bed, and stayed for more than three minutes, which is a huge achievement.

![Gakki2-943x1024.jpg](https://echouser-api-media.s3.us-west-1.amazonaws.com/Gakki2_943x1024_4ec9a10ccc.jpg)

>Gakki was in the bed!

<br/>

When users are not human, human-centered approach still can be applied with little adaptations. Every cat is unique and has its own preference. We have to respect the cat's need. We like pat our cats all the time but cats like to hide and spy. And if you give them the opportunity to be comfortable, then they will come visit and be social when they are ready. It's never a good idea to force the cat to do things they don’t like. A happy cat has a happy owner.


5 Stages of Cat-Centered Design

National Cat Day is on October 29th -- and we’re already celebrating.

At EchoUser, our pets have a special place in our hearts.

Jie Tang, experience designer and pet enthusiast, sharing avatars for pups on National Dog Day. She decided to iterate the process this month, cartoonifying four of her favorite feline faces.

Check out these charismatic kitties:

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#### Oscar, the Ocicat.

![Ocicat@2x.png](https://echouser-api-media.s3.us-west-1.amazonaws.com/Ocicat_2x_89d4d878f2.png)

This furball may seem a little obnoxious at first, but you’ll come to love Oscar for what he is: a sociable, loyal, and fun friend. A warm-blooded wild child at heart, you may wonder if Oscar is really just a dog in a cat’s body.

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#### Sidra, the Siamese.

![Siamese@2x.png](https://echouser-api-media.s3.us-west-1.amazonaws.com/Siamese_2x_4fadbbb93d.png)

What’s she staring at? You’ll find yourself asking this a lot, because Sidra is one spacey cat. While she’s on another plane of existence, you can still enjoy her company at home on Earth. It’s OK, because she loves you, probably.

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#### Percy, the Persian.

![Persian@2x.png](https://echouser-api-media.s3.us-west-1.amazonaws.com/Persian_2x_0d979f41a0.png)

Percy is a plush and pampered aristo-cat, whose hobbies include watching mice come and go as they please, eating the fanciest of fancy feasts, and lounging on furniture you bought exclusively for him from IKEA’s [pet collection](https://www.ikea.com/us/en/cat/pet-accessories-pt001/). The only thing greater than his innocence is his cuteness.

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#### Shirley, the British Shorthair.

![British-Shorthair_2@2x.png](https://echouser-api-media.s3.us-west-1.amazonaws.com/British_Shorthair_2_2x_8402419bf9.png)

Shirley is one cool cat, and she knows it. Just look at that smug little mug! This good-humored, affectionate kitty shares all of your inside jokes, gets all of your obscure movie references, and is more beloved to your friends than you are.

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If you enjoy these avatars as much as we do, feel free to download them all and share with your fellow cat-lovers. :)

Many thanks to Jie Tang for her creative way to celebrate National Cat Day!


Designing Avatars for Cats

August 26 marked an auspicious occasion: National Dog Day!

‘Tis a joyous day, one for us to celebrate the pups and paws that fill our homes with companionship and our hearts with laughter.

Experience designer Jie Tang decided to add a little artistic flair to her day’s festivities by creating avatars… for dogs!

Here’s how Jie cartoonified some the most familiar puppy faces in a dog-lover’s world:

The process began with browsing the net for reference photos, and then sketching a rough draft of each avatar on paper, which were then be scanned into .jpg files to edit in Adobe Illustrator.

Jie traced over the sketches using a digital drawing tablet, refining the iterations, and twisting every line, curve, and shape hundreds of times.

<highlight class="quote">

><quote></quote>
>_Who doesn’t love dogs! I love how they look at me eager with love._

</highlight>

She also put careful thought into selecting which kinds of dogs to sketch, watching pet videos and studying photos to help distinguish her favorite breeds.

“Each dog has a strong personality,” she says. “Frenchie, I’m a big fan of his look -- like a fat bunny with a pig nose!”

All four of her avatars made for some charismatic canines:

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#### Frenchie, the French Bulldog.

![Frenchie.jpg](https://echouser-api-media.s3.us-west-1.amazonaws.com/Frenchie_151dae2ad4.jpg)

This silly dog is most likely to be found drinking out of the toilet, chasing his own tail, or spaced out and staring at you from the edge of your bed. Despite it all, he’s still a good boy and the star of your Instagram account.

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#### Bueller, the Black Lab.

![BlackLab.jpg](https://echouser-api-media.s3.us-west-1.amazonaws.com/Black_Lab_cc6e2c1608.jpg)

This playful pup is always ready for a game of fetch, and will scare your neighbor’s kids until they come to learn that he’s harmless, and love him almost as much as you do. He also knows lots of cool tricks -- like balancing treats on his nose..

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#### Penny, the Pug.

![Pug.jpg](https://echouser-api-media.s3.us-west-1.amazonaws.com/Pug_1e54e5a16c.jpg)

Penny is a petite yet philosophical pooch. She’s well-read, even though dogs can’t read (allegedly). Her somber eyes light up to welcome you home after a long day at work. If you ever feel like you’re in the middle of an existential crisis, this furry quadruped is probably right there with you.

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#### Corn, the Corgie.

![Corgi-1.jpg](https://echouser-api-media.s3.us-west-1.amazonaws.com/Corgi_1_75c2e8857f.jpg)

This little one has spunk, and she knows it. Cultural adoration for this poofy floof (floof? Is that a word?) has spread across the internet in recent years, and rightfully so. What’s not to love? She’s feisty and as yellow as buttered corn.

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Release the hounds!

If you enjoy these avatars as much as we do, download them all here. :)

Many thanks to Jie Tang for her creative abstractions of some of the most beloved friends known to humankind. We can’t wait to see what she comes up with next month for National Cat Day!


Designing Avatars for Dogs

NASA held it's annual Big Think conference, a one-day, interdisciplinary workshop that pools the acumen and expertise of scientists, engineers, and other top industry minds to identify an innovation goal for NASA’s Frontier Development Lab over the course of the following year.

We were invited to supplement scientific conversations with the lens of human-computer interaction and user perspective, taking into account who would be implementing the solutions proposed by the attending experts in space weather, asteroid hunting, planetary defense, and machine learning. Needless to say, it was a cool way to apply UX in such a bold and undefined field.

To change things up, we proposed to graphically facilitate the session by recording the workshop in a live sketch. And NASA said yes.

Equipped with colorful markers and fresh notepads, our illustrator captured the day’s presentations, presenters, notes, and conclusions in a colossal sketch. At the end of the workshop, we were able to present the paper artifact to NASA and participants as a physical asset and graphic recording of the workshop.

![nasa-article.jpg](https://echouser-api-media.s3.us-west-1.amazonaws.com/nasa_article_6f6e92addf.jpg)

#### What is Graphic Facilitation?

Graphic facilitation is an emerging practice, one that companies are starting to recognize for its unique value in documenting and transferring information, as well as visualizing information during meetings to help with understanding and retention.

The results of our graphic recording session were pretty cool.

#### Value-add.

By illustrating the day’s presentations, we were able to accomplish several key outcomes:

- _Promoting active listening_: Watching someone else take complex information and distill it into note form helps the audience understand and retain what they’re seeing, and helps humanize complex data. The concepts presented at NASA’s Big Think workshop dealt with highly nuanced, complicated concepts, but processing information and actively translating it into another medium helped both viewers and our illustrator better understand the subject matter.

- _Visualizing information_: For our illustrator, it was a matter of translating data-centric ideas from engineering and physical sciences into readable, digestible visuals. This aids memory and subject matter comprehension.

- _Revisiting information_: After a full-day workshop strung with back-to-back presentations, it can be difficult to ensure retention, especially when sharing complicated yet critical pieces of information. Graphic recordings are a way of traveling back in time to remember when people talked about what, capturing the day’s proceedings in one fell swoop.

- _Summarizing findings_: At the end of the day, the live sketch captured conclusions and critical next steps, documenting the thought process behind how ideas were formulated and conceived.

<br/>

Participants were enthused by the end result, and snapped photos of the graphic recording with their mobile devices to refer to at the conclusion of the workshop. After receiving such critical acclaim, we’ll continue to promote graphic recording as a valuable tool for not only understanding, sharing, and recollecting important information, but re-living the workshop experience.

-- 

(And after an all-day workshop at NASA, a live sketch sounds like a stellar souvenir.)


Live Sketching at NASA's Big Think

Featuring, [Londa Overbeck](https://www.linkedin.com/in/londaoverbeck/). 

--

#### Tell us about your career journey and what brought you to EchoUser.

As a kid, I was always drawn to giving a voice to people who didn’t necessarily have one or weren’t able to speak up. In my family, I was the one to ask the questions. At school, I was drawn to people who were left out and bullied, making sure they had some kind of ally.

That ultimately led me into my first career as a psychotherapist. It was a valuable experience for me in many ways, but over time it became hard for me to hold so many painful stories and deal with life and death situations.

I hit a turning point where I needed to make a pivot. I wanted to continue impacting people’s lives in a meaningful way, but from a different angle. After a lot of exploration, I discovered UX and user research — I already had the soft skills and it matched what I cared about doing and how I wanted to spend my time. It was a way for me to continue helping to give others a voice.

![Meet-the-Echousers-Londa.jpg](https://echouser-api-media.s3.us-west-1.amazonaws.com/Meet_the_Echousers_Londa_55f6bb1c85.jpg)

#### Do you remember the moment when you decided to pursue UX, or anything that stood out about UX and user research?

I remember the moment when I first learned that it was a field. I was on that path of discovery and I went to a open house at Stanford for the MBA program. When they started talking about the d.school my ears perked up and I was like “Oh, I’m much more interested in that than I am in this MBA.” But you have to do another program to participate in the d.school. It ultimately kicked off a rabbit hole of research into the field.

At the time, I was leading a team of consultants at Edgewood Center for Children and Families who worked with nonprofits to help them improve health services for youth. I introduced my team to this user research model and over time we adopted it as our consultation framework. We got scrappy and learned a lot through trial and error. But, we also learned from some pros by developing partnerships with Adaptive Path, a d.school bootcamp instructor, and Catapult Design. I joined a Leading By Design fellowship at CCA to gain a lot more experience in UX, build my network, and lead a healthcare-focused project with Adaptive Path.

#### What brought you to EchoUser?

I was making a big jump from nonprofit to for-profit, from me being the evangelist for UX in a world that knew nothing about it to being one of many UX practitioners. I knew I wanted to be around other people who appreciated UX and could be mentors to me — on our team here, we’re all swimming in the same water.

Software is a big part of what we focus on and I wanted to gain product experience. I was also drawn to EchoUser projects on education and the BART because they went beyond products and targeted services and experiences. And, I liked the culture – it was just a good vibe when I came and interviewed.

#### What are the similarities between psychotherapy and user research?

As a therapist, I learned to straddle thinking rigorously about questions with listening for what emerges in the moment. The way in which you ask a question – tone, wording, format – can profoundly impact the response you get. You’re trying to get underneath the problem, understand what’s driving them, what really matters to them, what barriers are getting in their way.

The other thing that comes to mind is that both professions are grounded in understanding people in the context of their lives. As a therapist, you want to understand the larger ecosystem in which your clients live. Seeing couples and families interact with one another gives you a different view than having one person tell you their individual perspective. In UX, when you observe someone using a product or service at home or at work, you pick up on things that you might not see in a lab.

#### What is your process for interpreting what users want?

People might not know what they want. If you ask them directly they might give you a surface answer that doesn’t fully address the problem. This is where the art of questioning comes into play. Observing people in context, probing and listening for unmet needs and discrepancies between what people say and do. Asking people to imagine what things would be like in their ideal world.

#### If you could redesign any experience, what would you pick and why?

One area of interest is improving how people access healthcare. In my last job, my team did some work in Western Addition to figure out what gets in the way of accessing mental health care and came up with new ideas for how this can be improved. I’d love to do more projects like this — working towards more of an integrated health model.

I’m also interested in the postpartum experience. There are so many misconceptions and misguided expectations about what having a baby _should_ be like. It can be a really isolating time for many people. I was really lucky to find a core crew of folks to go through postpartum and beyond with. I’d love to find ways to make that kind of communal support more of the norm.

<highlight>

>_Immerse yourself in the field in whatever way you can. Read articles and books. Go to events. Be a participant in a research study. Putting yourself out there and meeting people in the field is really important._

</highlight>

#### What advice do you have for people just entering the industry?

Immerse yourself in the field in whatever way you can. Read articles and books. Go to events. Be a participant in a research study. Putting yourself out there and meeting people in the field is really important. The CCA community was huge for me in making my career transition.

Do whatever you can to get some projects under your belt. If you’re not in a job where you can do projects, find other ways to do it. Try Code for America or openIDEO.

If you’re looking to make a transition, start with recognizing what you already know. Figure out what your story is and practice talking about it. Being able to communicate what you will bring to the table and why you are choosing this path, is a really important part of being able to land a job.

#### What do you like to do outside of work?

I’ve gotten really into rock climbing lately. It’s what I do for me-time. My daughter recently got over her fear of the ocean so we’re running with our newfound freedom and spending a lot of time on the beach. My friends are like an extended family to me so we end up hanging out a lot on the weekends.

#### What are some fun facts that not everyone knows about you?

- I have a fear of flying, but I’ve also been skydiving.

- I’ve met the most significant people in my life in unexpected ways. When I started 5th grade at a new school, my sister was annoyed that I was following her around and cramping her style. So, she went up to one of my classmates and said “She’s looking for a friend”. Many, many years laters we’re still besties. She just texted me that her daughter came home from school saying “I think I met my Londa”.

- When I first met my now-husband in college, we went on a date it didn’t work out. Five years later we reconnected. I’d say round two was a success!


From Psychotherapy to UX Research

Featuring, [Laura Mattis](https://www.linkedin.com/in/lauramdesigner/)

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#### Could you share with us your career journey and what brought you to EchoUser?

I studied both English and Graphic design in undergrad because I wanted to consider the design pieces holistically – content and form. For 6 years, I was kind of a jack of all trades; designing banner ads, doing front-end development, managing a printer. I decided to go to grad school because I wanted to drive the strategy behind what I was designing.

I went to IIT Institute of Design in Chicago and spent 2 years re-engineering my design process: learning about design thinking and practicing service design. It was an incredible experience that confirmed my love for design and my desire to work on problems that positively impact people.

When I moved to SF a few years ago, I went to every possible design event, meeting up with anyone I could to understand the design community here. During design week, I came by the EchoUser office and chatted with Aaron and a researcher. I was really impressed.

![MeetEchoUsers-LauraM.jpg](https://echouser-api-media.s3.us-west-1.amazonaws.com/Meet_Echo_Users_Laura_M_e734ac42c3.jpg)

#### What’s special about EchoUser that caught your eye back then?

“Any experience”. Design here is not just about the surface, but it’s about diving into problems and pushing boundaries. While job searching, I was looking for companies that would encourage me to apply service design to real problems and EchoUser really stood out. People here are not afraid to study challenging topics or try new methods, like Hello Toilet or running a 100-people study in a week. I saw a lot of opportunities.

#### Tell us more about service design.

UX design in SF is focused on the product, like digital apps and websites. Service design says you’re actually designing experiences. That product is part of a larger ecosystem of people, physical and digital products and processes.

Take Uber. You aren’t buying a car, you’re buying convenient transportation. Yes, you need an app to access it, but designing Uber requires tools and training for drivers, a sustainable pricing model and working with (or challenging) public policy. You need a lot of people to work together to make that happen and service designers keep an eye on the whole system; they collaborate with lots of different pros in policy, interaction design, visual design and more. to stitch together the whole customer (and driver) experience. We try to bring everything together to make sure systems talk to each other in a seamless way.

#### What inspires your work?

I get inspired by putting myself in uncomfortable situations. I’m not an early adopter, but I’d like to try things just to see what it’s like. Maybe I’ll discover it’s not that uncomfortable and actually really cool. I’m a person who really likes structure and order, but I still put myself out of my comfort zone.

For example, I volunteered to live and work in Mumbai for 4 weeks working on a crazy fast design project on healthcare innovation in India. It was the first time I’d ever left the country, but an incredible experience about the power of design and how diverse (and awesome!) the world really is. I’ve even participated in a flash mob as part of a dear friend’s week-long wedding in Bangladesh.

![MeetEchoUsers-LauraM-flashmob.jpg](https://echouser-api-media.s3.us-west-1.amazonaws.com/Meet_Echo_Users_Laura_M_flashmob_2f265af0ca.jpg)

>Figure 2. Wedding flash mob. Photo by Wedding Chapel for Nabila Nowrin.

<br/>

#### Any advice for people who are new to the UX industry?

You can learn design tools and go to meetups, but there are intangible things to me that are more valuable.

Foster curiosity and nerdiness. You should be nerdy in the way that you dive into topics to understand them. If you think biking to work is cool, live that biking culture and contribute to that community.

Do non-design stuff and do it with passion. Learn about different things outside of design that make design more exciting. Because we borrow so much from other different fields – science, art, technology, philosophy – and they impact the people we design for.

#### How do you tell a great designer from a good one?

For me, a great designer isn’t scared of hard questions and they’re okay living with ambiguity. You can’t solve a lot of problems in a day. Design isn’t easy but these designers have confidence that the problem can be solved. Great designers question themselves: “Are we really asking the right question? Are we caught up with our own ego?”

Great designers know that they are not the greatest. Sometimes designers can have ego when they are really good at something. I really respect those designers who strive to learn from those around them and recognize that design is collaboration.

#### What are some fun facts that not everyone knows about you?

- My high school job was as a PetSmart certified dog trainer and I did it for 5 years. I trained dogs to do all kinds of commands and tricks. Imagine a big hound dog riding a skateboard down the main aisle in a PetSmart.
- I knitted all my Christmas presents one year — it was not the best idea, haha! It was fun, but so much work! All the women in my husband’s family knit and that’s where I got inspired to pick it up. I have tons of projects in the works, but one of my next one is Christmas stockings.

Becoming a UX Designer

Upon its release, Pokémon Go rose to the top of the App Store charts in almost every conceivable metric. Just four weeks since its release, some 20 million Pokémon Trainers log into the app daily to catch new Pokémon and grow their collection. But what is the root of this explosive growth? Certainly, a large part of it is due to the wave of Pokémon nostalgia that the game has generated. However, Pokémon Go’s ability to pull in more and more users each week, even a month after its release, is due to more than just its branding. Throughout this post I’ll highlight some of the ingenious usability and design choices made by Niantic that elevate this game from a novelty gimmick to the cultural phenomenon it has become.

![PokeLibrary.jpg](https://echouser-api-media.s3.us-west-1.amazonaws.com/Poke_Library_992f737897.jpg)

>Figure 1. With so many adults playing Pokémon Go, it’s easy to forget how popular it’s been with children as well.

<br/>

#### You teach me, and I'll teach you.

One of the most important high-level design choices for any product or service is how much complexity to present the user with. Many of the modern industry leaders such as Google and Apple gained their popularity by simplifying their competitors’ more complicated designs, making them much more accessible and intuitive. This simplification, however, can come at a cost; the less there is to learn, the less there is to actually do. That translates to less ability to hold people’s attention, which for a free-to-play game like Pokémon Go that makes most of its money from microtransactions rather than a one-time cost, is a very dangerous prospect.

So how did Niantic solve this dilemma? It certainly seems to have the best of both worlds, having managed to build a huge user base despite some incredibly complicated and unintuitive systems. The answer is that they understand how to design the same app for wildly different users.

To begin with, they only present players with the most basic level of gameplay when they start – the simple act of catching Pokémon. This is a fairly intuitive process which is supported by a brief tutorial. As soon as the users catch their first Pokémon they’re presented with a page full of grey silhouettes, only one of which is filled out. The message is clear: there are hundreds more Pokémon out there to catch. And for a large portion of Pokémon Go’s user base, that’s all the game they’ll ever need. The simple act of building your collection is a satisfying one, and Niantic understands that some of its users won’t care about the systems they layer on top of it.

They also understand, however, that some users will want a bit more to dig into than just catching Pokémon. So how do they present the users who want to go beyond that basic gameplay with more complicated systems, without alienating the players who simply want to build out their collection? Simply put, they don’t. The tutorial only covers the basics of catching Pokémon, and everything else is left up to the players to discover on their own.

This may seem counterintuitive, as leaving something unexplained typically only makes it more confusing. By leaving additional systems out of the basic tutorial, Niantic allows players to organically discover the parts of the game that will appeal to them. Players will only ever need to engage in as much complexity as they want. For example, if you never select a gym on the world map, you will never be presented with an explanation of gym battling. This layering of complexity ensures that the game is enjoyable no matter how many of its systems you care to learn about.

#### Arm in arm, we'll win the fight.

By this point it should be apparent that Pokémon Go’s tendency to get people talking about it, both on social media and in person, is no accident. Seemingly small design choices, like Pokémon not disappearing for everyone when caught by one person, transform what could have easily been a very isolating and even competitive game into one that encourages you to seek out fellow Pokémon Trainers.

Interestingly, the obvious features Niantic chose to leave out of Pokémon Go highlight their design philosophy just as readily as the ones which they chose to implement. Namely, there is no ability to directly communicate, trade, or otherwise interact with other players within the app itself. Any social interaction is done either face to face or through third party communities which means that, despite the game’s social focus, any direct social interactions are purely optional. Those who would prefer to avoid interacting with others, or even just take them at their own pace, will never feel as if they’re missing out on important features or worse, being forced into social interaction they didn’t seek out.

![Mass-Transfer.jpg](https://echouser-api-media.s3.us-west-1.amazonaws.com/Mass_Transfer_67f1d98634.jpg)

>Figure 2. Some users have already taken to mocking up much-requested features, so as the ability to ‘transfer’ multiple Pokémon at once.

<br/>

#### I wanna be the very best, like no one ever was.

So far I’ve highlighted several design choices that worked out well for Niantic, but that does not mean that the game is perfect by any stretch of the imagination. Like any application, Pokémon Go launched with aspects of the design that didn’t quite meet the intended standards. However, Niantic has been quick to fix these issues as they become apparent.

For example, one of the most popular complaints was that the button for transferring Pokémon (a task at the heart of evolving Pokémon and thus one most users will do many times) was hidden away at the bottom of a long page, making it awkward to transfer multiple Pokémon at a time. This has been rectified, as the transfer button is now in the bottom right corner and scrolls with the user. Similarly, Niantic was quick to realize that they hadn’t taken rural users into account in their designs given that the vast majority of Pokéstops were in urban areas. Since this left rural users starving for Pokéballs and in some cases unable to play the game for long stretches of time, Niantic began a long process of adding more Pokéstops to areas outside of cities.

More than anything this shows that Niantic understands one of the most important realities of design in our current day: It’s not a step, it’s a constant process. User experience isn’t something that will ever be ‘complete’. There will constantly be unforeseen use cases, shifts in user goals, and areas where you can improve your designs. No matter what your product or service is, it won’t launch perfectly. Constant iteration, both before and after launch, is how to hone your design into a satisfying and intuitive experience that will keep users coming back for more.

Ultimately, no single factor is solely responsible for the success of Pokémon Go. Without the Pokémon name, it’s unlikely that this game would have reached the level of mass recognition that it currently has. But Pokémon Go’s success lies in the fact that it was ready to meet that surge of popularity with intelligently targeted and constantly iterated design. After all, there’s no debating that the game has more than met its goals of promoting outdoor activity and building community. From people setting up real life Pokéstops to animal shelters creating special ‘Pokémon Go’ walking programs, it’s clear that Pokémon Go’s elegant design not only shaped the game itself for the better, but is affecting the real world in a powerful, positive way.


The User Experience of Pokémon Go

Featuring [Yalu Ye](https://www.linkedin.com/in/yalu-ye-ux/).

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#### Could you share with us your career journey and what brought you to EchoUser?

Growing up in China, I was always fascinated with what people could do on computers. Before I entered college, I thought Software Engineering would be a good fit for me. However, after exploring in many other areas throughout my college years, I realized that in addition to technology, I also enjoyed doing a lot of other creative activities such as designing posters, writing drama scripts and playing in a band. In the search of my potential future path that involves both technology and creativity, I came across Human-Computer Interaction (HCI). As I learned more about it through online research and book reading, I felt more passionate about it and decided to apply for grad school in the US since there are more HCI-related education and career opportunities here.

After all sorts of ups and downs throughout the application process, I made it to the HCI/design program in Indiana University Bloomington. The program was totally a life-changing experience. I felt fulfilled and grateful everyday to have had the chance to learn from and to collaborate with inspiring professors and cohort. Carrying on that passion, I interned at Autodesk for a summer, coming out with more self-confidence and design competence, as well as a love for San Francisco. Right after graduation, I joined EchoUser as a full-time experience designer, and this is where I am now.

![yalu-1.jpg](https://echouser-api-media.s3.us-west-1.amazonaws.com/yalu_1_ddcc28ed1b.jpg)

#### What drew you to EchoUser?

First of all, EchoUser’s focus on “Any Experience” really resonated with me. I believe that UX design is a problem-solving process that can be applied to any field and beyond just screens. It’s about an experience. And I love to explore a variety of things. Therefore, seeing how EchoUser has tackled a wide range of projects, I saw a lot of potential for myself by contributing my skills and growing as a multidisciplinary designer. In addition, EchoUser is full of people with diverse backgrounds and passions for outdoor activities and adventures, which really speaks to my heart!

#### What's your favorite type of project?

I’m more drawn to projects with broader scopes where I can design for the whole experience from end to end rather than just focus on designing solutions for a particular screen. For example, Hello Toilet is one of my favorite projects I did at EchoUser. It was a self-initiated project, which goal was to improve people’s public restroom experiences. It’s such a universal topic that I collected a lot of interesting stories from interviews and surveys. A common theme emerged from the research – anxiety. From there, I decided to focus on mitigating people’s anxiety throughout the whole process of searching, waiting, and using public toilets. I then started brainstorming design ideas and I’m now in the process of prototyping and bringing some ideas to life!

#### Thanks to your initiative, EchoUser just started a brand new mentorship program, where we paired mentors and mentees together based on their skills and interests. What made you decide to take the lead on this?

As a designer who just started out, I’m lucky to have a few senior designers addressing my concerns and self-doubts, as well as providing feedback and encouragement. However, I noticed that company-wise, people don’t always have the opportunity or the right context for a natural mentor/mentee relationship to happen. Initiating the mentorship program made me fulfilled by knowing that people can make use of this opportunity in many ways. No matter what topics the pairs ended up discussing, as long as they get something out of it, I feel great seeing them empowered.

#### Do you have any advice for people who are new to the UX industry?

Be open-minded and proactive. The UX industry changes really fast and there are new technologies and challenges coming out every day. It’s important for a designer to feel comfortable stepping out of his/her comfort zone and to embrace change as well as to contribute new change to the industry.

Be reflective. This would help a designer level up faster. There are always some lessons learned in every project, and being reflective is the best way to capture the growth along the career path.
Where do you see the future of UX going?

In terms of design media and techniques, I see the future will still be in a flux for a little while. As technology advances, designers have more and more opportunities to inject new forms and objects into many aspects of people’s lives. New design methods, such as user journey maps, and system maps, were also introduced to improve end-to-end user experiences.

On the other hand, I think the basic nature of design will still remain the same for a long time. I’m really inspired by the “principles for good design”, introduced by Dieter Rams in the 1970s, which focus on both minimalism and usefulness. If you look at the development of the design industry in recent years, those principles still apply. Thus, at a high level, I see the future of design still being built upon the same principles, but with different forms and methods.

#### We all know that you're always up for the next outdoor challenge. What has been your biggest adventure so far?

Without much experience, I hiked John Muir Trail alone for 26 days, 240 miles total. Inspired by a lot of other EchoUsers, I wanted to challenge myself and gave myself a chance to reflect about my past year in the middle of the beauty of nature.

Lesson learned: First, go with the flow. In the middle of the trip, I encountered serious mountain fire smoke from nearby area. I was indecisive about whether I should keep going or quit until I met another hiker at the resupply point. He told me, “Be the river, not the rock.” Let it play out its own way. Looking back, I’m glad that I did and finished the trail. I also became more grateful about civilization. There were no showers, toilets, or trash cans along most of the trail. Learning how to take care of all those basic human needs was the first thing I had to overcome. Coming back to the city life, I no longer take all the infrastructures for granted and am more mindful of making decisions that help sustainability of the earth.

![yalu-2-JMT.jpg](https://echouser-api-media.s3.us-west-1.amazonaws.com/yalu_2_JMT_62f15289b8.jpg)

>FIgure 2. Photo Credit: Matthias Ciprian. Camped after a snowstorm on JMT trip. _“If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together.”_

<br/>

#### What would you do if you weren’t a UX designer?

I am always fascinated with learning about different people’s stories and discovering unknown things. Also, I see sharing rarely told stories as a way to empower and inspire even more people. So if I were not a designer, I would probably film documentaries or write stories, especially for underrepresented groups major media usually chooses to ignore.


Adventuring into UX

Featuring, [Yuqian Zhang](https://www.linkedin.com/in/zhangyuqian/).

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#### How did you know you wanted to work in UX?

I have always been interested in research, but I got into it a lot more during my undergrad at Beijing Normal University in China. I majored in Applied Psychology and focused on the research track instead of the clinical track for this major. Afterwards I wanted experience working in America where I knew the field was more mature. I attended Columbia University in New York where I received my Masters in Developmental Psychology. During my time in New York, I met a UX Designer and was introduced to the world of user experience research. I was very drawn to this idea of tying user experience to my love of research. I also saw how user experience is tied to everyday life, enabling you to help people from different walks of life, to solve different types of problems, or to have an impact on the product you are performing research on.

After my Master’s program, I decided to take a course in user experience design at General Assembly to learn more about the designer’s perspective. During this time, I began to put together a portfolio of research projects in user experience to showcase my passion and capabilities in this area.

![Blog319_Featured.jpg](https://echouser-api-media.s3.us-west-1.amazonaws.com/Blog319_Featured_bb4afc37fa.jpg)

#### Tell us about your career journey and what brought you to EchoUser.

I initially came across a posting on a job board, and was attracted to EchoUser for multiple reasons. I was really attracted to the fact that they have a research team, which is great to be able to bounce ideas off of a team versus the solidarity of solo research work. I also liked the fact that EchoUser is an agency, and that this would give me an opportunity as someone who is very fresh to the field, to be able to be apart of the large breadth of client projects and gain experience in all these different areas. Another aspect I was drawn to was seeing the company culture and dynamic on EchoUsers’ various social media channels. It seemed like the employees were genuinely nice people who also knew how to have fun and be friends, which is what I was looking for in my next job.

#### What do you like about doing UX research?

I love working with data. I really enjoy the process of taking qualitative and quantitative data to solve different problems, and logically planning it out along the way. As opposed to clinical research, where I dipped my toes into a bit during my college years, UX research allows you to change the lives of people in their everyday lives. I like to learn about what makes them frustrated or what makes them happy, and to see the results come out of this interaction to improve their experience.

#### What is your process in interpreting what users want?

Rule of thumb: Don’t listen to users about what they want. Self-reported claims are not necessarily reliable especially when asking about future behavior prediction. It’s more important to observe what users do: observe their path when performing a task, observe obstacles along the way, and observe how they recover from mistakes.

#### What do you like to do outside of work?

Outside of work, I enjoy hiking and camping with two my dogs, baking desserts (matcha mille-crêpes are my favorite), swimming, traveling (I have driven the Pacific Coast Highway (SF-LA) 6 times!), as well as playing board games with friends.

#### What are some fun facts that not everyone knows about you?

- My coffee name is “Bella.” My name can be difficult for baristas to spell correctly on the first try, so I’ve found this is strategy much simpler. I’m also not the only one at EchoUser who does this!

- I always buy mini-sized soda to try and control my sugar intake, but I usually end up drinking multiple mini sodas because one is never enough…

- I successfully launched a Kickstarter campaign with friends!


Reflecting on a Career in User Research

Standing desks. Swiss ball chairs. Crazy mice. There’s a long checklist of items for the optimal office set up ­- all to make sure you don’t get neck pain, back pain, or carpal tunnel -­ and to increase productivity! Workplace ergonomics is essentially a science; a formula for designing a better work environment and a better work experience.

There’s another science that can achieve all the same things of workplace ergonomics without all the crazy equipment. Yoga!

Yoga in the workplace can:

1. **Reduce costs**: Yoga postures can alleviate muscle tightness built up over time, while strengthening the muscles that become weak from lack of use. These preventative exercises reduce the risk of work related injuries in sedentary work environments, which can result in health savings. In addition to physical health, yoga can also reduce the costs of stress-­related illness by promoting positivity and calmness in the midst of stressful work situations.

1. **Improve productivity**: In addition to greater focus and concentration, yoga also promotes self awareness and the ability to respond more calmly in demanding situations, enhancing decision making and the overall quality of work output.

1. **Improve quality**: Healthy bodies + peaceful minds = happy employees. When people are pleasant within, they tend to emanate pleasantness out. This cultivates deeper engagement with their work and the company.

1. **Improve employee engagement**: Yoga is all about well­-being. Body, mind, and soul. It fosters a culture that is conscientious and outward focused. Not only does this benefit client relationships, but collaborations within the organization benefit from these qualities as well.

1. **Create a better culture**: Healthy employees = happy employees. This contributes to a better culture and human performance within the organization.

Do we need to hire a yoga teacher? If you have a job and you have a body, you’ve got everything you need to design your work experience with yoga. Below are a number of simple exercises that can be practiced independently to cultivate these benefits and begin re­designing your work experience.

#### Practice for the mind.

- Start in a comfortable seat. Close your eyes. Focus only on your breath.

- Begin by taking 3 big breaths. Making sure the inhale is as round and full as the exhale.

- Do 3 rounds of square breathing. Inhale for a count of 5, hold your breath for 5 seconds, exhale for a count of 5, hold your breath for 5 seconds. Repeat 2 more times, taking note of the quality of your breath. Is it shallow? Is it full? Is it even? Uneven?

Once you’ve settled into your breath, and have been able to X out some of the open tabs in your brain, then you’re ready to move on to the physical exercises.

#### Practice for the body.

![Front-Shoulder-Stretch.jpg](https://echouser-api-media.s3.us-west-1.amazonaws.com/Front_Shoulder_Stretch_24d515d59c.jpg)

![Seated-Twist-Side-FF-.jpg](https://echouser-api-media.s3.us-west-1.amazonaws.com/Seated_Twist_Side_FF_52df09b977.jpg)

![Cobra-Eagle.jpg](https://echouser-api-media.s3.us-west-1.amazonaws.com/Cobra_Eagle_c2d2b29e6a.jpg)

![Forward-Fold-Shoulders.jpg](https://echouser-api-media.s3.us-west-1.amazonaws.com/Forward_Fold_Shoulders_47b17367fa.jpg)

![Lunges.jpg](https://echouser-api-media.s3.us-west-1.amazonaws.com/Lunges_db04ee426e.jpg)

![Camel-.jpg](https://echouser-api-media.s3.us-west-1.amazonaws.com/Camel_d2d10e152b.jpg)

![Childs.jpg](https://echouser-api-media.s3.us-west-1.amazonaws.com/Childs_0a48269a9a.jpg)

While the exercises prescribed above are curated in an intentionally sequential fashion, completing any one of these would contribute to your experience at work. No effort in this practice is too small. No effort in this practice is wasted. So don’t let your busy schedule and eternal to-­do list deter you from taking 5 minutes to invest in yourself and your work experience.

Start designing your experience today!


Yoga in the Workplace

It’s that time of the year when leaves start changing colors and pumpkins are everywhere! The theme of this year’s Halloween party was — farming! A lot of flannel shirts, overalls, straw hats and cowboy boots! Oh and the pink unicorn is back, hiding right in the corner…

The farming theme came from one of the many interesting projects we do here at EchoUser. Inspired by a colleague who grew up on a farm in Iowa, a few EchoUsers (Carol, Yalu, Seiko and Mick) along with an external team Applied Technical Systems (ATS) wanted to see what they can do to help farmers become more productive. They interviewed a wide spectrum of farmers and learned about their workflow, motivations and challenges. One of the EchoUsers even dressed up like farmers in order to build rapport with them and now she’s the Top 1 “MOST WANTED” in the farmers’ blacklist! Here’s a video showing their excellent work!

<div class='video'>

<iframe src="https://player.vimeo.com/video/143712134?h=c2da6b23b3" width="640" height="360" frameborder="0" allow="autoplay; fullscreen; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen></iframe>

</div>

<p><a href="https://vimeo.com/143712134">Farmed - USDA Innovation Challenge</a> on <a href="https://vimeo.com">Vimeo</a>.</p>

<br/>

--

<br>

Postscript - **We won a Large Organization award for the USDA Innovation Challenge!**


Yee-haw! Celebratin’ Halloween + Farming!

When Anish Sebastian and Juan Pablo Segura first founded 1EQ, a digital health company based in DC, they knew they were tinkering with the right ingredients: wireless devices that tracked and collected everyday biometrics, and a healthcare industry ripe for innovation. They just needed to find the perfect recipe.

At first, they planned to display personalized health tips, such as exercise and meal recommendations, based on genomic and fitness wearable data. It was a good start, but it didn’t seem to stick. Over the course of two years, however, the team found their way toward a more impactful solution.

Today, their flagship product, [Babyscripts](https://babyscripts.com/), connects expectant mothers with their healthcare providers through a mobile app, wireless scale and blood pressure cuff. Over the course of her pregnancy, an expectant mother uses the solution to share vitals with her provider, and follows a prescribed set of tasks to stay healthy. The provider, meanwhile, benefits from improved patient compliance and the ability to detect high-risk conditions. Staying connected beyond the office reduces the number of appointments from 14 to 10: a win for both the patient and provider. The solution has generated quite a buzz at a local startup incubator called 1776, of which they are a member, and is now being piloted in collaboration with [MedStar Health](https://www.medstarhealth.org/), the largest not-for-profit provider of patient care in Maryland and the Washington, D.C. region.

When I sat down to talk with Anish and Juan Pablo, there were plenty of exciting things for us to talk about. More than anything, I was most curious to find out how and why their product transformed in the way that it did. Here are the valuable insights they learned along the way:

#### 1. It's better to build something for someone, rather than everything for everyone.

<highlight class="quote">

><quote></quote>
>_People try to create solutions before they find problems. We fell under that trap in the first year,_ explained Juan Pablo, recalling their first iteration. _At first, we started by trying to be everything for everyone. The problem was that there are so many needs for so many different users._

</highlight>

As a way to stay focused, they made a deliberate decision to focus on just one experience: pregnancy. It was a clean nine month period, with high patient engagement. By adopting a niche focus, they became experts in the field, and more confident in making design decisions.

For example, during user testing, they sent expectant mothers home with an oversized, matte blue box filled with monitoring devices. The feedback: at the time when you take that box home, your risk of miscarriage is high. People didn’t want their neighbors to know about their pregnancy yet, and lugging a large, clinical-looking box home wasn’t helping. Their latest product is a narrow, glossy box, fit for a more personal experience.

By diving into that single pregnancy experience, they also discovered a critical insight into the people for whom they needed to design. They examined competing products in the industry, and noticed that all focused primarily on the patient experience. Among the apps that failed, someone was routinely missing: the healthcare provider.

<highlight class="quote">

><quote></quote>
>_Healthcare is unique in that it’s driven in collaboration with the doctor,_ said Anish. _It’s important to identify the use case first: how will you provide value to the patient and doctor._

</highlight>

The provider’s experience is just as critical to Babyscripts’ success as the patient’s. The two experiences go hand in hand; Anish and Juan Pablo believe that facilitating the patient/provider conversation will increase compliance and communication, ultimately benefitting both provider revenue and patient health.

![babyscripts-screenshot.png](https://echouser-api-media.s3.us-west-1.amazonaws.com/babyscripts_screenshot_59fc61a6aa.png)

#### 2. Use data to drive -- not distract from -- action.

Anish helps to run a meetup in DC dedicated to the Quantified Self movement. The movement harnesses technology to track personal behavior, allowing individuals to become more aware of their daily activities, and ideally, find fresh applications for that data.

Anish met one man who had 1700 days of sleep data. As a data enthusiast, he thought that the possibilities were endless. Surprisingly, however, when the data was shared with a primary care doctor, the doctor didn’t want it.

<highlight class="quote">

><quote></quote>
>_**That struck to the core of what I thought the problem was**,_ said Anish. _How do you translate that [data] into a something clinicians would understand?_

</highlight>

He found that clinicians don’t care about most of that data, as “95% of the data we collect is just noise.” As such, he and Juan Pablo designed Babyscripts to “eliminate most of the noise, and just show the 5% that matters, like risky blood pressure.”

“A doctor doesn’t want a dashboard. They just want to see the exceptions,” added Juan Pablo. The app pushes providers to reach out when their patients’ vitals are outside the norm, but does not distract them otherwise.

The insight around using just the relevant data to drive action inspired a number of critical design decisions on the patient side as well. For example, when they first pushed out their solution, Anish recalled that “we had a beautiful dashboard, but the average ‘Sally May’ out there didn’t care.” She had a busy work schedule, and didn’t have time to review her metrics. They took out all of the graphs, and just pushed out the information that mattered: a few tasks a week, tailored to her conditions, delivered at the time of need.

According to Anish, “Things just magically appear when they need it. Week 32: find a pediatrician.” Creating an actionable, focused experience drove patient engagement to almost two times the level they previously saw.

The BabyScripts experience facilitates high-value conversations between the expectant mother and provider. It keeps them comfortably connected beyond the office visit, but otherwise empowers them to continue living their lives.

#### 3. Find your allies.

Anish and Juan Pablo both recognize that the medical industry is ripe for disruption, and they’re looking to make a big impact. At the same time, they understand that healthcare is a highly regulated industry that will require a group effort to disrupt, and it will not happen overnight. They think of themselves as an important part of the solution, but not the only player.

Taking the time to understand how they can fit into the healthcare industry, and keeping the door open to partner with other innovators in the space, has enabled the team to make significant headway.

<highlight>

>**Said Juan Pablo, _“Healthcare disruption will have to be incremental. When we go in, we’re not saying we want to replace the doctor. We’re just going to help you be more efficient. We come in as a partner.”_ By tying everything into existing provider business models, and empowering both providers and patients to succeed, Babyscripts becomes _“innovation they can understand.”_**

</highlight>

In addition, they’ve found collaborating with innovation leaders in the medical space to be extremely valuable. Last December, they started a partnership with MedStar Health to run a major pilot in area hospitals. The MedStar Institute for Innovation seeks to advance health innovation in the areas of human factors, usability, simulation training, and technology development. Their team has helped 1EQ engage with real patients and providers to test their solution, and now actually deploy it throughout a number of local hospitals.

Looking ahead at the pilots to come, the cofounders still feel there’s a lot to learn about the pregnancy experience, and eventually medical scenarios beyond it. Given the valuable insights they’ve learned along the way about users, data, and the healthcare ecosystem, however, they certainly have the right mindset to keep making progress.


Experience Innovators: Babyscripts on the Quantified Pregnancy Experience

At EchoUser HQ this week, our office held a design jam of armageddon-sized proportions. Designers and researchers from EU, along with designers from Further, SpaceGAMBIT, and Premise, were given the following challenge:

<highlight class="quote">

><quote></quote>
>_How do we distill dense and complex asteroid data into useful, interesting, compelling, and intelligible information for the general public?_

</highlight>

NASA [Minor Planet Center](https://minorplanetcenter.net//)‘s Jose Luis Galache, our representing scientist and astronomer, gave the designers background on the data available. Essentially, NASA has a ton of data (size! composition! orbit! etc!) on over 60,000 objects. Great…now what do we do with it?

After digesting both our morning coffee and the challenge, we broke out into 4 teams and spent 2 hours conceptualizing and brainstorming ideas on how we could potentially bring this complicated data to the general public. As a group of non-scientific designers and researchers, we started with what we normally do in such design quandaries: learning about the users. Luckily, we were our target users!

Here’s what we came up with:

## Team 1: (aste)Roid Rage!

This was my team! We focused on kids and the idea that we could trick them into learning about asteroids by turning the data into a super fun game. Our game (Asteroid Rage!) lets the user gain control of nearby asteroids (NEAs) using nukes, gyros, and [white paint](https://www.space.com/18248-paintballs-asteroid-impact-deflection-video.html) to attack friends. Users earn currency in the game by researching, observing, and analyzing much like an astronomer would. Currency can also be used to build asteroid defenses to protect your home base. Ideally the game would create a community of aspiring scientists and informed youngsters. Future versions would include mining, building custom asteroids, and the ability to launch asteroids at Minecraft environments.

![956-1024x768.jpeg](https://echouser-api-media.s3.us-west-1.amazonaws.com/956_1024x768_9d002032e1.jpeg)

## Team 2: BadAsteroids

This team approached the challenge from a higher level by first identifying each type of persona that represented the array of users that make up “the public.” Their three levels then informed the design of a basic platform where a user could drill into the information — and, at the very highest level, actually contribute information as well as develop apps that interact with the data in meaningful ways. Their solution engages everyone from the curious science student to the amateur astronomer.

![959-1024x768.jpeg](https://echouser-api-media.s3.us-west-1.amazonaws.com/959_1024x768_e7d0e667a6.jpeg)

## Team 3: Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Asteroid — The Winners!

During the initial briefing, JL brought up the fact that traffic on the Minor Planet Center’s website always spikes whenever an asteroid makes the news — such as [the one that blew up over Russia](https://www.space.com/24714-russian-meteor-blast-chelyabinsk-anniversary.html) last year. Based on this nugget of insight, Team HGttA decided that the MPC’s website could be enhanced with a more whimsical and innovative approach to the data. What if there was some sort of sidebar on the MPC’s website that looked similar to the trip-planning widget used for sites like Kayak and Expedia? Essentially, a user can “book” a trip on a nearby asteroid (currently there are 5 upcoming “flights”) to better understand things like its flight path and how many NEAs are around at any given time, connecting the user to the data in a very human way. This unconventional idea won, and it’s no surprise given how cool it would be to allow a user to hitch a virtual ride around the solar system on a giant asteroid!

## Team 4: Asteroid Runners

Also taking a page from the unconventional playbook, the Asteroid Runners proposed that the best way to get the public engaged with data is by pulling them out from behind their computers and onto the pavement. In this asteroid race, runners would be the asteroids with the goal to destroy Earth! Obstacles (Jupiter, the Asteroid Belt, etc.) would pop up over the course of this Ragnar Relay- race. But alas, Earth is not totally doomed. There would be public participation as well for non-runners who, by answering trivia questions, could potentially save Earth from the asteroid-runners. The race would raise awareness as well as potentially raise funding for NEA research.

![958-1024x768.jpeg](https://echouser-api-media.s3.us-west-1.amazonaws.com/958_1024x768_6781a99f4d.jpeg)

--

All in all, the jam was a success. The ideas were creative, inspiring, and definitely a springboard for integrating alternative ways of thinking into our upcoming Asteroid Hackathon event in October. For such a beastly problem as presenting a wealth of difficult data to the public, the jammers accomplished quite a bit in only 2 hours!

![957-1024x768.jpeg](https://echouser-api-media.s3.us-west-1.amazonaws.com/957_1024x768_6ce2d684f6.jpeg)

Can you spot our judge, Jose Luis?

Want even more? Along with our Asteroid Hackathon event in October, our very own Mick McGee and Amelia Altavena, submitted a SXSW talk to explore the topic even further and dive into the next generation of asteroids. SXSW serves as the perfect venue to replace the visions of blasting pixelated rocks in archaic video games with real ideas on how to use big data visualization and crowdsourcing to save the world from planet-destroying asteroids.


Asteroid Design Jam at EchoUser

At EchoUser we thrive on making the complex simple, and what is more complex than space? Space comprises many wonders, but unsuspecting danger can be hidden just beyond our sights, and one such hidden wonder is asteroids. For most of us we go about our daily business probably not giving asteroids much thought. However, asteroids represent a real threat to humankind. If a stray asteroid slams into Earth, it can alter the geological history of our planet and evolution of life. In fact, 66 million years ago one did just that, when a single asteroid caused three-quarters of all living things to perish on Earth.

## So, what’s being done to make sure we don’t meet a similar fate?

Well, organizations such as the Minor Planet Center and NASA are working on incredible projects to increase our knowledge of how asteroids move and act, continuously collecting massive amounts of data. However, asteroid data is necessarily complex. One of the greatest obstacles facing folks working to make sure we are not surprised by asteroids is actually understanding the vast amounts of data being collected.

To help solve this challenge, EchoUser has teamed up with representatives from the Minor Planet Center, Maui Maker, SpaceGAMBIT, FURTHER by Design and New Relic to organize the Asteroid Hackathon. The event is part of NASA’s larger Asteroid Grand Challenge project, and it is set to take place October 25 at the SETI Institute in Mountain View, Calif.

## Calling all enthusiasts and data junkies: This is your chance to hack space.

The Asteroid Hackathon invites the brilliant minds of Silicon Valley and beyond to save our planet by hacking asteroid data and turning it into digestible information for citizen scientists. The hackathon aims to give citizen scientists, engineers, designers and amateur astronomers access to an asteroid data set so they can bring new insight to data patterns, and encourage additional observations and characterization.

The best ideas come from collaboration, so we are calling for teams of three people covering UX, engineering and astronomy skill sets to participate. The winning team will be awarded a cash prize to further develop its idea.

## A word from our sponsors…

Recently, we had an opportunity to sit down with a couple of our co-hosts, Jerry Isdale, a long time software engineer and founder of Maui Makers, and Jose Luis Galache, an astronomer at the Minor Planet Center, to discuss space hacking and the Asteroid Grand Challenge, the inspiration behind the upcoming hackathon.

--

**EchoUser**: The Asteroid Hackathon event is tied to NASA’s larger Asteroid Grand Challenge. Before we dive into the upcoming event, let’s talk about the goal of NASA’s Asteroid Grand Challenge.

**Jerry**: The Asteroid Grand Challenge is one of NASA’s programs to get an open call for technologies for the space program. The basic goal is to find all asteroid threats and know what to do about them. There are over 600,000 asteroids currently known, with more being discovered every day. A percentage of these asteroids are “near-earth” asteroids, and a percentage of these near-earth asteroids can actually hit the earth. In the past, there have been large and small ones that have hit the earth in the form of asteroid strikes or large meteor-asteroid strikes. In fact, two years ago an asteroid hit Russia, with no warning. It blew up in the sky over Chelyabinsk causing significant damage.

The goal of the project is to find these-types of asteroids in space before they blow up, and figure out what we can do about them. The Asteroid Grand Challenge was in the planning process for quite a while prior to the explosion in Russia, but the incident validates why we need this program.

--

**EchoUser**: _Sometimes all the stars line up in your favor, literally! How important are these types of events for our understanding of asteroids?_

**Jerry**: They are very important. The damages and costs of the asteroid explosions always catch people’s attention.

--

**EchoUser**: _What are you looking to accomplish with the upcoming Asteroid Hackathon?_

**Jose Luis**: The event is not particularly about astronomy. We want to bridge the gap between scientists and the public, and have the opportunity to educate both sides on what is going on in space. The Minor Planet Center, in particular, wants to be able to share information, not just data, to educate the public and anyone that visits our websites. We want there to be more opportunities for people to come across our website and learn something – this can happen if the information is more clear.

**Jerry**: We want people to be able to hunt for asteroids and find information about asteroids with ease. The event is a great way to push that forward. The Minor Planet Center has created a much more easily accessible database, but they are in need of a user interface. The idea behind the hackathon and other events we have planned this year is to help make it easier for people to access the database and information.

--

**EchoUser**: _Let’s talk data. Is working with the large amount of data slowing down the process of understanding what is going on in space?_

**Jose Luis**: We are always looking for new and better ways to get the data we have here at Minor Planet Center out to people who are browsing the web. While we have lots of data, we need more information. We need to create tools that can transform data into useful information so someone who is not an astronomer can look at the data and learn something from it.

Our data is already public. That is one of our missions – all of our observations and predictions for asteroid flybys are always public. But we don’t have that much information that someone who is not an astronomer is going to understand. We want to give the public an opportunity to really understand the data we have.

--

**EchoUser**: _What are your expectations surrounding the hackathon?_

**Jose Luis**: We are hoping to get a good number of creative people who have hacking skills and know how to turn data into information. To be honest, I have no idea what to expect with these computer programmers. I think one good thing that comes out of these large scale events is grouping together a big number of smart, creative people — they are bound to come up with something.

--

**EchoUser**: _What do you think the UX perspective is going to bring?_

**Jose Luis**: We are a very small group without anyone specifically specializing in UX. Our goal for UX is to present things more clearly so people can digest a lot of data, but we do not know how to do this effectively.

--

## Ready to join us in hacking space and saving Earth?

If you are interested in helping to save our planet by tackling complex asteroid data and making it digestible for the broader community with unique data mashups, mind-blowing UI visualizations, or something even better, please email us and we will get you more information on how to submit a team for the Asteroid Hackathon. We will also continue to share details here on our blog, so check back regularly.

Hack Space. Save Planet Earth.

Welcome to _**The EchoUser Experience**_, where we hope to inform, entertain, and offer a window into our personality. We are designers, developers, usability engineers, business strategists, human factors specialists… surfers, hockey players, runners, and enjoyers of happy hours. 

We have many characteristics that make up who we are. So do the products and people we work with. EchoUser was formed with the intention of helping you, me, anybody, and everybody have better experiences in whatever is they do, use, or buy. We, as in the big Royal We of humanity, are constantly exposed to systems, products, and services that have been (hopefully!) designed to serve our wants and needs. But what we want and need can vary greatly depending on ‘who we are’ at any given time: coffee drinker in a cafe, reader of email and news online, rider of a bike to work, user of enterprise applications, diner at a fine restaurant, movie viewer at a local theater, driver on city streets, fan at a local ballgame, etc., etc., etc. The roles we play each day are limitless. It is our goal at EchoUser to work with the makers of these products, systems, and services to provide the best experiences possible for their users, whoever they may be. 

The fun of working at EchoUser is that the projects and objectives of our clients vary greatly. While we ‘grew up’ in Silicon Valley working on software and the web, the reach of the creative process embraces anything we as people can get involved with. We and our clients always want to make things better… and the bosses always want to know by how much! That’s where we come in — improving and measuring. We apply the principles and philosophy of Experience Innovation to rapidly improve design and measure the outcome… 

I was going to write about all the things we believe in about design, innovation, etc., but this already feels too much like a commercial. Most of all we believe in the users. They are the engine that drives innovation and ultimately decide whether you succeed or fail. You wouldn’t be reading this if you didn’t feel similarly. Perhaps not the same; definitely not the exact same. As a profession, we are a passionate, opinionated bunch. I hope our blog shows that passion, whether it’s from the great folks we have within EchoUser, or the awesome guest bloggers we’ll be inviting. I also hope that you find this blog adds to the conversation of pushing the field of user experience forward. 

Welcome to The EchoUser Experience

Inspiration can often come from things that are the easiest to miss. When you do catch those little details and take a moment to think about them in depth, they’re pretty amazing. I know they make me smile. Someone designed each and every number in these photos. Someone else figured out what kind of material to use and how to attach it. Someone else still thought of what container shape and size might look best in each situation. And that’s just the street numbers, I haven’t even gone into the architecture on to which they’re mounted and adhered. The depth of artistic intent in the world around us is astounding, and most days we just walk by it without a thought. These photos of building and apartment numbers were taken along my walk to work down Clay Street from Nob Hill through Chinatown, ending in the Financial District in San Francisco. I especially enjoyed the variations in typography and how they made use of, or augmented, the contextual space. I chose to make the photos black and white to emphasize the shapes, value, and texture. I hope you enjoy these as much as I did. 

![Blog_187_StreetTypography.jpg](https://echouser-api-media.s3.us-west-1.amazonaws.com/Blog_187_Street_Typography_2d426b548a.jpg)

![Blog_187_StreetTypography.jpg](https://echouser-api-media.s3.us-west-1.amazonaws.com/Blog_187_Street_Typography_dfb2e6b97a.jpg)

![Blog187_02.jpg](https://echouser-api-media.s3.us-west-1.amazonaws.com/Blog187_02_c8d1cf49d1.jpg)

![Blog187_04.jpg](https://echouser-api-media.s3.us-west-1.amazonaws.com/Blog187_04_7642898a9b.jpg)

Street Typography

Dear Creative,

Did you get into an industry fueled by creativity and innovation to pursue the safety of following? To walk a path softened and muddied by a thousand footsteps? No? I didn’t think so. We both know why you got into this industry. You joined up because you enjoy the battle. You enjoy the hunt. You stand behind The Cause. “The Cause” is the process of repetitive failure followed by the hope of innovative success. The process consumes you. You stay up late and you wake up early just to jot down an idea to prevent its loss to the detritus of the day. You do this on the off chance that it’ll be the one idea that makes your heart flutter and your brain buzz – knowing full well that it might flop. — Failure is one of the truly worthwhile uses of our time. By failing, we’re proving that we’re willing to pursue things that are not guaranteed. Failure is a willingness to try something new, dangerous, and unknown. Repetitive failure is the only prerequisite of being an artist. So go. Fail. Watch something explode. Learn something. Enjoy yourself. Repeat.

Sincerely, A Fellow Creative

Fail, Don't Follow

Working as designers at an agency, we get the luxury of working on a variety of projects with different clients. Although it’s exciting to be working with entrepreneurs and innovators, there are times when I doubt whether true innovation exists anymore. Every other product I encounter these days is a web version of an existing software, or a social networking tool for different markets. The last true world-changing inventions I can think of are the iPhone and the iPad, and they were built on previous products such as the Blackberry. 

But borrowing from older products or concepts doesn’t necessarily mean an idea isn’t innovative. In fact, in most cases, innovative ideas are built on previous foundations. Add a keyboard, internet and email access to a cell phone and you get the Blackberry. Add additional standardized mobile applications to the Blackberry, and you get the iPhone. Increase the screen size of an iPhone, add more RAM and a faster processor, and you get the iPad. As we can see, innovation doesn’t just come from solitary innovators, but occurs through an evolution of prior ideas. It’s the constant iteration of inventions that makes them more useful and powerful, often with the seemingly simple addition of features or capabilities that already exist. 

Various social science thinkers such as Steve Johnson and [Andrew Hargadon](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Hargadon) have taken a closer look into the process of innovation and claim that it comes from an amalgam of minds, as opposed to the popular notion that brilliant ideas come from  lone geniuses. More specifically, Johnson claims that there are environments he describes as “conjugal beds”, in which ideas “can have sex” and procreate new innovative ideas. At his TED talk, he explained that the intellectual flowering during the past 500 years started in London and was largely due to the British switching from beer to tea and coffee. This greatly sped up the evolution of intellectual discourse because 1) the majority of the population was no longer drunk most of the time, and 2) people were imbibing coffee and tea, which are stimulants causing more intellectual activity, plus 3)  coffee shops were created, thereby creating spaces in which minds can commingle. 

Anyone living in the Bay Area can drop by countless coffee shops, and witness this commingling in action. It’s not uncommon to see startup folks in coffee shops discussing “the next big thing” or even “the next small thing,” which really could become the next big thing (e.g. Twitter). Hargadon further supports this idea that innovation springs from creative communities in his analysis of IDEO’s creative process. He claims that IDEO’s big success in innovation is largely owed to the fact that they have the space to collect technological solutions from a wide range of industries. Due to the agency’s position in the market, they are in a prime position to collect intellectual knowledge and capital from their clients, which span many industries. This storehouse of intellectual and technology solutions allows designers to create innovative solutions that are not necessarily created from scratch but adapted from other industries and applied to the current problem. Hargadon calls this “technology brokering” and claims that IDEO isn’t actually any more creative than any other firm, but it is in a position to accumulate a large reserve of technology capital, giving the company a competitive advantage when coming up with innovative solutions. 

How do these insights apply to innovating for your company or even for yourself? Well, first off, if you’re a designer, the pressure is off to feel like you have to re-invent the wheel when it comes to designing. As we have seen, the ‘lone wolf inventing on their own’ is a myth; moreover, it’s an unrealistic expectation to live up to. Instead, one should focus on creating fertile environments in which ideas can commingle with other ideas, possibly creating new fresh adaptations or hybrids. In short, adopt IDEO’s process of innovation by creating spaces in which knowledge and idea sharing is easy. In a company, build your own repository of technology capital that designers can draw upon. In a company that has more than one designer, design reviews among designers are crucial for cross-pollination of ideas and solutions. This raises the overall “innovativeness” of the design team. Many brains focused on a design problem is much better than a single brain mulling over the problem, and just collecting design solutions from various industries is no good if those ideas are not shared. 

Learning from others’ work also exposes designers to new design patterns and ways of working through design challenges. If you’re on your own or don’t have access to other designers, then you’ll have to build and expand your own warehouse of design solutions. Look at how other people have solved similar problems and see you can apply it to your own problem. Competitors’ solutions and products outside of the industry can also allow you to look at your problem from a new perspective, possibly sparking new ideas. Attend lectures and talks so that you can interact with other technologists, and expose yourself to new ideas. Taking this further, attending creative events such as Maker’s Faire or art shows can inspire and give you a different perspective. This is good practice in general for designers, but it is especially vital to designers who don’t have other designers to bounce ideas off of. 

So when you’re stuck on a problem, or just feeling un-innovative, then remember that you can create environments for ‘a-ha’ moments that can make you feel like a ‘lone genius’, even if it’s just for that moment.

The Myth of Maverick Innovators

I’m proud to be a designer. I vividly remember being at a happy hour one evening at 111 Minna, right after I started at EchoUser, and somebody asked me what I did. With a little hesitation, but a hint of a swagger, I replied, “I’m a…designer”. Damn I felt so freakin’ cool. But I wasn’t always a designer, at least not by name. Sure, I noticed things in the world around me, paid attention to how I interacted with people and things, but I had no training or experience, I couldn’t verbalize my design-y thoughts in any meaningful way. In fact, I didn’t even think of design as being something I could do until about 4 years ago, and only then it was when I saw IDEO’s  Tim Brown on TED that I realized design is for everyone, not just artists and “creative types”.  So when people say _“Oh no, I can’t do design. I just don’t have the eye”_ I can point to myself as proof that folks, that just ain’t true – everyone has what it takes to be a designer. What has design given me since I started at EchoUser 3 years and 2 months ago? More than I can explain here, and definitely more than I realize, I’m sure. But a few things do come to mind: –

# 1. Design made me aware

I literally see things differently now. I notice pixels (or a lack thereof on the Retina display) and I care about kerning; I love when people take the time to design something delightful ([Nest](https://store.google.com/us/category/connected_home?hl=en-US&GoogleNest&utm_source=nest_redirect&utm_medium=google_oo&utm_campaign=homepage&pli=1), Yardsale, Path and [Zappos](https://www.zappos.com/)) and notice when they don’t (WellsFargo.com, any MUNI experience, dreaded AT&T customer service reps); I hear subtle differences in the sounds car doors make when they close; I appreciate a well laid out store ([Paxton Gate](https://paxtongate.com/), Apple) and how a letterpress menu feels (expensive). All of these things I now notice, for better or worse, that I didn’t before – and I couldn’t be happier. I think the thing that most separates designers from non-designers is a general curiosity and awareness of the experiences that exist out in the world, who they’re for, and how they could be better. –

# 2. Design gave me a language

This is really important, because language adds structure and substance to what are otherwise just opinions. What used to be a knee-jerk opinion, “I hate this sign, it’s just too blue” turns into, “There’s no information hierarchy on this sign, and the blue background conflicts with the readability of the text.” Language gives me fodder to dissect and explain a particular experience, whether I’m talking to a client or a user going through an experience, which is absolutely key – because design without communication is just fluff. –

# 3. Design gave me family

I mean this in a most literal sense – the crew at EchoUser is made up of fantastic designers and researchers, all of whom are my friends and daily inspiration. The work they do blows me away, and their attitude to being part of a great company (whether with 3 employees back when I started, or the 12 we have now) is really awesome. But I have a family beyond the walls of EchoUser, too: everyone who has had some part in creating an experience, whether on the front lines of product design and engineering, or in a more peripheral role – these people and I now have something in common (design). The best part about the discipline of design is that it’s not limited to a specific product: I can chat with someone about the design of a product I’ve never seen simply because we speak the lingo (see #2 above). Further, I meet people every day who don’t consider themselves designers but are designing awesome things every day anyway (and serving as amazing inspiration) – we have something in common and that’s very cool.

And now, as I leave EchoUser for a 6-month road trip across the US, Canada and Central America in my surf van Duke, I’m turning my design lens on something else entirely: myself. Because while designing for others is great, there’s no reason why we can’t design life, relationships, career, indeed our _future_ in the same way (or at least try to). More importantly, I think a big part of the creative process is to step back to assess and synthesize, to poke and prod at what has been created so as to push its boundaries in the future. I think it’s all too easy to get caught up in the daily moments that make up our lives and fast forward 30 years – having lived a good and full life, sure, but not a good, full and (semi) _designed_ life. While taking time off to reassess one’s life, to get inspired, is by no means a new thing, it’s novel for me – and as every designer can attest to, there’s nothing more exciting than designing something new. Thanks to Mick, Aaron and everyone for a fabulous 3 years. Here’s to many more to come! – Felix

\* _Feel free to follow my photos and commentary from the open road over at [@Felixdesroches](https://twitter.com/felixdesroches?lang=en)._

My love affair with design

I always hear people say “I’m not a designer. I don’t have time for that stuff. It’s just not my job.” Total bollocks. We’re all designers, and we all design things. They may not be made of pixels, or be sketches with cool looking shadows and highlights, but we do design. Think: _CEOs design what a business is and where it’s going. Coaches design the best team. We all design our schedules every day. Lawyers design legal arguments. Teachers design kids, and in doing so, our future. Taxi drivers design their ride (hard on the brakes, hard on the gas, hard on the brakes…) Accountants design taxes and finances. Two people in love design their relationship._ The main difference between a trained designer and the rest of us is usually that designers are **aware** of what, whom, and why they’re designing. Awareness, of course, doesn’t imply actual control – but it’s a good first step. If we all considered ourselves designers, no matter our ilk, what would the world look like? *even you, mum. You designed me, after all.

We're all designers*

_This post originally appeared on Oracle’s Usable Apps blog. Mick is a member of the Oracle Usability Advisory Board. Thanks to Oracle for allowing EchoUser to repost it here._

<hr>

Being part of a user experience design firm, we have the luxury of working with a lot of great people across many great companies. We get to help people solve their problems. At least we used to. The basic design challenge is still the same; however, the goal is not necessarily to solve “problems” anymore; it is, “I want our products to delight and excite!” The question for us as UX professionals is how to design to those goals, and then how to assess them from a usability perspective. I’m not sure where I first heard “delight and excite” (A book? blog post? Facebook status? Steve Jobs quote?), but now I hear these listed as user experience goals all the time. In particular, somewhat paradoxically, I routinely hear them in enterprise software conversations. And when asking these same enterprise companies what will make the project successful, we very often hear, “Make it like Apple.” In past days, it was, “Make it like Yahoo (or Amazon or Google),” but now Apple is the common benchmark. Steve Jobs and Apple were not secrets, but with Jobs’ passing and Apple becoming the world’s most valuable company in the last year, the impact of great design and experience is suddenly very widespread. In particular, users’ expectations have gone way up. Being an enterprise company is no shield to the general expectations that users now have, for all products.

# Designing a “Minimum Viable Product”

The user experience challenge has historically been, to echo the words of Eric Ries (author of [Lean Startup](https://www.amazon.com/Lean-Startup-Entrepreneurs-Continuous-Innovation/dp/0307887898)), to create a “minimum viable product”: the proverbial “make it good enough.” But, in our profession, the “minimum viable” part of that phrase has oftentimes, unfortunately, referred to the design and user experience. Technology typically dominated the focus of the biggest, most successful companies. Few have had the laser focus of Apple to also create and sell design and user experience alongside great technology. But now that Apple is the most valuable company in the world, copying their success is a common undertaking. Great design is now a premium offering that everyone wants, from the one-person startup to the largest companies, consumer and enterprise. This emerging business paradigm will have significant impact across the user experience design process and profession. One area that particularly interests me is, how are we going to evaluate these new emerging “delight and excite” experiences, which are further customized to each particular domain?

# How to Measure “Delight and Excite”

Traditional usability measures of task completion rate, assists, time, and errors are still extremely useful in many situations; however, they are too blunt to offer much insight into emerging experiences “Satisfaction” is usually assessed in user testing, in roughly equivalent importance to the above objective metrics. Various surveys and scales have provided ways to measure satisfying UX, with whatever questions they include. However, to meet the demands of new business goals and keep users at the center of design and development processes, we have to explore new methods to better capture custom-experience goals and emotion-driven user responses. We have had success assessing custom experiences, including “delight and excite,” by employing a variety of user testing methods that tend to combine formative and summative techniques (formative being focused more on identifying usability issues and ways to improve design, and summative focused more on metrics). Our most successful tool has been one we’ve been using for a long time, Magnitude Estimation Technique (MET). But it’s not necessarily about MET as a measure, rather how it is created.

MET is based on a definition of the desired experience, which users will then use to rate items of interest (usually tasks in a usability test). In other words, a custom experience definition needs to be created. This can then be used to measure satisfaction in accomplishing tasks; “delight and excite”; or anything else from strategic goals, user demands, or elsewhere. For reference, our standard MET definition in usability testing is:

<highlight>

>_“User experience is your perception of how easy to use, well designed and productive an interface is to complete tasks.”_

</highlight>

# Articulating the User Experience

We’ve helped construct experience definitions for several clients to better match their business goals. One example is a modification of the above that was needed for a company that makes medical-related products:

<highlight>

>_“User experience is your perception of how easy to use, well-designed, productive and safe an interface is for conducting tasks. ‘Safe’ is how free an environment (including devices, software, facilities, people, etc.) is from danger, risk, and injury.”_

</highlight>

Another example is from a company that is pushing hard to incorporate “delight” into their enterprise business line:

<highlight> 

>_“User experience is your perception of a product’s ease of use and learning, satisfaction and delight in design, and ability to accomplish objectives.”_

</highlight>

I find the last one particularly compelling in that there is little that identifies the experience as being for a highly technical enterprise application. That definition could easily be applied to any number of consumer products. We have gone further than the above, including “sexy” and “cool” where decision-makers insisted they were part of the desired experience. We also applied it to completely different experiences where the “interface” was, for example, riding public transit, the “tasks” were train rides, and we followed the participants through the train-riding journey and rated various aspects accordingly:

<highlight> 

>_“A good public transportation experience is a cost-effective way of reliably, conveniently, and safely getting me to my intended destination on time.”_

</highlight>

To construct these definitions, we’ve employed both bottom-up and top-down approaches, depending on circumstances. For bottom-up, user inputs help dictate the terms that best fit the desired experience (usually by way of cluster and factor analysis). Top-down depends on strategic, visionary goals expressed by upper management that we then attempt to integrate into product development (e.g., “delight and excite”). We like a combination of both approaches to push the innovation envelope but still be mindful of current user concerns. Hopefully the idea of crafting your own custom experience, and a way to measure it, can provide you with some ideas how you can adapt your user experience needs to whatever company you are in. Whether product-development or service-oriented, nearly every company is ultimately providing a user experience.

# The Bottom Line

Creating great experiences may have been popularized by Steve Jobs and Apple, but I’ll be honest, it’s a good feeling to be moving from “good enough” to “delight and excite,” despite the challenge that entails. In fact, it’s because of that challenge that we will expand what we do as UX professionals to help deliver and assess those experiences. I’m excited to see how we, Oracle, and the rest of the industry will live up to that challenge.


Delight and Excite

Hi, I’m Garrett, a newish UX designer at EchoUser. Recently my compadre Felix and I spent several months redesigning a complex user interface for a client’s cloud computing software platform. (I use the word compadre without whimsy; it can mean co-parent or companion in war. I feel those definitions are accurate). It involved a lot of coffee, head scratching, and frequent guttural sounds of pain intense abstract thought. There was plenty of “board-burn” (drawing or erasing recklessly, chafing the skin on the bottom of your pinky or palm) and ink-stained fingers from using them as erasers. We laughed. We cried. We made. For your viewing pleasure I’ve put together a few snapshots of our experience. Enjoy. A lot of work goes into a conceptual redesign. In fact, a lot more that you can see here. But hey, a 70+-frame GIF is pretty ridiculous as is.

<superhero>

![Blog161_Gif.gif](https://echouser-api-media.s3.us-west-1.amazonaws.com/Blog161_Gif_cca47d9f53.gif)

</superhero>

In the end, we came out with all our limbs intact and a kick-ass design. However, we did look a bit like the post-rescue Chilean miners. Super design requires super people: Aaron-Winning Smile-Rich. Pants Charmer; Project Captain. Felix-Raiden-Desroches.;Storm Summoner. UX Master. Garrett-Ryu-Godsey. Hadoken Hurler. Pixel Warrior.

And that’s pretty much it in a nutshell. Until next time, adieu.

Whiteboard Super Fun Time!

Our client and friends over at Threadflip launched this week to a lot of fanfare, with spots on [TechCrunch](https://techcrunch.com/2012/04/17/threadflip-gets-1-6-million-from-frc-baseline-a16z-dave-morin-and-others-to-virtualize-the-clothing-swap/) and elsewhere all over the web. The novel clothing marketplace is making a splash with its luxurious feel and awesome user experience, and should be poised to reinvent the way women swap clothes. I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention that Threadflip’s design greatness is due in some (large!) part to our very own [Amaya Lascano](https://twitter.com/papayapants), who put her stylish fingerprints all over the UI and user experience while working with the Threadflip team. So kudos to Amaya and Threadflip for kicking serious UX butt – here’s to Threadflip being a huge success.

Threadflip and EchoUser in the news!

From [Harry West, CEO over at Continuum](https://www.continuuminnovation.com/en/), about the shifting sands of business growth and progress:

<highlight class="quote">

><quote></quote>
>_There’s always a tendency for people to go: “Well, I know the business we’re in because I can see it. I see it every day. That’s the business we’re in, right?” Well, that was the business you were in._
>
>_Right now we are in the process of inventing the business we will be in. When people see that, it takes off. But until people can see it, until it’s in some way real and relevant to them, they don’t know what they can do to be part of it._

</highlight>

I think it’s fascinating how the main indicator – and sometimes a weak one at that – of what a firm can do is what it has already done. I often find when sending out pitch decks to potential clients that I’d like to add in a section titled “dream work” that covers all the stuff we wish we could do. Like the “Hobbies and interests” section in a resume, sometimes it’s the side stuff that tells the true story.


Living in the Past

A big part of what we do at EchoUser is tell stories. Whether we’re designing an interface from scratch, putting a new product in front of real-life users, or researching the needs of a client’s customers, we have to figure out how to make all the pieces of quantitative and qualitative feedback come together into one coherent narrative. When I’m analyzing results and looking through quotes from interviews and usability sessions, I’m looking for the bits that best tell the overall story of how people reacted to the ideas, products, or services they saw. There are plenty of places I turn for examples of great storytelling, from magazines to movies to TV shows. But podcasts are one of my favorite sources of inspiration. We’re generally visual people here — we tweak interfaces or present our findings with graphics and slides — and so I’m impressed by those who tell compelling stories with only words and sounds. Some of my go-tos:

- [This American Life](https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/this-american-life/id201671138) — Now it’s a classic example of radio storytelling, but back when I first encountered the show, I remember thinking I’d never heard anything quite like its mix of journalism, personal history, and humor. 

- [Radiolab](https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/radiolab/id152249110) — To say Radiolab is “about science” under-states the weird, wonderful world it exposes. To be honest, for the longest time, I thought the “lab” part just referred to the way the show plays with sounds and textures; I felt kind of silly when I finally figured out the scientific connection.

- [99% Invisible](https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/99-invisible/id394775318) — Short stories (most are under 20 minutes) about design and architecture, from what goes into making a stamp design to why we can’t steer a car with our eyes closed.

- [The Memory Palace](https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-memory-palace/id299436963) — It’s about history, I suppose, but it’s really just a great selection of bite-sized tidbits about the curious characters that left their mark on society in various eras. I like to queue a bunch of these up at once for a little Memory Palace binge.

<br>

Where do you turn to hear great stories?

Storytelling Inspiration

A radio show is something you listen to, maybe through headphones or in the car, with voices — not visuals — to guide the way. And a magazine is something you hold in your hands, flipping through stories, looking at pictures, sometimes tearing out a page to save for later. That is, until it’s not. In the past week, I’ve attended two genre-bending live events that play on our assumptions about the functions of different forms. At [RadioLab Live in Berkeley](link), hosts Jad Abumrad and Robert Krulwich brought an episode of the science-focused public radio show to the stage with visuals ranging from screen projections to live dancing to flickering lights in the audience. And at [Pop-Up Magazine](https://www.popupmagazine.com/), authors, artists, and photographers presented their work on stage — with nothing recorded, handed out, or written down except for the “table of contents.”

Each event had familiar elements. In the case of RadioLab Live, the performance followed the general structure of the radio show — various acts, or stories, broken up by brief musical interludes — and the sound came from a mix of on-stage narration and pre-recorded interviews. At Pop-Up Magazine, authors and artists delivered their pieces in an order familiar to magazine readers: short, pithy articles (gadget reviews, travel dispatches) followed by longer features on foreign affairs, culture, and crime. But both were also completely different experiences — not a radio show, or a magazine, or a theater performance, but something borrowing elements from all of those formats and twisting them into something new. They’re shapeshifters, morphing from one form into another. These days, our world is filled with shapeshifting experiences. Take stores: If you ask me to picture a clothing store, I still imagine a physical place that I visit to buy things. But there are online shops, and mobile shops, and hybrids like physical stores with online-ordering kiosks. Imagine what it must have been like to imagine an online store for the first time. What parts of a physical store would need to carry over so people could tell what was going on? And what could the online version offer to still be different and worthwhile? I’m not sure if there are universal guidelines that explain how shapeshifters can get the most out of each of their different experiences. But if I learned one thing from Pop-Up Magazine and RadioLab Live, it’s this: I like when each new format is recognizable as a relative of the original but still new and novel enough to be offering something I could only get in that particular way. What shapeshifting experiences have you encountered?


Shapeshifting Experiences

This morning I attended The [SF Creative Mornings](https://www.creativemornings.com/) event at the beautiful offices of Typekit. This was probably one of the classiest events I’ve attended in awhile, which I suppose isn’t saying all that much, but seriously, they had *glass pitchers* for milk and tiny little things of cereal! *Very* classy.

The sun was shining, there was food and coffee, there were tons of creative, nice people wandering about.  The perfect start to a Friday.  Oh, the talk was also pretty awesome.  Seriously, Adam Tobin gave a great talk around the theme of “I have an idea… what next?”  He spoke about what he’d done with his ideas, the toy companies he’d started, and his current mechanical/artistic work. Some of the awesome things he showed included: a marble set that you stick on your fridge, musical instruments you fill with water and play in the tub, and a contraption that tells time with Othello pieces.  One of my favorite quotes from him was “That idea that you have, you don’t… you have the start of the idea.” – making a point that a lot of things he thought he’d invented morphed and changed through prototyping and iteration. (Photos from the [creative mornings flickr set](https://www.flickr.com/photos/sanfrancisco_creativemornings/sets/72157627039047110/).)

SF Creative Mornings with Adam Tobin

Just back from a week trip to Montreal, and I was surprised by how far along the city has come on the design front since my last visit a few years back. I have to admit, it’s pretty easy to get all wrapped up in the San Francisco _we-are-the-center-of-the-hipster-design-universe_ bubble, so it was really refreshing to see well thought-out design all over the city. Here are a few examples that caught my eye:

# Bixi

I’ve been reading about bikeshare/rent programs in Europe for ages, but had yet to experience one – and then I met Bixi. All it took was a swipe of my credit card, a quick glance at the map to see the nearest Bixi location next to where I was going, a 6-digit pin (to unlock an available bike), and I was off. No fuss or trouble, and the best part was the basket up front to hold my trusty SAQ stash and the kickstand for when I needed to stop to take in the sights.  This for a third of the price of a cab to the same spot (about $4). I also found out afterward that there’s a Bixi truck dude who drives around the city filling up (or emptying out) Bixi stations, so you always have a bike at hand.

# Design in Montreal

It’s rare that I give kudos to cities for anything – I’m more used to ripping them apart for their crappy public transportation, dirty roads, etc. But Montreal was different. I was amazed by how everywhere I looked, there was useful signage pointing out historic landmarks and directions for how to get to places of interest, all in both English and French (obvious for Canada, but still a delight for out-of-towners). Beyond useful signage, the city itself seems more radiant than before. From the stunning beauty of the Basilic de Notre Dame, to the hyper modern Mutek building, what I used to see as a hodgepodge of ancient victorians stuck next to shining highrises I now see as a pleasing mix of old and new. Design has advanced beyond architecture, as well: the new [STM](https://www.stm.info/fr) (public transit) look-and-feel is a breath of fresh air, the redesign of the Lafleur identity took it from dingy diner to clean cuisine, and the local restaurant Carte Blanche, with a single chef/owner and sublime food points to an emerging culture of holistic design. It might just be my design tastes that have changed, but I really do think Montreal is coming into its own.

# Design in Quebec City

Quebec City, while a totally different flavor to Montreal, is also showing its design savvy. A longtime tourist destination, it’s not surprising that signage is easy to follow, nor that there are _pancartes_ (placards) with interesting information sprinkled throughout the city. It seems that when you’re in a place that’s been around for 400 years, you’re never far from a historic site – and Quebec does a good job of surfacing all that fabulous detail. I also loved the new totally sweet electric [_Ecolobus_ system from RTQ](https://www.rtcquebec.ca/), a nice attempt to reduce the carbon footprint on what is the oldest fortified city in North America. I was surprised – as I always am – by how Quebec is a culture all its own; I’ve never understood how a single province so close to the U.S. can be the fount of so many industries – most of which are unknown to the rest of Canada, never mind anywhere else. The venerable [Simons](https://www.simons.ca/en) department store sells major brand labels you’ll find anywhere else, but also has its own line of clothing and housewares that sell like wildfire (the former to yours truly). [Tim Hortons](https://www.timhortons.com/) is everywhere, which is good because on cold days you’ll want a warm cup of coffee or hot soup, and if you ever want to tap into the huge Quebecois music scene, you’re never too far from an [Archambault](https://www.archambault.ca/). And finally, there’s the strangest – and most delicious – artifact of all: poutine. Repulsive to those who’ve never had it, an addiction for 99.9% of those who have, poutine (a mix of french fries, special gravy and cheddar cheese curds) is probably the most designed dish on the planet. I find it best straight up a _la sauce brune_, but the adventurous can try _l’Italienne, la Galvaude, le Greque, la Mexicaine_ and a dozen of other variations. Every part of a poutine can be tweaked, and everyone has their favorite place with the “best” poutine (mine is Chez Boub in Lac Beauport). In any case, poutine is proof that over-designing isn’t always a bad thing. Final thought? Don’t judge a city by its cover, you might be surprised at how well designed it is, after all.

Quebec's Design Moxie

A great little portrait of the inventor of digital cameras – Steven Sasson.  A lot of what he has to say is true of inventing or designing anything.  

Some of my favorite quotes: 

<highlight class="quote">

><quote></quote>
>_The key when you’re putting across an idea, you have to understand the culture you’re dealing with first and foremost… and to put only the essential elements of your idea out there so it doesn’t get confused._

</highlight>

<highlight class="quote">

><quote></quote>
>_Be aware that your invention is in an environment where the rest of the world is inventing along with you, and so, by the time the idea matures it will be in a totally different world._

</highlight>  

[Inventor Portrait: Steven Sasson](https://vimeo.com/22180298) from [David Friedman](https://vimeo.com/davidfriedman) on Vimeo.

Wise Words From the Inventor of the Digital Camera

I think startups have a dirty little secret. It’s not something that’s ever talked about, and it’s especially easy to gloss over when it seems like [we’re in the midst of the next bubble](https://www.wsj.com/articles/BL-DLB-32673). It’s also hard to put a finger on it with all of these slick products that startups are putting out: shiny “web 2.0” goodness, easy sign ups, intuitive interfaces, built in gaming fun, engaging visuals, seamless integration between the web and phone apps, location-based…everything. 

When you add it all up, it sure feels like behind every startup there’s a Steve Jobs doppelgänger pulling the strings (and we all know how designers who think of themselves as Steve can get us in trouble).

# Lifting up the kimono

Is there a concrete Ux process behind any of these startups? Did they do their user research, test their prototypes, iterate on their designs? I, for one, can’t tell, because in the last 3 years I’ve only seen 3 startup clients at EchoUser, while we’ve worked with **dozens** of bigger companies. 

We all have friends in startups, too, and very few express more than a passing interest in investing in Ux. I presume they’re all too busy trying to get more users in order to IPO. And the really interesting thing? The startups we have worked with knew on a fundamental level that they needed Ux – but they also wanted to make sure they had done their due diligence before getting more funding. So good Ux = more $$$. Sounds like a safe equation, right? 

And why aren’t we seeing VCs doing more of this? I can count on one hand the number of VCs who publicly tout having Ux (defined as usability testing, user research, prototyping, etc.) as part of their investment process. I know investors are often quiet about their process for investing in companies, but there’s no reason VCs shouldn’t talk about user experience – I mean, that’s like a bank not talking about a credit check before issuing a new account. It should just be standard procedure. 

So if startups generally aren’t interested in Ux, and VCs aren’t asking for it, what does that say about the state of the startup industry today?

# Ux isn’t about pixels

Before I comment on the tech bubble (which I’m as wholly unqualified to talk about as everyone else), a few words about Ux:

<highlight> 

>**Ux is not about pixels, yo.**

</highlight> 

Sure, the end result of a good Ux process will be a change in UI – but these changes will be _based on a thorough understanding of user behavior, wants, and needs_. Not some ethereal desire to make a cool-looking, “me too” product. And don’t tell me Ux doesn’t work with products that push the boundaries of what people want or need – a well designed Ux process is meant to map the system of user behavior so that gaps can be identified – and opportunities capitalized on. It’s not just about moving buttons around (though [Amazon showed that this can be very helpful](https://www.uie.com/)).

# Good Ux can make a company bubble-resistant

Yep. You read that correctly. A company that invests time and money in a solid Ux activity will effectively immunize itself against a bursting bubble. Markets doesn’t drive the bubble, but user behavior sure does transcend the bubble. The companies that survived the last bubble had a product and user experience that were in line with long term user behaviors (::cough cough:: Google ::cough cough::). 

It’s when the startup community and VCs take a gamble, make a bad guess about what they think users will want – that’s when things go awry. And to think all it might have taken was a little Ux.

# Ux is addictive

The silver lining? Ux is catching. Working with real users, hearing feedback from the horse’s mouth (as it were) – it’s fascinating, and **every single client** of ours has come away jazzed. Nobody has come away going “wow, that was a waste of time. I hate actually listening to my users.” 

More importantly, quite a few have taken the Ux process that we helped them with and internalized it – and why not? We don’t want to be a crutch, and spreading the Ux gospel is way more enriching an experience for us in the long run anyway. So here’s my TED- wish for today: startups and VCs – please take Ux to heart, and make it part of your product growth and investment process and strategy. The world will be better for it, and you’ll have some primo bubble insurance.

Startups, VCs and UX: oil and water?

<highlight class="quote">

><quote></quote>
>_Everybody lies._
>
> [Dr. House](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gregory_House).

</highlight>

Just like doctors need to pay close attention when patients describe their illness, and do various medical tests to validate those symptoms and come up with their diagnoses and prescriptions, usability professionals, in a sense, are doctors too. They are “examining” users when they are interacting with products, so as to diagnose the problematic issues (“illness”) in design. 

Since a lot of usability methodologies (interviews, focus groups, etc.) heavily rely on users’ self-reporting, if users don’t (or are not able to) truly describe their experience with products, in other words, if users either intentionally or unintentionally lie about their experience, it would largely bias the usability diagnosis. Instead of self-reporting, are there any behavior-based “tests” that would help us directly gain insights based on how users do and/or react to products? 

Eye tracking might be an option. Eye tracking can simply be described as “a technology to track where people’s eyes are looking.” Although it is being used more frequently in user experience research and marketing, years ago, when people being tracked needed to wear a special type of contact lenses or wear a heavy head-mounted device, eye tracking was only used for science research purposes, and needed to be operated by people with eye-tracking domain knowledge. 

So do users’ eyes lie about their behavior? In the 1980s, one of the most influential theories in the field of eye tracking was raised by Just and Carpenter: the “[mind-eye hypothesis](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eye_tracking).” According to the hypothesis, what is fixated (by eyes) and what is processed (by brains) are usually coupled together. So when users look at a word or object, he or she also thinks about the process (cognitively). Therefore, researchers can use the eye data to infer what content on an interface attracts users’ attention and has been cognitively processed by them. 

With the development of infrared eye tracking technology, in today’s eye tracking study, there’s no need for users to wear any special equipment, the eye tracker is often built in with the computer monitor. By simply viewing content shown on the monitor, the built-in eye tracker is able to track the eye movement with an accuracy of .01 second! The difficulty of eye tracking more and more falls into the study design and the data analysis stage. First of all, not all usability issues can be diagnosed by eye tracking. A few issues that eye tracking can help identifying are: the visibility of a UI (e.g. do users pay attention to a specific part of a product or a website), users’ efficiency (e.g.  how long do users spend on each step of a task, which step is particularly time-consuming to users? any distracting content?), users’ attention pattern (e.g. where do users’ eyes go on this particular interface? where is the best location to put the product name?), etc.   

Knowing what are the right research questions to ask, and what are the appropriate visual stimuli to pick in order to design an eye tracking study might require that researchers have relevant eye tracking experience.   Additionally, even a short 10-minute eye tracking test can generate a multitude of fixation, saccade, and scanpath data. How to reduce, reformat, and analyze the data requires usability specialists to understand the data both from a high-level perspective (to identify potential metrics that might help to answer the research questions) and from a micro-level perspective (to identify potential areas of improvement by looking at differences at second or mini-second level). To generate a general heatmap might take 5 seconds, but if you want to tell a full story based on users’ eye movements, it might take months. Eye tracking is still a relatively new toy for usability professionals (or “doctors” 🙂 ). As with any other methodology, it’s by no means a panacea. Often times it is coupled with Retrospective Think Aloud protocol, that is, users will be asked to view their scanpath afterwards to describe the reasoning behind the way they visually interact with an interface.

The field of eye tracking is exciting and promising, not only because it captures a new aspect of user behavior, but also because it might help to explore a brand new and different way of human-computer interaction. Tobii, one of the leading eye tracker manufacturers in the world recently devised an [eye tracker built-in laptop](https://www.pcmag.com/archive/tobiis-eye-tracking-laptop-technology-eyes-on-261396) that enables users to use their eyes to perform different actions just like how we are using the mouse with our hands.

Read Between the Eyes

The easy story about COVID and work is the abrupt move to remote work and the accompanying questions that arise:

- When an office location loses importance, what happens to 9-5? (Anytime) 

- With reliable internet, when do we need to be physically together? (Anyplace)

- With freelance work becoming more viable, do workers need to be bound to one employer? (Anywhere)

![monkees.png](https://echouser-api-media.s3.us-west-1.amazonaws.com/monkees_f87d4737b7.png)

Side note: “Anytime, Anyplace, Anywhere” also happens to be an obscure release by _The Monkees_ in their 1986 compilation album, but somehow I don’t think they were writing about the workplace or experimentation.

These key questions [hit businesses hard in ‘21](https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/10/great-resignation-accelerating/620382/). They hit me hard personally as well. I had been working remotely for a year, I was looking for new work, and I wanted a more dynamic setting for UX Research than I thought I would find working for one specific company. My spouse faced similar uncertainty in her work future.  We were staring at incredible privilege and a wide open opportunity that we had never quite seen before. We are also parents of two boys under five, and feel daily the soul-crushing challenge to introduce variety into a life that demands routines and stability.

![bungalow.png](https://echouser-api-media.s3.us-west-1.amazonaws.com/bungalow_b6c0ceb561.png)

As a design thinker, I _sometimes_ at least _somewhat_ practice what I preach. I knew there was a more measured approach to testing the waters than quitting all jobs and selling our house. We decided to run a small experiment across six weeks in December and January, where we moved from our suburban home in Longmont, CO to a rental in the heart of Portland, OR. I had just joined EchoUser, and was working here while I also wrapped up outside projects. It would mean working at odd hours to meet all the demands, but in a fun location, with a forced change of pace. We wanted to see if this anytime, anyplace, anywhere was for us.

You might explain the hypothesis for our trip as something like this:

<highlight>

>_If I temporarily live in a new setting and work for multiple employers, my life satisfaction will increase._

</highlight>

I sense this is an experiment many people are running variations on, or may like to in the coming years. So what did I conclude? Let’s look at three themes from the experiment which speak as much to research design as they do if I should spend my work life on the road.

### Theme 1: Clarify Your Objectives, Control Your Variables

Completing our six week experiment, I have a ton of data. Many feelings about day-to-day life. The [best coffee shop within walking distance](https://theredecafe.com/) of our rental house. Good memories of creaky stairs and puddle-splashing with my kids. Yet, I don’t know if I really validated the hypothesis or not.

In hindsight, I think “Salts-Halcomb Portland Getaway 2021” suffered from the same symptoms of many rounds of product research. 

Because the objectives weren’t well-defined at the beginning, the research design wasn’t optimal, and the data are wide and speak more to obscure questions than the vital ones.

Our experiment took place over the holiday season, and in an area of the country where we have friends and family. In reality, our experiment has much more to say about questions like “How does it feel to live near family without staying with them?” and “What is it like to juggle a lot of different new things during Christmas?” than it does about anytime, anywhere, anyplace. My satisfaction with the experience was high, but I think it’s clear that work wasn’t the most important factor to that satisfaction.

![family.jpeg](https://echouser-api-media.s3.us-west-1.amazonaws.com/family_3674a00583.jpeg)

This is endemic to UX work. How many times have you begun a study that really taught you more about your workplace culture than it did your customers? Or, realized that your usability concerns couldn’t be addressed until you first cleared up issues around desirability and a deeper understanding of the user experience?

Sure, there is still a ton of learning (more on this later), but we don’t have a lot of time in life or research to learn something that isn’t the most important thing. I’m not sure when school schedules and projects will align to give us another opportunity at this.  The only antidote I know to this problem is planning, asking vital questions up front about what we really want to learn. Had I really wanted to test the workplace questions above, at the least, my wife and I would have chosen a more normal time of year and a location with fewer people we were excited to see.

### Theme 2: Jump in fully

Still, I’m more research pragmatist than research purist, so I want to spend some time on the other side of the coin from Theme #1. While the learnings could have been more precise, I did encounter so much. Furthermore, few of those learnings would have come forward from a quiet Christmas at home in the same 9-5 I’d been working. I think as life researchers and product researchers alike, we’re always working within imperfect context, and the real skill is being able to extract the valuable data from the cluttered missteps and noise.

What I did well in this experiment was to encounter enough friction to produce meaningful results. 

Some takeaway thoughts include:

- **In this new era of work, focus is everything**. We should all know by now that [humans are poor multitaskers](https://www.forbes.com/sites/forbestechcouncil/2021/07/15/why-you-shouldnt-multitask-and-what-you-can-do-instead/?sh=5488790ad01b), and some of these new ideas about work add layers of complexity. Anytime, anywhere, anyplace means we’re essentially merging work and life rather than trying to seperate the two. I don’t think the answer is writing emails at the dinner table. Rather, I think the biggest skill of the next decade is being able to quickly drop into context: there was prepping for a meeting in the couple hours between holiday gatherings, having laser focus for 30 minutes with client A even when the bulk of the day was spent on client B. There are also vital and known strategies to block similar work that I have begun to experiment with. (New Year’s Resolution 2022: Focus!)

- **My longing is for new creative routines** more so than tectonic shifts in how I do work. The best elements of the work experiment included the walk-ability of our neighborhood. I would break up my day with a walk to the produce stand, an hour in the coffee shop, and a quick train track built to connect with my boys. Those were easier byproducts because of our experiment, but they didn’t need a new job or a new house. I am looking for a state of mind that is fluid and creative. While I’m curious how my work choices aid that, I’m glad to have that insight to implement anywhere.

<br/>

My encouragement to all of us in UX work is to pursue routes that might spark significant insight. Slight shifts around the edges of a user experience are easier to get right but seldom transform a business. If the recipe is 3 parts good planning, and 1 part right methodology, there is also a good dash of chaos to bring learning. The chaos of this month will spark change in our lives.

### Theme 3: Your timeline be damned, the research never ends

As a last thought, I’m getting comfortable with the fact that many of my questions couldn’t be answered in six weeks. I have a lot to unwind before undertaking changes to my work life that have been established over almost 20 years. 

I am committed to advancing independence, variety and freedom around my work life - and I chose EchoUser in part for its commitment to this culture. I’m convinced that sticking to my home office chair for 8 straight hours is the next thing that needs to go. But we have a lot of thinking to do before the upheaval to our family of a trip like this is worth the regular cost.

I notice the research parallels with every time I see UXers or product teams try to tie a nice bow on the learnings because of an external timeline. Yes, our contract ended, dev needed to ship, priorities changed. But we fool ourselves into thinking that means the learnings need to be complete, final, authoritative. I need to cultivate a mindset of “I learned X but it made me wonder Y”… for that is much more true to experience. I think it will actually help our products, which are always evolving. We act off the incomplete data, we take our best next step, and we start learning again.

![coldBeach.png](https://echouser-api-media.s3.us-west-1.amazonaws.com/cold_Beach_f0f76e6372.png)

I’ll have to report back later on the advancement of anytime, anyplace, anywhere. It has some legs. I’ll do it better next time. I have a whole set of new questions. Six weeks well spent.

An experiment in Anytime, Anyplace, Anywhere

We recently had an intriguing Talk-O Tuesday session (our weekly internal lunch meeting). We brain exercised, in a way. It was definitely different from our normal talking sessions, which can get quite heady and stimulating in their back and forth. 

For this session, our Talk-O moderator, Jiyoon, started by laying out some simple rules that set the stage for an interesting mind-bending journey. At least for me. Still not sure if it led to nirvana, or possibly somewhere more dark. Nevertheless, I couldn’t stop thinking about the experience and how others might find it useful for their own brainstorming and creativity workouts. 

The simple rules:

- Sketch something that comes to mind once you hear the prompt. 

- Don’t stop moving your pen/pencil until told to. 

- You do not need to share anything that you create. 

Would this even work? Would I feel more creative? Would it become easier over time? Such simple rules within a one-hour timeframe. That’s a long time to just sketch! (At least there was music.) Meetings are already too long. Now do it without talking and stay inside your own head. Go! 

So here are my sketches. I am definitely not a sketching artist. But I also feel no shame in sharing the results. I’ll do my best to describe each prompt, but I don’t quite remember most of them, which is an interesting aside, as I do recall feeling myself drifting deeply into each theme while sketching.

<br> 

----

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![feet.jpg](https://echouser-api-media.s3.us-west-1.amazonaws.com/feet_8de1fbf348.jpg)

**Feet**

I’m just going to say the first prompt was “feet”. I don’t remember. But I do recall feeling somewhat mentally rigid as we got underway. Even my sketching space on the paper was cramped and almost pinching into the edge. Drawing the large foot did help break the mold and release my mind. Especially those toes.

<br> 

----

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![cookies-1024x209.jpg](https://echouser-api-media.s3.us-west-1.amazonaws.com/cookies_1024x209_452d02f396.jpg)

**Cookies**

Again, I don’t recall, but maybe, “cookies”? And my bad drawings look more like pizza and donuts than cookies. Maybe I was hungry. My favorite part is the big head/face (maybe also a cookie?) and the callouts. Some sort of bizarro Homer mumblings from the upside-down. 

<br> 

----

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![danger.jpg](https://echouser-api-media.s3.us-west-1.amazonaws.com/danger_91ed80fa6b.jpg)

**Danger**

This one feels like “danger”. My mind was definitely in transition at this point in our sketch exercises. I particularly like the comic strip style for giving it more of a story feeling. Also to make the _danger_ feel not so _dangerous_. I mean, why am I drawing someone lunging at someone else with a knife? Questions should be asked. 

Transcription: - | “Danger?” | “Yes!” | “Oh” .. “Mm, DIE” | “Freeze spell” | “Later...” .. “Damn”

<br> 

----

<br> 

![bliss.jpg](https://echouser-api-media.s3.us-west-1.amazonaws.com/bliss_7dd58944be.jpg)

**Calm**

The most straightforward prompt; “inner calm” (or something close to that). And the result was a warm coral reef, with me stretched out in long gliding motions, with the outside world suppressed down to natural underwater noises. Looks like bliss. Felt like bliss sketching it. Perhaps my sketch brainstorming was becoming more calm, simple, and straightforward. (Spoiler: It wasn’t.) 

<br> 

----

<br> 

![space.jpg](https://echouser-api-media.s3.us-west-1.amazonaws.com/space_993dae7982.jpg)

**Space**

Mind control? Actually, pretty sure it was something to do with “space”. Both are acceptable. I had recently read _The Three-Body Problem_, and without giving much away, a key plotline is one side being able to read the minds of the other side. Perhaps my favorite sketch. Does the one on the left look like Elon Musk? 

<br> 

----

<br> 

![monsters.jpg](https://echouser-api-media.s3.us-west-1.amazonaws.com/monsters_bda5c3df9a.jpg)

**Monsters**

It’s gotta be “monsters”, yes? Or one overall motley monster. I think this is where my mind had fully shifted out of its initial rigidness, well past smooth brainstorming, through loose and swervy, and finally smashing into _what was I thinking_? These now remind me of 1) Game of Thrones; 2) Donnie Darko; 3) the unreleased sequel to E.T.; and, 4) a needs-to-be-made Bigfoot movie.   

<br> 

----

<br> 

![despair.jpg](https://echouser-api-media.s3.us-west-1.amazonaws.com/despair_217f5c7060.jpg)

**Despair**

I have no idea what the prompt was. Looks like a pit of despair. With a fossil graveyard. And a hangout for punk cats. A mental release, of sorts? Who knows. Unsettling. 

<br> 

----

<br> 

![peace.jpg](https://echouser-api-media.s3.us-west-1.amazonaws.com/peace_10f0d880a6.jpg)

**Peaceful**

And finally a very normal looking scene, an idyllic mountain lake. So peaceful. So starkly different from the prior doom scene. I recall feeling more just peacefulness and an ideal place I’d like to be. No hidden awfulness; just a rapid, fluid change in focus from the prior sketch; really, all the previous sketches. 

<br> 

----

<br> 

There were more prompts & sketches. But we switched from prepared prompts to called out prompts and shorter sketch times as the hour was winding down. As I recall, most of the prepared prompts had 6-8 min of sketching time. Plenty of time to mentally drift, which I think was necessary to see where the mind would go, especially with the no stopping your pen/pencil moving rule. 

This is a lot of navel-gazing on my part as I attempt to explain to myself what I was sketching. But hopefully, the open sharing can convey how (through meditation sketching, but also beyond):

<highlight>

>**A simple set of rules can successfully be used to promote brainstorming creativity.**

</highlight>

I encourage you to try it yourself and to let me know if you reach nirvana, or perhaps find a little bit of darkness.

Meditation sketching: Brainstorming exercises

During a recent project, a client asked us to evaluate the initial user experience for setting up a telephony product. They were not interested in doing a more traditional usability test as they felt that this “out of the box” experience could not be easily captured or replicated by forcing a user to perform a set of pre-defined tasks. They wanted feedback that was more contextual and ethnographic in nature, but they still wanted the quantitative data such as times, errors, assists, and usability ratings that you get from standard usability testing. 

The more we thought about this, the more we came to realize that there is a gap in methods from where lab testing ends and contextual/ethnographic studies begin. Usability testing is often used for getting feedback or benchmarking the usability of key task flows of a product or service. These key tasks are discrete and isolated to make it easier to get more quantitative data, but this comes at the cost of losing what the natural workflow may be since a structure or order is enforced. The natural workflow is something that is researched through more contextual methods. 

What we wanted for this project was to be able to allow a natural workflow that would allow users to use multiple tools and do things that were not expected by the product team while being able to get metrics such as time, errors, assists, and perceived usability. With this in mind, we created a method that we’ve dubbed internally as **Event Style Usability Testing** to help bridge this gap between usability testing and contextual/ethnographic studies.

# Components of Event Style Usability Testing

There are a couple of basic components to the use of Event Style Usability Testing

- A set of pre-defined “events” are identified that users are asked to perform.

- Users are allowed to use a system (or software) to do the events in any way and any order that they deem appropriate. There is no forced order.

- The test facilitator records the events as they take place creating a workflow record as well as keeping metrics such as time that events start and stop, number of errors and assists for events, and perceived usability of events.

- New events that were not pre-defined or expected are added ad hoc as they are observed during sessions.

To better understand this, what do I mean by an “event”? Events are very similar to tasks that are used in more standard usability testing with a couple of distinctions. Like tasks, events are created that users are asked to perform or experience. For example, an event would be to send an online payment to a person from an online bank account. If this were simply a task in a usability study, then users may be told specifics about who to send the payment to, for how much, and when it should arrive by. 

For an event, things are turned into a scenario as much as possible.  They are told what they are trying to accomplish, not given specifics.  In the case of the event for sending an online payment, users would choose who to send it to, for how much, from what account, etc.  Allowing them to shape the event using their own data or specific to their own interests allows interesting insights and observations about what users may do in real situations.

Once the events have been pre-defined, an event list is created for participants to use for the session. Prior to beginning the session, users are asked to read the entire list of events that they will be asked to do. They are then instructed to complete the list of events in whatever order they would like and makes the most sense to them. Having them read through the entire list of events this way allows them simulate more closely what they would do out in the real world. It’s assumed in most systems and software that users generally know what they want to do (or else why are they using the system or software in the first place) but may not know specifically how to do it. Event testing aims to more closely replicated this.

The rest of the process now relies on the careful observation of the testing facilitator. Since there is no specified order that participants are using to complete events, the facilitator needs to monitor what events the participant is attempting or in the process of doing. This includes capturing time stamps of when an event is started, completed, or stopped and not completed, or resumed after being stopped previously. While observing each event, other usability metrics can be captured as well such as any observed errors, assists needed, and other usability scores.

The last piece to the Event Style Process is being flexible to add new events to record and capture in the middle of a session. When trying to replicate real world workflows, it can be nearly impossible to predict and plan for all paths and avenues that users may try to use to work through events. Also, unforeseen or unanticipated events may occur in context that would not occur in a highly structured usability test. The event testing allows these newly observed events to be captured mid test so that they can be reported on later.

# Benefits of Event Style Testing

The event testing allows for a number of benefits and deliverables that cannot normally be obtained in a usability test. These include:

## Workflow Analysis

Since the order that events take place is recorded during the study, a full task flow can be created and analyzed. This is particularly useful for systems or software where very little is known about how users setup or experience them, especially in complex systems where multiple tools or software may be needed.The resulting task flows can show where various tools and software are frequently used, in what order, and for what purpose. In the case of the telephony product we tested, the task flows highlighted at what points different software products were used for configurations and at what points users stopped to verify correct setups and troubleshoot problems.

## Quantitative data collection

While the natural workflow analysis can be observed, quantitative data such as errors, assists, and usability ratings can still be collected and compared across users. This creates a more holistic view of the experience being evaluated from a qualitative and quantitative standpoint, the best of both worlds.

--

Event Style Usability Testing has become a powerful method in our user experience toolbox to bridge the usability test and ethnographic research divide.We are always looking for new takes on old methods and hope others may find this useful as well!


Event Style Usability Testing

I’ve been using the [Swype](https://beta.swype.com/) keyboard on my Android Incredible for the past few days and I’ve found it pretty great to use.

When I first read about Swype I was a little skeptical – how much faster could it really be / would it actually be useful for people used to regular typing? I’ve found, however, that Swype is useful for more than just typing quickly (which it does quite well albeit with a learning curve). It’s also fun 🙂  **And** it also is much more efficient when a user prefers one handed, vertical-oriented typing (like I do). 

In order to type quickly on a normal touch keyboard, the most optimal position for me was the horizontal position, using both thumbs. In reality, however, I hardly ever turned the phone this way, it was one extra step and it required a bit more “commitment” to the typing process :). Plus, it sometimes hid some important fields on the screen itself. This meant that I would always type on the vertical orientation, which meant that I would often accidentally tap letters since the letters were so small and close together. 

Swype actually **works best** in the vertical orientation, with one hand. And it **benefits** from all the letters being small and close together. 

David Pogue at the NYTimes recently wasn’t [really sold on Swype](http://pogue.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/07/01/the-swype-revolution/) (and I agree with some of what he has to say), but I also feel like he was only taking speed into account – he wasn’t taking into account the other slight ux issues that the normal keyboard has.

Swype

# A rainy day, in SF town

I went to my first TED(x) event this past week.  I’ve never been to [TED](http://ted.com/) or a TED affiliated event before, so it was a real treat to see it live and in person after hours of watching luminaries on my laptop.  Hosted by the cool crew at [Parisoma](http://www.parisoma.com/), the venue was far more intimate than I thought: about 45 people in attendance – including a few speakers – in a nifty loft space on Howard; not a bad way to spend a rainy day, IMO. 

So how did [TEDxSoMA](http://twitter.com/tedxsoma) compare to the TED we all know and love through the videos? Other than the world’s most uncomfortable chairs, I spent 4 solid hours totally captivated.  I was lucky enough to get a front row seat (literally) next to my new friends [Simon](http://twitter.com/simonsmith001) and [Ted](http://twitter.com/tcbeatie), which let me see the talks up close and personal.  Overall the speakers all seemed well-versed in TED- speaking: clear, very little reading, and lots of pictures if they chose to have a slide show. 

From [Phil Libin](http://twitter.com/plibin) at [Evernote](http://evernote.com/), to [Heather Fleming](http://twitter.com/heatherfleming) at [Catapult Design](http://catapultdesign.org/), to the intense [Damon Horowitz](http://www.phil.upenn.edu/faculty/horowitz) from [Aardvark](http://vark.com/) (who reminded me vaguely of Gene Wilder in the original Charlie and the Chocolate Factory), it was a great lineup, and when you add in a great duet with the stunning [Solenn Seguillon](http://solennseguillon.com/) and beer from the folks at [21A](http://www.21st-amendment.com/), it was a recipe for success.

# Common thread?

The only gripe I have is this: the talks, while fascinating, didn’t cohesively tie into the theme of the event, “Interactivity in Different Realms”. Sure, it was great to hear Libin’s theory on why man’s brain has changed little in 20,000 years (hence why we need Evernote), and Howard Roffman’s well-versed (and read) story of Star Wars over the years, but I found the common thread tenuous at best. 

But with an eclectic mix of people in the room we had little trouble brainstorming and chatting during the intermissions, and overall it was a great time.

TEDxSoMA: great minds, great ideas

# Being a UX designer wasn’t something I knew I wanted to be

I didn’t expect to “fail” so many times in my career to get to where I am. Throughout my life, I was unclear on what exactly I wanted to do. I knew I wanted a purpose, or to do something that could help others. I did not care whether it would be a big or small impact. 

Growing up, I thought I had to pick a career with security and stability. So I decided to commit to a Biology degree. I thought maybe I could be a doctor, or a dentist, or even an engineer. At the time, I knew I could do it but I doubted if I would be happy going to work every day. 

While working on my biology degree, I felt completely burnt out. I had a lot of doubt and regret about choosing a degree I didn’t enjoy. What if medical school or everything doesn’t work out? Then I would have to work in a lab. The idea of that scared me and even pushed me to consider other options. 

I’ve always liked art and creating art, but I thought that might be too subjective of a major. But I found a middle ground—graphic design. It is a major where I can be creative with some structure. Long story short, I graduated with a graphic design degree in 2021.

Following graduation, I landed a job at a package design agency. At the time, I was very excited and grateful to work with some big companies. But if you stripped the title away, the job ended up not being what I expected. I had the impression I was able to do more, such as solve problems or generate new designs. But since the companies I worked with already had their branding and design style established, it didn't leave enough room for creativity. Work consisted of grabbing assets from a toolkit and plugging it into a template. My day-to-day became repetitive and comfortable. Was this what I wanted? Is it helping anyone? During this time of my life, I felt stuck. I kept questioning my position in the industry. From there, I started looking back at my college career, and the classes I have taken to identify what I liked and disliked. That is how I landed on user experience.

# You miss 100% of the shot you don’t take

I had taken a UX design class in college and enjoyed it. But as for how to break into the field, I had no idea about it. I knew that it is much more than just design. It is also user research that will impact the final product. The idea of getting to know more about a product’s users and using their feedback and opinions to design was fascinating to me. The more I learned about the UX design process, the more I wanted to pursue this as a career. I knew it would not be cheap or easy to do so, but that didn’t matter. What I felt at the time was definite, and it was a journey I was ready to embark on. And with that, I enrolled in a UX boot camp. 

Somehow things started to work out for me. Toward the end of September 2021, I received a text from my sister saying that one of her friends had a sister that is a UX designer. Her UX research and design agency was looking for another UX designer, and she told me to apply. My first thought was, “Um, no. I have no prior experience.” I had nothing to showcase and I hadn't even started, much less completed the boot camp yet. But…what if? I had two weeks to come up with a case study, just something to show. So, every night after work, I went through all my materials from previous classes and researched online how to create a case study. Then, I applied. 

And? I got it. Never in a million years did I think I would get the job. First of all, the interview process was intimidating and long. I kept overthinking whether I can handle it or not. Along with that, there was a design challenge. I have not done that before and it made me even more nervous. I will admit that I did think of not doing the interview overall, just not to see myself fail. But what is good about that? I was lucky to have family and friends around to encourage me and honestly make me feel silly for even considering that. I realized that they are correct, what harm would it be? At least at the end of the day, I experienced my first UX job interview and can learn from it. So, I just took things one at a time. I collected my resources, reached out to old professors, and did a lot of Googling. And of course, it all paid off. 

# First Year = Learning Year

I decided to go through the boot camp while working. I understood the design process well and how things work, but I felt it wouldn’t hurt to take a proper course that goes through the entire process. Within the first three months, I started my first client project. Somehow, the project I was working on perfectly lined up with the coursework. Starting with scoping the project to user interviews and to designing.
 
My first year of being a UX designer was a learning year. For my first project, I had the opportunity to be a designer on a product team. Here my role was to support user research and product design. When I first started with the client, I was terrified to ask for help or even show any of my work for feedback. I felt a sense of imposter syndrome, and that I didn’t deserve to be here—almost like they were going to find me out and realize that I am not a good designer. I sat down with myself and asked “What can I do to be better and grow?” The answer was to move away from my comfort zone. During this period, I had to fail to learn. It took me a while to accept this, but with time and great mentors, I was able to do so.

As things go, the more you do it, the easier it gets. Things don’t change overnight, but it was a mindset that I had to slowly implement into my day-to-day. I started by showing my designs early. In hindsight, I don’t know why I was so reluctant to show anyone anything until it was perfect. No matter where my designs were in the process, I learned that it is much more beneficial to show them early. This made it easier to nail things down and also to communicate the direction the design was heading. Letting people on the team see the design early will help them understand what you’re doing and provide additional knowledge on what can and cannot be done. This can help clear up any misunderstandings and make moving forward much more efficient.

Another thing that I started doing was setting up one-on-one meetings with designers and engineers on my team. Efficient communication with my team was something I initially struggled with. To be honest, I went into this project expecting others to tell me what to do or feed me all the information needed. Maybe it was pride or fear of being judged, but I hesitated to ask for more support. But then I struggled with the work I was doing—I didn’t know their goals, or why my designs couldn’t be built out. Then I came to the realization that I couldn't just sit there and let this cycle keep happening. All I had to do was ask. I started by just asking if they would like to meet, and we continued depending on how it went. I felt like this was a much more efficient way to communicate my questions and concerns and a good way to connect to them. Just by talking more and getting comfortable with the team, I was able to get things done much more efficiently. 

In retrospect, my first year of becoming a UX designer was not a linear path. My career was a trial-and-error process. Simple things didn’t come easy to me. Learning to accept that I was wrong or had messed up and learned from it was the best thing I had done for myself. This first year has taught me to learn how to step out of my comfort zone and collaborate in a team. I am very grateful I got the opportunity to break into this career and am lucky enough for it to be the right fit for me.


One Year of Being a UX Designer

Have you ever thought about the things that you use all the time? Which of those things have elevated themselves to where you love to use them? We recently canvassed the team and asked, what are five things that you love today? Here’s what they said.

# Chloe

## Peloton

Awesome example of a brand powerhouse! What other fitness instructors are basically celebrities, where their audience gossips about them and trades who their favorite is? Awesome music, outfits, instructors, brand and musician collaborations, AND you're getting healthier while also having fun! 

## Beats Studio Buds

Somehow Beats has better Bluetooth connectivity than the competition (I don't use air pods, so I can't compare). They're dead easy to connect and have great sound.

## Vests

Yes, this is a weird one, I know. But I sit at a desk for the majority of my day and I get cold. A fuzzy LL Bean vest is my life saver. I probably own 10.

## Carafe

Following the warm theme, especially during cold months I like to drink herbal tea during the day. A basic insulated carafe acts as my tea pot and keeps my tea piping hot throughout the day, meaning I don't have to keep making multiple cups of tea. Also I feel like I'm being efficient with my tea bag use. (LOL, I bet you don't hear that every day!)

## Google Pixel phone

I know all you Apple folks will be looking askance at me (don't worry, I'm used to it, my family does it a lot). Most of my accounts and apps are all linked through the Google ecosystem, making it so fluid to access emails, documents, websites and passwords on my phone. Everything truly feels so seamless. 

# Vy

## AirPods

I wish I could be comfortable in silence… but I can’t. These earphones go with me everywhere, on a walk, grocery store, gym, etc. In a way, they keep me company while I go and live my mundane life. I do hate it when I forget to charge them. 

## Whiteboard Calendar

Planners have never really worked for me. I have a monthly calendar on my wall where I write down events for the month. This way it is in my face whenever I enter or leave my room. It is also very satisfying crossing off the box at the end of the day.

## Taylor Swift ‘Folklore’ album

If I were to be an album… that’s all.

## Journal

I am someone who prioritizes gratitude, reflection, and growth. Writing my thoughts, life, and goals down helps clear my head. It’s like a time capsule that I can look back years from now and see the growth.

## Blueberry bagel

Current hyper fixation food. With some strawberry cream cheese, you cannot go wrong.

# Mick

## Chai Tea 

Specifically, my own homemade version. I’ve been making it for years (decades?) and it has morphed over and over and over, and become deliciously extra- (over-?) spiced. Makes drinking cafe chai lattes grimace-inducing. I feel in a particularly good stretch of chai creativity and consistency in recent months.

## CHGO

Chicago sports podcasting, streaming, hard-working, terrible ranting, etc. If you are a Chicago native, hometown sports become ingrained into your identity. The Bears haven’t had a lot of success in many years, but they’re becoming much more interesting. Same for the Blackhawks. The rest of the local teams? Ehhh. The CHGO crew covers it all.

## ChatGPT

Specifically, ChatGPT as a product. Model this, model that, blah blah blah. Too many are missing the forest for the trees. ChatGPT is a great product. I don’t want a conversation embedded into everything I do online (offline coming soon!). I want a single place to have a consistent experience. They’ve knocked it out the park (both big idea and small UI) and I still don’t think people realize that because of all the broad AI hype.

## (unintentional “Ch” theme). Let’s go with: Chicago altogether

Particularly warm weather Chicago as the first day of Spring has passed. I have not been to Chicago in the Spring for many, many years. A small longing of (warm weather) homesickness.  

## Chains

As in chaining around LLMs; aka, agents. Aka, the REAL power of this wave of AI. Chatting is a phenomenon, as already mentioned. Automated integrations (a la Zapier) with LLMs at the center are transformative – a dangerously ambitious and in the category of overused words – but dismiss this one at your own peril.

# Rally

## iPad

This is my everything device. It’s my main leisure device. I watch movies, videos, surf the net, read books, draw, shop, listen to music... It’s also an important work device. I use it to take notes and make sense of my thoughts - I’m a big fan of the Apple Pencil - and with an external keyboard, I can do most of what I can do on my laptop which allows me to get work done without being tethered to my desk. My iPad really hits a sweet spot for me - small enough to feel effortless to take anywhere but big enough for the experience to feel undiminished.

## Nespresso

I love good coffee. I’m also lazy, so I won’t consistently expend the effort you need to make it properly. But that hasn’t stopped me from constantly searching for a device that amazing coffee with no effort. I’ve experimented with a lot of pod-based machines, but they’ve always left me disappointed. Until I picked up a Nespresso machine. This is the one that hit the sweet spot. Making coffee (or espresso) is effortless: turn it on, pop in a capsule, and press a button. The capsules keep the used coffee self-contained, so clean-up is as simple as dumping them into an envelope that Nespresso provides for recycling. And the coffee itself is pretty good. As an added bonus, the machine itself is small, cute really, and fits perfectly in an unassuming spot on our kitchen counter.

## AirPods Pro

This is one of those products that hits the balance of quality, convenience, and usefulness. I just pop them in and they work. (On the flip side, on the rare occasions when they don’t work, it’s unbearably frustrating.) Transparency mode was a revelation for me. Now I could leave them in and interact with my environment as if they weren’t even there. Combined with them being so comfortable, it makes the entire experience of using them completely seamless. 

## Adidas Tiro pants

My love for these pants was a direct result of being stuck in my house during the pandemic days. There was no reason not to be completely comfortable and these pants fit the bill. They’re light, fit great, and I love the sporty look. They make me feel like I still have some shred of athleticism in me. Even as I've re-evolved back to our normal day-to-day interactions with the world, these pants are, by far, what I wear the most.

## Noxgear Tracer 2 running vest

The Noxgear Tracer 2 is an illuminated running vest. I usually run before sunrise so from November through early April, I’m running in the dark. I live in a city, so illuminating my path isn’t a problem. What I worry about is being seen, and this is when the Noxgear running vest comes to play. Since the whole thing lights up, I know I’m extremely visible (I’ve seen others running using it and it works great). But what makes me love this vest is that it’s so light and it fits so well, I forget it’s there when I’m running. It’s waterproof, sweatproof, and over the last three years of use, 100% reliable. 


5 Things We Love

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Empathy

Since I started working at EchoUser, I have had the opportunity to work with clients on vastly different spectrums of UX Maturity (User Experience Maturity); while traditional maturity rubrics or scales look at fundamentals like UX staff, budget, etc., I’ve found that in the most UX mature organizations, everyone from the Product Manager to the developer has an appreciation for UX. They can talk the talk, and in the best case scenario, they can apply UX best practices themselves.

But what do you do when the organization is not UX mature? When a UX group is hired and the broader team doesn’t really know what to do with them? Worse yet, when they don’t want to do anything with them?

Over the last nine months, I’ve worked with a federal agency with very low UX Maturity. While UX and human-centered design are in their multi-year project vision, they’ve staffed 10 designers, researchers and content experts, and included contract researchers on nearly every product, their UX system is nevertheless rich with misunderstandings and time pressures. For example, building in time for research and design takes a back seat to meeting a deadline. On top of that, questions like “what is the difference between UX and UI after all?”, “can you get me these mockups by…noon?”, and “what can end users tell you that we can’t?” are common. Our starting point – a loose understanding of UX – is a formula for frustration and limited impact. 

It’s also a motivating challenge. 

As a UX team, besides bringing our “A game” to our product teams and working with leadership to open space for, say, a non-technical research spike, we’ve added “build capacity” [for UX] to our role. In the context of this federal project, that means shepherding those we work with through an experiential process of design and having them play the roles researchers play. It means giving them the tools to do the UX work we do and apply them in their own context of work. In essence, we are democratizing UX so that everyone on the team can appreciate the value of User Experience, distinguish it from UI, understand why getting in front of users is so important, and work more closely with us to deliver functional and delightful experiences for our users. 

<highlight>

>**In essence, we are democratizing UX so that everyone on the team can appreciate the value of User Experience.**

</highlight>

There isn’t a perfect formula for building capacity for UX; what works in one organization might not work in another. In our case, the UX team has hosted three-day workshops, a brown bag series, and coached team members to apply UX tools. But the most important thing we’ve done to this end is to include the broader team and the client members of the team IN our work: having clients sit in on user interviews, engaging them in the synthesis process, using them to pilot a usability test. This type of inclusion may seem obvious to many in the UX field, but it’s been one of the biggest challenges we’ve overcome given the resistance we’ve experienced. We want and need to do more of it.

This project is by far the most challenging I’ve been on specifically because of the organization’s UX maturity. It’s also been the most rewarding; in addition to delivering more delightful products for the users, we’re also seeing those we work with grow in ways that will make a difference on every product they touch in the future. As a former teacher, I find that this extended impact is the most powerful.


Educating Clients in my UX Practice

Another week, another great discussion around design justice in our Design Justice Reading Circle at EchoUser. In our [previous discussion](/stories/can-ethical-algorithms-exist), we had talked about tech companies’ ethical responsibilities. This time, we shifted our focus to what our responsibilities are, as designers and researchers, when responding to technology ethics, and the tangible actions we can take.

To prepare for this discussion, we read “[Able, Allowed, Should; Navigating Modern Tech Ethics](https://medium.com/designatmeta/able-allowed-should-navigating-modern-tech-ethics-50f54f0df7d6)” by Margaret Gould Stewart, VP of Product Design at Facebook and watched a short video “[This Panda Is Dancing](https://vimeo.com/193299995)” from [Center for Humane Technology](https://www.humanetech.com/), an organization co-founded by the former Google Design Ethicist Tristan Harris. Both touched on how the reality of tech use stray away from its intended purpose and consequently our first question was the importance of redefining how we assess the success of technological products.

We discussed if Facebook is aligned with Facebook’s mission “to give people the power to build community and bring the world closer together”. Not surprisingly, we had different opinions about this topic and the most frequent phrase in the discussion was “it depends”. For example, while we’re aware of how technologies have the potential to tear the world apart by spreading hatred we’ve also witnessed how technologies have brought people together. One coworker told us she was empowered to share her “#MeToo” story because of all the women and men before her sharing their stories on social media as part of the #MeToo movement.

The ambiguity of “it depends” is one of the reasons, besides a clear ROI, why tech ethics is a nice-to-have rather than a must—since we cannot predict how technologies will be used, we may as well focus on something more tangible and predictable such as developing features for the MVPs. However, at EchoUser, we care deeply about the people we’re serving so we don’t want to take the convenient path of ignoring the “it depends”.

So what’s the solution? From Margret’s article, we discussed “The Four Quadrants of Design Responsibility” with the X-axis a scale of things and Y-axis a scale of audience, and approaches Facebook takes to address those ethics challenges. All three approaches: designing misuse cases, seeking outside expertise and redefining what success looks like resonate with us, especially the last one because that is what determines the product goal, the design principles, the process, and features we’re building. Being very deliberate and nuanced in how we assess success also helps us unpack the sometimes abstract and flowery mission statements companies have and translate them into meaningful actions.

Besides setting up the framework and principles, we also discussed the importance of diversity hiring and ethics education. We don’t know what we don’t know so having a diverse workforce and people who care helps us proactively make ethically responsible decisions instead of putting out fires.

All in all, it was another fruitful design justice discussion and provocation at EchoUser— looking forward to what comes next in our Design Justice Reading Circle.

Cover Photo by [Daria Nepriakhina](https://unsplash.com/@epicantus) on [Unsplash](https://unsplash.com/), Thumbnail Photo by [Franki Chamaki](https://unsplash.com/@franki) on [Unsplash](https://unsplash.com/)


What does success look like for ethically responsible products?

Have you heard about Design Justice? If you’ve heard about it, have you tried to incorporate into your design practice? How?

These aren’t rhetorical questions — I really want to know!

A colleague and I just started a Design Justice Reading Circle in order to engage our coworkers and ourselves in the principles and practices of Design Justice. We’re using the term as a broad umbrella for the types of topics we want to discuss and the conversations we hope to generate.

If you’re not yet familiar with Design Justice, here’s how the [Design Justice Network](https://designjustice.org/) defines it, briefly (generated at the [Allied Media Conference](https://amc.alliedmedia.org/) in Detroit, the coolest conference of them all):

<highlight class="quote">

><quote></quote>
>_Design justice rethinks design processes, centralizing people who are normally marginalized by design and using collaborative creative practices to address the deepest challenges our communities face._

</highlight>

As designers and researchers, our small group is trying to think about how our work as consultants shapes the direction and designs of our clients’ work, now and into the future.

We are UX practitioners who are trained to always put the experience of the user front-and-center. So…

- How might we do this more intentionally, considering the needs of those who we might not normally reach with research activities?

- How might we engage those who might be considered “edge cases” by our peers or clients?

- How might we invite the community we’re designing for to co-create with us, particularly when we’re moving from project to project several times a year?

<br/>

In this group, we’ll talk about Design Justice, its working definition, and how we can incorporate it into our work. But we want to cast a wider net, too. We’ll gather case studies from around the web (okay, maybe print media, too), and discuss how we would use the Design Justice framework to approach a given issue differently.

We don’t know exactly what this will be yet, but hope that it will at least be a starting point. Part of our job every day is to challenge assumptions and speak for users — let’s just make sure we’re doing so for everyone.

<br/>

----

<br/>

Here are some pieces we’re starting with:

[10 Ways Designers Can Support Social Justice](https://designjustice.org/blog/2017/2/6/10-ways-designers-can-support-social-justice) (Design Justice Network blog)

[Turns Out Algorithms Are Racist](https://newrepublic.com/article/144644/turns-algorithms-racist) (The New Republic)

[Female hurricanes are deadlier than male hurricanes](https://www.cnn.com/2016/09/01/health/female-hurricanes-deadlier-than-male-hurricanes-trnd/index.html), study says (CNN)

<br/>

----

<br/>

This article was originally published on Deirdre's Medium blog.


Design Justice Reading Circle

<highlight class="quote">

><quote></quote>
>
>_Alexa, play Explosions in the Sky on Spotify._
>
>_Alexa, what’s the weather now?_
>
>_Alexa, wake me up at 7:30._

</highlight>

Since getting Amazon Echo Dot, aka Alexa, I talk to her almost daily. Our conversations are usually very simple and task-oriented, because, well, she only knows basic commands and is highly dependent on skills she knows.

However, the fact she is able to execute my asks, as basic as they are, makes her a superior virtual assistant. To be fair, I haven’t had the chance to compare her with other assistants besides Siri, which I now rarely interact with despite owning several Apple products. The reason I avoid Apple’s virtual assistant is that Siri has a hard time understanding me — or, more accurately, my accent.

The reason I avoid Apple’s virtual assistant is because Siri has a hard time understanding me -- or, more accurately, my accent.

![yiying1.png](https://echouser-api-media.s3.us-west-1.amazonaws.com/yiying1_9e4c98add3.png)

#### Recognizing human intention.

Virtual assistants, like many other digital products we use, are a type of machine learning application. Tons and tons of data are fed into such an application to help it see, hear and understand the world. Like how we learn to recognize spoken words, in order for a virtual assistant to recognize speech in a wide range of contexts, it needs to be trained with numerous variations of audio samples in speed, tone, pitch, volume, and pronunciation.

Failing to properly train virtual assistants before shipping will very likely aggravate users — or worse, make them lose trust in speech recognition altogether. This is exactly what happened to me five years ago, when I first encountered Siri on my then-brand new iPhone 4S. Oftentimes, the words Siri detected from my speech were hardly accurate, and I felt almost ashamed of not being understood by Siri.

![yiying2.png](https://echouser-api-media.s3.us-west-1.amazonaws.com/yiying2_a8e8002d22.png)

In this case, understanding every user is the crucial first impression the machine has to make.

#### Evolving as human-machine interaction increases.

To better understand the specific audience a virtual assistant is interacting with, a robust feedback loop needs to be in place to allow it to continue taking in new inputs and evolving as human-machine interaction increases.

Amazon claims that since Alexa, the brain behind Echo, is built in the cloud, it’s always getting smarter. In other words, the more we use Echo, the more it adapts to our speech patterns, vocabulary, and personal preferences.

Though I don’t have concrete evidence that Alexa is adapting to how I speak, I do feel she is getting better at understanding me.

For example, the first time I asked Alexa, “When is sunset?" she didn’t recognize it, and interpreted the sentence as “Why is sunset?"

I guess she was confused about my “h” sound in “When," which in theory, should be silent.

The second time, without changing my pronunciation, I put more emphasis on the word “When." For some reason, she recognized my intention, and gave me a proper response: “Sunset is at 8:19 pm.”

The third time and beyond, even when I followed the same speech pattern as my first attempt, with no word emphasized and a clear “h” in “When,” she got it, and told me the time of sunset.

#### The role of design in machine learning.

Anecdotes like these illuminate the role of user experience design in machine learning. However, without a strong technical background, how do designers approach machine learning?

A few months ago, I worked on a client project that required some understanding of machine learning. During this project, I put a lot of effort into researching high-level machine learning concepts and found myself enjoying the process of learning them.

What got me interested in machine learning is that it reflects something we designers are all so familiar with — the human-centered design (HCD) process. At a high level, machine learning and HCD both go through these three stages: _Define, Ideate, and Implement_.

![yiying3.png](https://echouser-api-media.s3.us-west-1.amazonaws.com/yiying3_a5e918cddb.png)

HCD process VS Machine learning workflow

What struck me about this machine learning workflow is that it reflects something we designers are all so familiar with — the human-centered design (HCD) process.

#### Designing what machines learn.

Anecdotes like these illuminate the role of user experience design in machine learning. However, without a strong technical background, how do designers approach machine learning?

A few months ago, I worked on a client project that required some understanding of machine learning, which was quite challenging for a non-technical person like me.

During this project, I put a lot of effort into researching high-level machine learning concepts and found myself enjoy the process of learning them. Here is a basic workflow of using machine learning to solve a business problem: spam email.

## Machine learning workflow for spam detection

#### Define.

The goal of spam detection is to prevent users from being bombarded or harmed by irrelevant information. To solve this problem, we need a labeled training data set that contains enough samples of spam and non-spam emails.

Once collected, these samples will then be pre-processed and cleaned to ensure data quality.

The next steps are to identify aspects of data and select or create models that are relevant to the problem we are trying to solve. We are looking for features, i.e. data properties, that help determine if an email is spam, such as email title, content, sender, receiver, etc, and use them to train a classification model, such as [Naive Bayes](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naive_Bayes_classifier).

#### Ideate.

After training, we will validate the model’s performance and accuracy with the validation set and iterate model selection or creation based on the result.

#### Implement.

Once the model is ready to go, we will deploy it to real-world applications, and start using it to predict and classify new emails. These new emails will then become new data input to the system.

![yiying4.png](https://echouser-api-media.s3.us-west-1.amazonaws.com/yiying4_437043b755.png)

##### Asking the right questions.

In this workflow example we can see that machine learning, just like HCD, starts with asking why we are doing this, who it’s serving for, what the user is trying to do, which contexts matter, what success looks like (Define) and then figuring out how we are going to do this (Ideate), and what we can learn from the real-world uses (Implement).

Not addressing these questions properly, especially for those at the Define stage — where we define what and who machine is learning from, we will end up having biased systems and make some people feel they or their experiences don’t matter.

Are dark skins not normal to cameras? [Shirley cards](https://www.npr.org/2014/11/13/363517842/for-decades-kodak-s-shirley-cards-set-photography-s-skin-tone-standard) — named after the original model, a Caucasian female with a light skin tone and blue eyes — set photography’s skin-tone standard for many years

Is a person with a different accent not the user? [Switchboard](https://www.wired.com/2017/03/voice-is-the-next-big-platform-unless-you-have-an-accent/?gi=6c955e554214#.zcqej5o2l) — a collection of roughly 2,400 telephone conversations that skewed toward a narrow set of American accents — is a benchmark for the models used in numerous voice recognition systems.

The HCD process, when it’s done well, is an inclusive approach to problem solving. By asking and answering these questions, the UX community has helped make the digital world a much more pleasant place to be.

This is why we need to get designers and researchers at the machine learning table, along with other professionals, to design and engineer systems that truly bring value to human’s lives.

## Inclusive machine learning.

As [Kat Holmes](https://twitter.com/katholmes), the Founder of KATA and previous Microsoft’s Principal Director for [Inclusive Design](https://www.microsoft.com/design/inclusive/), puts it like [this](https://www.highresolution.design/13-kat-holmes-microsoft/2017/5/7/13-microsoft-design-director-kat-holmes-on-the-importance-of-designing-for-one-size-fits-one):

<highlight class="quote">

><quote></quote>
>_Thinking about machine learning, data-driven decision-making, conversational interfaces and artificial intelligence…we need design in those conversations, we need designers in the decisions that are made around all those technologies…machine that’s learning, well, who’s it learning from and who designed it to learn in what way? Do they design it to learn in the way that they learn? Do they process with their own biases into the design and is that AI?_

</highlight>

With the progress of data collection and algorithms, as well as our awareness of design’s role in machine learning, I’m hopeful that future technologies will be more inclusive, rather than in favor of certain skin tones, accents, abilities, resources, and contexts. And maybe, just maybe this wouldn’t happen to me again:

<highlight class="quote">

><quote></quote>
>
>_Siri, what is machine learning?_
>
>_Here’s what I found on the web for ‘What is mushroom landing.'_
>
>That was a good laugh, though.

</highlight>

----

<br/>

_Author's note: Author's note: Special thanks to my co-workers Laura Mattis, Lilian Qian, Mick McGee, Rawan AbuShaban, Wan-Ting Huang, Yalu Ye and Zach Herring for their feedback and support! Also, thank you [Adam Geitgey](https://medium.com/@ageitgey) for writing an awesome series about machine learning — I learned a lot about machine learning from your articles._


Design Inclusive Machine Learning

I’ve been working as a UX researcher in an agency setting for 6+ years now, and in my experience, every project and client is at least a little bit different. Sometimes the client relationship is straightforward, and I develop a quick rapport and feel in sync with the client. Sometimes those relationships are more complex. For me, with respect to client relationships, the role of empathy looms large in client questions or adjustments to the research plan.

I’ve had the (not uncommon) experience where a client asks a question, such as “what if we added a diary study to this project” (the project timeline has already been scoped), or “I’d like to revisit the study goals” (and is requesting a complete revamp the original plan). Especially early on in my career, my stomach would drop, my brain would immediately jump to all the reasons why the suggestion wouldn’t work, and I would have to fight for internal calm to construct a response to the request.

Ultimately, what is happening here is my natural human resistance to change. I have likely spent hours planning and put my heart and soul into my research plan/moderator guide/questions/methodology, and it can feel effortful to adapt my work to the change requests. What I have found (and have heard others’ similar reactions) is that my mind or emotions move to blame the agent of that change, namely the client. (In my head) like, “ugh, why are you trying to make my life hard!? Why are you changing your mind!? Why are YOU doing this to ME??”

In reflection on the early days of my consulting career and my observations of early career UXers, I suspect that some of this resistance to change is also due to our experience level. Earlier in our careers, we are getting used to methodologies, crafting questions, and writing research plans; tasks often take us more time as we haven’t yet built up the repetitions that eventually make that work feel more intuitive. Further, at an agency, we often learn new things on every project, from working with a new set of clients to learning a new industry or product/service type, so again, we have increased cognitive load. And finally, we often work under a pre-scoped contract, so there is a finite amount of time available for the work.

<highlight>

>**I sense two clues to empathy in this reflection… empathy can be more difficult to summon when we feel we’re not in control or have a lack of agency; increased cognitive load can also impact our empathy level.**

</highlight>

<highlight class="quote">

>Brian:
>
><quote></quote>
>_Lack of agency is a great way to put it. Also, it’s genuinely hard to empathize with someone we don’t feel displays that empathy back towards us! Again, “Why are you doing this to me?!?!?!!?”_

</highlight>

<highlight class="quote">

>Brian:
>
><quote></quote>
>_There’s probably a simple truth here: the one paying the bill (the client) doesn’t really have to care how their change impacts me. But I also think we generally over-personalize what’s happening, and if we’re courageous enough to engage or even disagree, there is usually a way forward. This reminds me of marital advice to realize “it’s not you against me” but “both of us against the problem.” In consulting, I see a project as an ongoing conversation between me and the client about how best to achieve their results. Requests to change something become a data point about what’s going to make success. I have the right to provide data points, too (such as deadlines or my strategic perspective), and then together, we decide the way forward._

</highlight>

I’m going to walk you through a few examples from my career:

### Additional Method Ask

On one of my first projects as a consultant, I was paired with a very senior researcher on our team (shoutout to Dan Delaney). Dan is an unparalleled model consultant that I had the pleasure and privilege to learn from. A self-described “Ad man” in a previous career, he led by example through empathy and active listening as he worked with our client. I remember on an early client call for this project (this was after the project had been scoped and a statement of work signed), the client threw out the idea of adding a diary study into the project. My silent and unseen (pre-Zoom days!) reaction to this request was, “What?! We don’t have time for this! How the heck are you thinking we’re going to do this??”

Meanwhile, Dan responded very calmly, genuinely, and thoughtfully, “Wow, that is a great idea! What are your hopes for that activity? What do you want to learn?” and so on. He continued, staying right “alongside” the client and her thoughts, exploring the idea and potential outcomes. And eventually, he (seemingly effortlessly) steered the conversation and plan back to the original scope of the project.

What I took away from that interaction was the crystal clear example of truly listening to the client. Not jumping immediately to the impact on the scope, but instead, exploring what is underneath the request. Why is the client suggesting a diary study? What are her goals? What is she really interested in learning? How do those goals influence the ultimate outcomes desired of the research as a whole? This way, we can deeply understand the client’s needs and uncover more layers contributing to the project.

### Research Goal Change

This example of my experience comes from this year (so hopefully, you’ll witness an improvement from my previous experience :-) ). I was working with a client to conduct discovery research to support decision-making on their 2022 product strategy. Initially, the client and I decided that the research should be foundationally focused to promote a holistic understanding of their users. We developed a moderator guide and framework for data collection accordingly. A week or so before the user interviews were slated to start, we piloted the study using an internal subject matter expert as a participant. After the session, I debriefed the client. I thought the session went relatively well. The client, however, was very disappointed in the session. In her view, we had only gathered information that the team already knew.

Fortunately, I have learned a lot over my time as a consultant and developed my pathways to calmly address requests and have a conversation. And that is really what it takes. Being able to take a (deep) breath and dig into the request. And this is where empathy comes in.

In this example, through earlier conversations, I understood where the client was coming from. The business was experiencing customer churn (leaving the service), and they needed to more deeply understand the details around specific pain points contributing to churn. The initial plan to be foundationally focused lacked the depth desired to understand where they needed to pivot. So while the change request was relatively significant (I reworked the entire moderator guide and data collection framework to match the refined goals), I also understood the desire for the change and wanted to ensure that I was delivering the correct findings to truly help the team move forward.

I recently learned a phrase from a book on parenting (_Parenting without Power Struggles, Susan Stiffelman_) “How does this behavior make perfect sense?” I think it applies to these types of situations as well. Because as I came to realize (fortunately early in my agency career, thanks to wonderful role models and mentors) that our clients have whole other worlds that they’re dealing with, we often have relatively little visibility into those worlds. But asking that question (or before learning the phrase), asking myself, what could be going on with this person? What is happening on their side that I may not be aware of? That reflection opens up a whole host of possibilities and understanding, and with that comes empathy.

<highlight>

>**There is another clue to empathy hidden here as well… empathy can promote understanding, but I also think the reverse is true; sometimes, we need the understanding to promote empathy.** 

</highlight>

A bit of a chicken and egg dilemma!

The folks we work with are under pressure from their organizations to release a product, drive decision-making, etc., a universe of factors that we will miss without using our research skills. The client’s questions, suggestions, and requests reflect those pressures, combined with a genuine desire to make the research the best it can be to meet their goals. Ultimately that is what we’re trying to accomplish. It is my responsibility as a researcher and a partner in the project to extend every ounce of empathy that I find I can easily extend to users. Understanding their reality better (organization, pressures, goals, etc.) enables me to do my best work. The conversations, active listening, and uncovering reasons behind change requests inform vital shifts to the plan necessary to achieve the best possible research outcomes.

<highlight>

>**There is another clue hiding here as well, empathy is hard to summon when you feel on the spot and pressured to make a decision or take action.** 

</highlight>

I often need to ask for space to take a breath and consider change requests. And then, I can come back to the table with a topped-up tank of empathy and my thoughts in order. It takes courage to ask for what you need, and I still need to remind myself that it is okay to ask for that time.

In the next segment, [Brian](https://www.linkedin.com/in/briansaltshalcomb/) will look at what it means to have empathy as a parent. Not always an easy feat, I can say with surety as a parent of an almost 5-year-old!

<br>

--

If you haven’t already, check out the previous posts in our empathy series.

[Exploring Empathy Part 1: An Introduction to the Series](/stories/exploring-empathy-part-1-an-introduction-to-the-series)

[Exploring Empathy Part 2: Empathy for Users](/stories/exploring-empathy-part-2-empathy-for-users)


Exploring Empathy Part 3: Empathy for Clients

### Upholding company culture.

This is one of my responsibilities as the Operations Administrator at EchoUser. Well, that sounds easy: provide food, coffee, in office yoga, and company happy hours! DONE! But then I got to thinking… some of the biggest tech giants not only in the world, but right here in the Bay Area, provide their employees with all-you-can-eat cafeterias, made to order coffee, on-site gyms, and bottomless kegerators, yet they still have high turnover and unhappy employees. Why? What more could they want?

As I was searching the Internet for possible reasons, I came across an [article](https://www.entrepreneur.com/growing-a-business/entrepreneurs-need-to-focus-on-culture-not-perks/247167), called Entrepreneurs Need to Focus on Culture, Not Perks, written by Greg Besner, the Founder and CEO of CultureIQ.

This made me realize I’ve been misdefining perks as culture and I’m not the only person getting these two confused. Yes, they can be tied together, but they still have their own entity.

![Brown-Bag.jpg](https://echouser-api-media.s3.us-west-1.amazonaws.com/Brown_Bag_dd1bdff949.jpg)

### Here at EchoUser…

We value a healthy work/life balance, continuous self-improvement, open communication and teamwork, creativity, and empowerment – all important components that build a strong company culture.

--

Some examples of these include:

#### A healthy and flexible work-life balance.

EchoUser understands employees have a life outside of work. We trust our employees will get their work done while also enjoying a healthy work/life balanced life.

#### Our quarterly mentorship program.

During our company strategy off-site last year, we developed “action teams”. One of the action team’s goals was to create an internal mentorship program in order to strengthen our skills and learn from our peers. We are currently in the alpha phase of the mentorship program and are receiving positive feedback from all participants.

#### Open communication and teamwork.

It is not an uncommon sight to see groups of people gathering in an open space and bouncing ideas off of each other.

![Any-Experience-Picture.jpg](https://echouser-api-media.s3.us-west-1.amazonaws.com/Any_Experience_Picture_2642d30588.jpg)

#### Any Experience projects.

Employees are able to work on projects that they are interested in, where they see a need for improvement or just want to do more research on. This empowers our employees and allows them to work on something they have a personal interest in. Ask us about our “Hello Toilet” and “Shut-up and Woof!” projects!

#### Most importantly…

We have fun with each other!

![Blog213_Featured.jpg](https://echouser-api-media.s3.us-west-1.amazonaws.com/Blog213_Featured_b36676d93e.jpg)

These are just a few of the things that help build a strong and positive company culture and how we are doing it at EchoUser!


Company Culture

The World Health Organization predicts that by 2050, the global population of those over 60 will be 2 billion, double from where it stood in 2000. Thanks to improvements in public healthcare, our life expectancy is increasing. Although we will see more people live up to 80 and 90 years old, the number of adults aged 65 and over will outnumber children under the age of 5 in the next few years. This got me thinking about the current experience for the elderly and their caregivers/children. Are there any areas in which we can improve their experience? What tech companies are trying to improve the lives of the elderly? Here are some of my findings.

#### Internet of Things technology.

Many companies are starting to build sensors that can be placed in and around homes of the elderly and disabled to keep track of their activities and their whereabouts. For example, EmpowerYu is a startup trying to provide peace of mind to the elderly, the caregivers and loved ones by monitoring daily activities using unobtrusive sensors in an elder’s house. As a result, the company will be able to assist the elderly live independently as long as possible. Family members or caregivers will be able to resolve any issues from small ones (i.e. the microwave stopped working) to more serious ones (the elderly may fall down). Another added bonus of using sensors around the house is that we can reduce cognitive load for the elderly (i.e. one may forget to wear a wearable device). Moreover, the smart system will learn the elder’s lifestyle and determine when something unusual happens. Currently a team of Experienced Designers at EchoUser are helping refine this experience.

#### Wearable devices.

Today, there are wide variety of wearables in the market such as Fitbit and Apple Watch. Wearable devices can provide great benefits to the elderly as well. Wearables will allow tracking of older people’s activities, vital signs and whereabouts even outside of their houses and because wearables are worn, that are harder to lose. They come in many different shapes. Some look like watches, and others look like a fashion accessory. Others are making them discreet by letting users clip them onto clothing items. For example, a company called CarePredict designed a wrist worn device which monitors the wearer’s activities and alerts caregivers/ family members of any changes in behavioral patterns. However, wearables have some cons as well. For example, what if one forgets to wear the device or forgets to charge the battery?

#### Powered exoskeleton technology.

This robotic technology helps users boost their physical strength. This technology can be used in military and medical fields (e.g., Ekso Bionics), but also to aid the elderly with movement. For example, the Hybrid Assistive Limb developed by Cyberdyne reads the user’s brain signal and takes the desired limb movement.

#### Summary:

These are a few examples of the current technologies which assist the elderly and their loved ones. There are pros and cons to each technology and each has different use cases where they excel. All in all, it is exciting to see many companies tackling this complex and emotionally important issues for our society. Please share with us any other technologies you may know of that built with the elderly in mind.


Exploring Technology That Helps the Elderly

One of my goals for the year was to take space and time to reflect. I’m happy to say that I’ve been able to successfully work on that goal! Recently, I have been reflecting on empathy. It is one of our company values at EchoUser, and it’s not hard to make the connection as to why. Empathy is core to UX and is often discussed. I have been reflecting on how EchoUser has explicitly framed our Empathy value statement and what it encompasses:

<highlight>

>**_Empathy_**
>
>**Our core essence. Act with integrity, respect, and self-awareness. Have this for our clients, our work, each other, and ourselves.**

<highlight/>

We had a virtual offsite last month where we engaged in several team activities based on our values. Mick, our founder and Vice President, talked about empathy, and especially the aspect of having empathy for our clients. It got me thinking.

There are situations when empathy feels easy to me and other situations when empathy is harder or doesn’t come as naturally. I wondered, in my own career and life, what’s the difference, and why is this the case? I also realized that I’ve grown my capacity for empathy over time in my career. Currently, I have also been doing a lot of personal work in the area of empathy and vulnerability. Something significant is beginning to shift within me as a part of this personal work, and I decided to write a blog post about my musings on empathy. But then my colleague Brian convinced me that there was enough here to expand into a series (thanks for the creative push, Brian!). So that’s what we’ve done. In the next few posts, Brian and I will be sharing our thoughts on empathy from the following perspectives:

- Empathy for Users

- Empathy for Clients

- Empathy for Kids (as parents)

- Empathy for Oneself

We hope you enjoy the ride and that perhaps our musings encourage you to reflect on how empathy shows up for you in your life. Where is it easy, and where is it hard for you?

<br>

--

Stay tuned for the next installment in our series, Empathy for Users, coming next week.

[Chloe Markley](https://www.linkedin.com/in/chloewsmarkley/)


Exploring Empathy Part 1: An Introduction to the series

In one of my early career stops, I worked with nonprofits to configure a software system that would track their outcomes. Picture your local food bank wanting to count how many meals they served and how far their dollars stretched. My process involved discovery work with the Program Directors, building out and testing the system, and then training the “frontline” workers – like the food bank volunteers – on how to use it.

After a few projects, a pattern began to emerge… can you guess?

<br/>

As elegantly and successfully as I could translate Program Directors’ needs into the system, as excited as those leaders were – implementation generally failed. The food bank volunteer didn’t understand it, or it was too much work, or the data they put in weren’t correct. Often, this resulted in the cash-strapped organization abandoning the tool within a couple years. **The kicker: it also fueled a narrative that those volunteers were to blame. We needed to change these people.** I feel deflated writing this. In so many ways, what a drain on the lifeblood of these organizations!

A lot changed for me when I started beginning projects by hanging out with the food bank volunteers (or similar “users” of the system). Spend a day in a fast-moving food bank, listen to the assistance being provided, and it’s easy to see why data entry might be low in priority. More subtly, it would become clear why slight tweaks to the system or the process actually increased success. And most importantly, wow, were these people amazing! They were running over from their lunch breaks or bringing their children in to try to live out their view of community.

<highlight>

>**This is the empathy lightbulb that all of user or human-centered design is built on, right? We build better things when we seek to understand the real people who will use them, and solve for those people.**

</highlight>

As that lightbulb has grown into a profession and discipline for me, I notice similar traits across my colleagues (and I imagine you, the reader). When we have a core belief that we must place the user at the center, it’s fairly easy to have curiosity about them. People are fascinating, and as the subject of our work it becomes natural to deeply understand their experiences. This passion is generally what brings us to work, and it’s mutually reinforcing.

<highlight class="quote">

>Chloe: 
>
><quote></quote>
>_"For me there is also a sense of kinship with users. Prior to ever knowing anything about UX, I can recall my experience as a Microsoft Word user. Any time I made a mistake: picked the wrong command, did something to lose a file, inability to perfect the formatting etc. I blamed myself! Once I learned about the field of User Experience, I realized that those types of mistakes don’t rest solely on my shoulders (as a user), there is an aspect of the design that could be changed to better suit my needs and give me an improved experience. I think this past experience is in my unconscious mind as I research users."_

</highlight>

<highlight>

>**So, empathy for users from first glance feels pretty easy. It’s the core of our UX work, and we all know what it’s like to be a user ourselves. But, not so fast…**

</highlight>

#### Empathy Depletion

While it’s generally easy, I do recall scenarios where I simply could not muster empathy for the users I worked with.

One situation that comes to mind is a multi-year research project where the product was closely connected with the user’s worldview and belief system, and where (generally) that worldview differed from my own. In the beginning, all of what we have discussed was true: it was easy to be curious, I could get excited about what I was learning could improve the product, and I could relate to some of their perspectives. But over time, “living” in another’s worldview and needing to maintain my objectivity grew tiring. I felt exhausted trying to enter their world each day and give it the attention it deserved.

Similarly, I have had days or weeks where my research pace was simply too fast. The sharp listening at 8:00am faded into going through the motions by the last interview of the day. Empathy fades into “let’s get this over with.”

Both of these scenarios call for better boundaries. There is such a thing as being on a project for too long or scheduling too many interviews in a day.

<highlight>

>**I imagine boundaries will show up again in this series. For those in the empathy business, how do we monitor what’s left in our “bank”, and meter out that limited resource?**

</highlight>

### Over-Identifying

Another secret to UX Research is that while it’s one part the “soft skill” of empathy, it’s equally about logic and strategy, and there can be conflict in those two. For many researchers as they begin, it can be hard to know how to listen empathically, AND:

- Steer a user away from topics that don’t matter to the research
- Not reciprocate their vulnerability by sharing about your own life
- Protect against over-indexing on any one user or one comment
- Interpret when what the user says they want isn’t really what would be helpful

All of these tactics are vital to providing reliable insights, and yet perhaps a bit paradoxical with what we generally mean when we say empathy. It reminds me of a saying we had in another past job, when I was a hospital chaplain. We would talk about needing to have “one foot in the room and one foot out of the room.” As we entered with empathy for the patient’s life circumstances, we needed to protect ourselves from getting too wrapped up in them, and thus forgetting our role (and ironically, losing our very ability to provide support).  I think that insight fits pretty well for how I experience empathy with users.

<highlight>

>**I wonder if that carries? Empathy for users, for clients, for ourselves – is it always about one foot in and one foot out?** 

</highlight>

What a rewarding profession. We spend our days exploring fascinating humanity and providing a level of attention to people’s experiences, attention we wish every device or service (looking at you, Department of Motor Vehicles) paid to us. Yet, it’s not always that simple.

<br>

--

Stay tuned next month as Chloe continues the exploration with a focus on client empathy.

[Brian Salts-Halcomb](https://www.linkedin.com/in/briansaltshalcomb/)

[Chloe Markley](https://www.linkedin.com/in/chloewsmarkley/)


Exploring Empathy Part 2: Empathy for users

I knew time was a much more fluid concept in Uganda than it was in America. If I invited my colleagues to meet at 10 a.m., they might arrive around 11, 11:30, or sometime later that day. However, every Ugandan I knew got up when the sun rose. Many people worked in their fields before they left for their office between 8:30-10 a.m. As an outsider, I really wanted his guidance so that I could feel more productive and make sure I was working on things important to my Ugandan colleagues and not just important to me. 

Around 8:45 am, I’d use my own key and let myself into our empty office. I’d greet and visit government health care workers in the clinic next door, practice the language spoken in my town, Luganda, and learn about the challenges of immunizing children who live far from a clinic and chat about upcoming weddings, funerals, and births. 

During Peace Corps, children affectionately referred to me as muzungu, which means white person or foreigner in Luganda. I often wanted to be invisible because I looked so different AND because I so desperately wanted to fit in. Ugandans frequently stopped whatever they were doing to stare at me, or if I was standing near someone, I would suddenly find kids stroking my hair. Uganda has over 50 different cultural tribes and consequently a variety of norms. As Ugandans in my town were typically non-confrontational, I tried to follow their lead. This wasn’t easy for a New Jersey-born American with Brooklyn roots. It meant that I kept my thoughts about my boss’s recent behavior to myself.

I texted a good friend to share my frustrations with her. I couldn’t wait to vent. It was only after I clicked “send” that I realized that I accidentally sent the message to my boss. Immediately, I felt fear and worry. However, the mistake forced me to find out what was really going on with my boss. I called him and asked if there was a reason why he arrived late and left the office early. It turned out that he hadn’t been paid for the past five months. Unfortunately, all Red Cross employees weren’t being paid because of a cash flow problem at their head office. The longer I stayed in Uganda, the more I learned that delayed paychecks were a pretty common occurrence. I felt terrible about what had happened.

Almost 20 years after serving in the Peace Corps, this story has a few invaluable lessons that I regularly apply to UX research. It’s an important reminder to identify my assumptions and ensure that I’m testing them rather than assuming that they’re fact. I aim to assume positive intent, and focus on being curious. We, as researchers, never really know what’s going on with our colleagues, the people we’re interviewing, and other stakeholders. This experience also highlighted my need to learn the cultural context of where I’m working - whether I’m in another country with cultural norms different from my upbringing or a company that has its own set of cultural mores. Living in Uganda, I knew that I’d never fully understand the culture or be aware of all of the intricacies of what is and isn’t appropriate. But by recognizing this, and prefacing my intent by saying something like, “Please let me know if this is not something appropriate to ask...” or by asking a trusted Ugandan advisor how he or she would handle a certain situation, I think that I had a better chance of not offending anyone. I also learned to push myself to have more challenging conversations. I try to balance having an awkward conversation with considering the culture of where I’m working. Lastly, I think this and other similar experiences in Uganda taught me that I don’t have to constantly be doing something. Spending time learning about people, their struggles, and their joy, and listening was and continues to be the most important part of my UX work. I feel incredibly grateful that I had a chance to make and learn from my mistakes, and incorporate these lessons into my current day-to-day work as a UX Researcher. 


How I Learned Not to Make Assumptions and Have Awkward Conversations

The web has been inundated with news about David Bowie’s recent loss in the fight against cancer. Days before his passing he released his final album, Blackstar.

Articles began to appear claiming this release was not a coincidence, but rather a thoughtfully executed plan on the part of the artist. He had known the time would come where he would have to say goodbye, and rather than some contrived press- event Bowie did what he has done best for decades. He planned a grand farewell, and thank you, for those that had loved and supported him. Many articles have done deep dives into the meaning behind the lyrics, the symbolism in the final music videos ([here’s one example](https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2016/03/16/david-bowies-last-release-lazarus-was-parting-gift-for-fans-in-c/)).

![db.gif](https://echouser-api-media.s3.us-west-1.amazonaws.com/db_c62951ea46.gif)

I wanted to take a look at the **experience** that was David Bowie’s passing. While most celebrity deaths can be felt and heard worldwide, this was unique. While it is hard to say what Bowie hoped the outcome would be, I would argue that it has been more of a celebration than a mourning compared to other artist’s passings.

I can’t help but think of the mass of fans that gathered around Seattle Center after Kurt Cobain had committed suicide. The thought conjures images of sadness, hurt, loss – and perhaps that is inclusive with the nature of Cobain’s death. It seems like so often we mourn the passing of rock stars in this way (recently: Lemmy Kilmister, Scott Weiland, Joe Crocker, Wayne Static – just to name a few ? ). In my opinion, it feels like Bowie wanted to steer away from that sentiment. While his loss is still undeniably heartbreaking, he has left us with something to celebrate. A new collection of work (Blackstar) to remember him by and music videos that seemed to share the sentiment of “I know it’s coming, and I’m ready.” I believe this adds a kind of peace for fan that are dealing with the loss.

--

_Banner art by [craniodsgn](https://www.deviantart.com/craniodsgn/art/David-Bowie-323873668)._

Designing for Death

In our next two blog posts, Chloe and I will shift more personal. Beyond empathy for our users and clients, how does empathy show up in our homes and within our concept of self? 

I often think about the work I did as a volunteer coordinator. Our volunteers supported people through big hairy times in their life: addiction, illness, and grief. What I found fascinating was how often my phone would ring, and I’d hear: “Do you have any one-day volunteer work? A flower garden to plant? A meal that needs cooking?” While I would try to find somewhere to channel that energy, it was revealing about the boundaries of empathy in our world. “Drive by” empathy is an entirely different task than to walk alongside someone in the nitty-gritty of life. 

<highlight>

>**This brings me to parenting - where there is no one-day work, no sporadic empathy, where I listen to my child in a one-hour interview and then go about my day.**

</highlight>

No, just the monotonous, grinding, step-after-step, redo-after-redo, day-after-day, sleepless nights work. Dogged love, for sure. Is it the same empathy?

When my son was born, empathy towards him was fairly easy. His needs and his helplessness were so clear. We had brought him into the world, and it was my responsibility to try to understand him and respond. Those early years can be extremely hard for parents, but for my wife and me, they were mostly smooth sailing. We practiced learning to watch and observe him, gave him space to explore, and provided the foundational support to navigate the world.

Everything changed when we adopted a brother, and my boys were between ages two and five. As they began to resemble little adults, and as the number of interventions required to keep them from hurting each other grew— my empathy was often nowhere to be found. What had once been, “I see what you’re trying to communicate; how can I help?” quickly turned into:

- How many times have I told you… [that no one likes to be spit at in their face]

- Why are you doing this to me? [refusing to eat my wonderful dinner that was the only food you’d eat last week]

- What don’t you understand about… [why we don’t pee on the carpet]

I found that I often simply didn’t like these people. These are soul-killing moments for parents, where we are so confused and also so ashamed that we can’t bring a grounded point of view to these young kids.

In the good moments and through some really helpful mentors, I’m starting to remember a few things. The first thought can’t be said enough: parents’ tanks are often so empty, and the fount of empathy just isn’t going to be there until we are filled. When I hear this, I usually want to scream because of the amount of work it is to find, prepare and pay for childcare — and what a drop in the bucket “breaks” can be. But it’s vital. So let’s start there. My own health is likely the greatest factor in how I interpret my children.

Taking it a step further, our specialists and educators remind us that our growing children just simply cannot be the “mini adults” we want them to be. I’m expecting too much. Neurologically, they do not have the wiring for self-control that I desire from them. Emotionally, many of their actions are simply the best communication they can come up with, for “I need you to see me.” Even more, my children are trying to develop autonomy, to find their own place in the world. 

This knowledge is powerful, and as I am able to really internalize it, I can see my children differently. In the trying moments with my four-year-old, I find empathy by thinking of him as if he is two, needing Dad to respond to him in a more elemental way, building the repeat cycle of “express need→need met” of a baby. For my five-year-old, I grow the most frustrated during his tantrums, where he moves from the gentlest boy to kicking, clawing, and demanding. For a long time, I would moralize and try to teach him during all of this: “This isn’t kind to daddy. I know you don’t want to hurt me. Let’s talk through this together.” Finally, an educator helped me to understand that he simply could not hear me during those moments. I’ve flipped from trying to fix the behavior to trying to understand what he’s communicating, which is often about how out of control life feels for him. There’s that empathy creeping back in.

Along with those educators, Chloe is a regular commiserater and listener to me, experiencing many of these same motions of parenting:

<highlight class="quote">

>Chloe:
>
><quote></quote>
>_As a teammate and a person, it is so helpful to have people I interact with on a daily basis to chat with on parenting challenges and share some of the shame I feel when I don’t get it right. It’s often just helpful to know it’s not only me going through these challenges! I wonder if having empathy for each other as parents, or if that’s not empathy, just those discussions, helps us to top up our empathy tanks a bit? At the very least, they help me feel seen and less alone in my struggles as a parent._
>
>_In my reflections, echoing what Brian mentioned above, it is the deep connection between myself and my child that can make finding empathy more difficult. As a type A person, it is also about a lack of control. I can’t control this little human, and in my heart, I know I don’t want to. But at the same time, I want her to eat her dinner and put her socks on so we can leave the house or wear weather-appropriate clothing. I am both responsible for her health and well-being and at her mercy when she demands to wear shorts and then complains it’s cold out. It can feel hard to have empathy when I feel like I’m trying to do my best to help, but my effort is summarily dismissed._
>
>_And I think that is why empathy in my work is often easier to come by. For me, the connection to the work isn’t at such a deeply personal level, and I often have more control over the situation. This also prompts me to wonder, do we have different empathy tanks that we draw from?_

</highlight>

So, empathy in parenting… much more challenging, but I also think chock full of potential learnings. I’ll suggest two:

<highlight>

>**The first clue is that empathy is about letting go of the need to change the situation.**

</highlight>

All these parenting moments are moments where my desire to control tries to overwhelm my children’s need to communicate something—two incredibly strong forces. What eases the pressure is when I can slow down and observe rather than fix it. Ironically, this is what I always tried to convey to those volunteers years ago. What they thought was going to be hard about caring was how unpredictable it would be. “What do I do? What do I say? What’s going to happen?” But whenever that could shift towards “I don’t need to change anything; I just need to listen,” there was relief and ease. For us to have day-in and day-out empathy for people going through hard things, for our spouses, and for our kids, we need a posture of understanding before correcting or solving. This is actually natural UX. As a researcher, I love to sit behind the freedom to simply understand what a user is trying to say, well before a client’s team and I turn toward actions. It’s that same posture I’m trying to cultivate, somehow twisted and hard to access by my expectations of what it means to parent or support.

<highlight>

>**The second clue may be about our own fallibility.**

</highlight>

Do you remember that moment when you realized that your parents made a lot of mistakes? When they no longer controlled the universe or walked on water. My kids are a long way from that moment (I still have them convinced I can see through walls), but I feel it every day - and I think it’s powerful. There is nothing more absurd and embarrassing than me yelling at my distraught child to get his shoes on because we’re going to be late and “This is important to me!!!” Parenting is deeply humbling. We are deeply flawed. But if that’s the case, might it mean we might let up a bit on the flaws of those near us…?

Ah, but that is a new can of worms and our next topic. Empathy for self— what are the barriers to seeing ourselves as I described? Perhaps deeply flawed, but also worthy of respect and care. Join us next time as [Chloe](https://www.linkedin.com/in/chloewsmarkley/) digs in.

<br>

--

If you haven’t already, check out the previous posts in our empathy series.

[Exploring Empathy Part 1: An Introduction to the Series](/stories/exploring-empathy-part-1-an-introduction-to-the-series)

[Exploring Empathy Part 2: Empathy for Users](/stories/exploring-empathy-part-2-empathy-for-users)

[Exploring Empathy Part 3: Empathy for Clients](/stories/exploring-empathy-part-3-empathy-for-clients)



Exploring Empathy Part 4: Empathy for Kids

I truly didn’t know this was a thing, and did not realize the level of importance, until the last few years… really this past year. Several factors brought this into focus for me: becoming a mother, taking the Playing Big course (shoutout to [Tara Mohr](https://www.taramohr.com/), I learned so much), and having a few episodes of debilitating fatigue that seemed to have no identifiable source. There is so much to unpack here, but parenting struggles and the fatigue episodes uncovered a realization of how stress affects my relationships and my body. On the surface level, I knew this was true, but I did not learn the lesson in a real way until this past year. What I have started learning from Tara, and several other sources ([Brené Brown](https://brenebrown.com/), [Dr. Rick Hanson](https://www.rickhanson.net/)) is that it can be difficult to have empathy for others, until I can extend it to myself. The pressure that I have been putting on myself to excel in my career, to be a “good” parent, and to always "go go go" at 110% is having very real effects on my body. 

This was, this is, a big realization. Working to excel has always been an element of my core self, from my earliest days at school. It is a pressure for accomplishment, and deeply tied with that is a pressure for perfection. These needs feel so ingrained in my being, my perception of self, that I often can’t even see it. Most terrifying for me now is the fear that my parenting will cause that need for perfectionism in my daughter. And given my personal experience and a realization that I want my daughter to love herself exactly as she is; I don’t want to pass that on to her. 

One of the big questions that Tara asks in her training is: is perfectionism and drive for achievement really serving you? Or said another way, what goal are you actually serving on the “treadmill” of perfection and accomplishment? Is it moving you towards projects that speak to your soul and core values, or is it holding you back or causing you to hide from bigger things? In one of her talks, she spoke about what it feels like to work from a place of relaxation (which is different from rest!). That concept hit a cord for me. I came to identify that I do my best work, and my best thinking, when I’m relaxed. That the “flow” state is one of relaxation, not one of pressure, stress, or anxiety. And as one example, this realization has actually freed me to be able to write, which I had always wanted to do, but felt stuck and unable to do previously.

What I am still learning and incorporating into my life is this concept that I can extend empathy to myself and that doesn’t mean that I’m giving up or giving myself a pass. I can work from a place of relaxation and that doesn’t mean that I’m slacking. That I need to have empathy for myself as a parent, to work on that with intention so that I can extend that empathy for my daughter and ensure that I instill in her the belief that she is worthy of love in any way that she shows up.

And wow, I will tell you — this is hard! It takes attention and repeated effort to not slide back into old habits. I found I was doing it again just the other day when I was feeling tired in the evening (more so than I feel I should, given the day’s activities) and told my husband I was going to wake up early again to get my workout in. And he just looked at me like “What are you talking about… why would you do that?” And I realized, "oh, yeah, I’m pushing myself unnecessarily and not listening to what my body is telling me" (so I didn’t wake up early, I let myself get rest). 

<highlight>

>**Here is another clue about empathy: we know that listening and understanding others is critical to fostering empathy. So the lesson I’m learning is that having empathy for myself is actively listening and understanding myself.**

</highlight>

Feels like a simple concept, but one that has taken me a long time and hard work to get to.

I’d like to bring Brian’s voice in here, as I’m curious about others’ paths or experiences with self-empathy:

<highlight class="quote">

>Brian:
>
><quote></quote>
>_We’re a bit different here, and I think that’s illustrative. I’ve always held myself and my work to a high standard, but I’ve never been highly ambitious — so I don’t relate significantly to the way Chloe describes the pressure to succeed. More often, I find my natural voice to myself and others is about accepting what is, about “less is more”, and about going with the flow._
>
>_What I find interesting is that my growth area is listening to (having empathy towards?) the part of me that is more ambitious, and more achievement-oriented. I do have “fire” inside, although I’m maybe less familiar with it. Cultivating and recognizing my goals and values has become more important to me as I age and my time gets squeezed._
>
>_I think self-empathy and knowledge are often about recognizing the variety of voices and impulses we have within ourselves. We are complicated beings! It is through empathy that I can see I am both intense and relaxed, both introverted and extroverted, and both confident and insecure._

</highlight>

Empathy for self is a journey, and I am so grateful to have discovered this path. I am hopeful that through deliberate practice, empathy for clients, my family, and myself will come as easily as the empathy I have for the users I study. Some of the clues and conclusions that we came to as Brian and I wrote this reflective series already feel like helpful wayfinding points on my path, anchors to recall if I feel like I’m slipping backward.

I also have a hope that in sharing these reflections those of you out there that feel a connection to some of what we’re saying can also move onto this path with us. I am wishing for you all that you start to realize that you are enough, you are doing enough, and you don’t need to push yourself to exhaustion to do great things. That you can learn and improve and achieve and also speak to yourself in a loving way. Taking a page from my favorite Peloton instructor Robin Arzon, if no one has told you that you’re doing a good job today, let me be the first one. You are doing a good job, you are enough. ❤️

<br>

--

Resources I’ve found particularly helpful on this journey so far:

- [Brené Brown](https://brenebrown.com/) | [Vulnerability Ted Talk](https://www.ted.com/talks/brene_brown_the_power_of_vulnerability/no-comments) | [Dare to Lead podcast](https://brenebrown.com/podcast-show/dare-to-lead/)
- [Dr. Rick Hanson](https://www.rickhanson.net/) | [Being Well podcast](https://www.rickhanson.net/being-well-podcast/)
- [Tara Mohr](https://www.rickhanson.net/being-well-podcast/) | [Playing Big course](https://www.taramohr.com/courses/)
- [Whole Brain Child, Dr. Dan Siegel](https://drdansiegel.com/book/the-whole-brain-child/)
- [Parenting without Power Struggles, Susan Stiffelman](https://susanstiffelman.com/podcast/)

-- 

If you haven’t already, check out the previous posts in our empathy series.

[Exploring Empathy Part 1: An Introduction to the Series](/stories/exploring-empathy-part-1-an-introduction-to-the-series)

[Exploring Empathy Part 2: Empathy for Users](/stories/exploring-empathy-part-2-empathy-for-users)

[Exploring Empathy Part 3: Empathy for Clients](/stories/exploring-empathy-part-3-empathy-for-clients)

[Exploring Empathy Part 4: Empathy for Kids](/stories/exploring-empathy-part-4-empathy-for-kids)



Exploring Empathy Part 5: Empathy for Myself

“Scale” is a rather confusing corporate buzzword – people love to talk about it, yet it can mean so many different things at the same time. After all, anyone who cares about their organization’s long-term health cares deeply about scale, and there are countless ways to achieve it. To keep up with a growing product, for example, a sales director might scale his sales team by expanding his operation, a support manager might scale customer support offerings by building out a help center, and an engineer might tinker with a feature to make sure it can scale to a greater load. In all such cases, how a company responds to growth and change plays a huge part in its business success. Why should designers care about scale? The decisions that a designer makes early in the development process can have lasting implications for how a product, and an entire business, fares down the road for all stakeholders. A good product not only evolves with the times but also has a strong foundation for withstanding change – from introducing new features, to adding more users, to moving into new markets. It’s clear that designing for scale is incredibly important, but it can be easily overlooked when deadlines are tight. Keeping the following tips in mind, however, can save your product team countless hours in the future:

# Develop a solid conceptual model

More than once I’ve been in the situation where, late in the game, a new feature needs to be added to the interface. The question inevitably becomes, “But where should it go?” By making it clear at the beginning how elements relate to each other at an abstract level, it is more likely that new functions will find a natural home in the future. I find it useful to start any design project by making a high-level map of how elements relate to each other (i.e. “this group encompasses these sets of elements, or this group of elements is secondary to this other group of elements”), without getting too literal about where they are actually positioned. It’s similar to designing a house and first determining what kind of rooms need to be included and how they should be grouped.

# Leave some breathing room in your framework.

Similarly, when designing a product’s structural framework, it helps to anticipate future content. For example, when designing a navigational framework, consider how future information will fit into the pattern you choose. While it may be sufficient to find what you’re looking for now, what will happen when you have ten times as much information to navigate? Perhaps you need to incorporate filtered views or advanced search functions.

# Consider edge cases

When reviewing your designs, solicit feedback from stakeholders who understand the extreme conditions the product will have to accommodate. Chat with a few users outside of your typical user profile. Talk to support representatives who have worked directly with customers and understand when and how they will push the product to the limit. Collaborate closely with engineers who understand technical limitations and are invested in making the product as robust as possible.

# Design for the probable

At the same time, while it is important to be aware of edge cases, there’s a balance between accommodating extremes and providing an efficient interface for the average user. Edge cases should not drive your design. As recommended by Alan Cooper, a thought leader in the field of interaction design, “design for the probable; provide for the possible.” It is best to design a default interface for your most common use case but provide necessary secondary functions on demand. A good product is simple enough to use on a daily basis but customizable and robust enough to handle edge cases when they arise. All that said, no amount of preparation eliminates the need to iterate after launch. Early and thoughtful consideration into scalability, however, can help your product adapt well into the future.


Designing for Today and Tomorrow

When my colleague Chloe Markley set out to [write about empathy last fall](/stories/exploring-empathy-part-1-an-introduction-to-the-series), I was curious how she might give a familiar term, new clarity, new bite. At EchoUser, we say empathy is **our core essence**. That sounds important but hard to grasp, bringing up thoughts of the undefined _essence of fruit flavor_ contained in a LaCroix. Could we move towards a more refined, more bold, more palatable recipe?

## The Empathy Cocktail

We began by thinking about [empathy for users](/stories/exploring-empathy-part-2-empathy-for-users), the basic foundation of UX. There, we recognized that empathy’s main ingredients are curiosity and acceptance, a posture that people (ourselves included!) is fascinating and well-intentioned. Rather than interpreting someone else’s viewpoint or actions as mistakes, the empathic person sees their best intentions. However, we also balanced this curiosity with the idea of “one foot in the room, one foot out of the room”: for the UX researcher, the temptation to overextend and over-identify with the user leads to burnout and missed insight. If we’re crafting an empathy cocktail, we must recognize it is potent and to be consumed in moderation. It’s a slow sip over an evening, not the choice of frat parties.

- _Select a modest glass. You’ll be filling this only about ⅔ of the way (never to the top!)_
- _Fill your shaker with one part curiosity and one part acceptance._

In [empathy for clients](/stories/exploring-empathy-part-3-empathy-for-clients), we saw how hard it can be to have acceptance when we are not in control or when we’re pressured to take action in the moment. New requests - whether a change to a research goal or method - can feel like personal affronts. I guess our cocktail isn’t all sweet and floral! Chloe guided us to use understanding as a way to actually produce empathy. Before expecting yourself to be comfortable with what you’re hearing, pause and ask, “how does this behavior make perfect sense?” The first step may come more from the brain than the heart, but it will produce a more balanced response.

- _Add a couple of splashes of bitters. It can’t be too smooth!_
- _Let your ingredients sit and age for a few minutes. This stage is vital: they’ll create their own unique combination of flavors outside of your control._ 
- _Observe the changes that are occurring. Shift your focus from how you feel about the changes to what the ingredients are trying to accomplish. What are you noticing?_

Things started to taste really different when we introduced [empathy for kids](/stories/exploring-empathy-part-4-empathy-for-kids) and the idea that we might have to pursue hard empathy over time in the nitty-gritty of life. We discussed the deep urge to change people and situations, contrasted with the best moments when we can simply recognize what the other is trying to communicate. 

- _Add a heaping tablespoon of humility._
- _Take a small taste. Let the flavors speak for themselves._
- _Make minor adjustments. Your tendency will be to over-correct but remember you want to help the flavors develop their autonomy._

Lastly, [we looked at ourselves](/stories/exploring-empathy-part-5-empathy-for-myself) and asked what we could learn about extending empathy to our own minds and bodies. Here, we noticed how active the process is, a repeated practice rather than a one-time thing. It doesn’t appear to be a recipe we perfect the first time. Along the way, we actually have to remove some things: perfectionism that no longer serves us or some other nagging voice that does not match our goals.

- _Take another small taste. You will likely notice something too strong, something out of balance. Add another splash of acceptance._
- _Shake it up_
- _Pour and enjoy with friends_
- _Improve your recipe again tomorrow_

Thanks for joining Chloe and me as your mixologists in this reflection this past year. We learned a ton and came away refreshed by the users, clients, and family members that guided us. 

And cheers to your pursuit of less control, more observation, and waiting - empathy. May you enjoy the mysterious combination of flavors that results!

<br>

-- 

If you haven’t already, check out the previous posts in our empathy series.

[Exploring Empathy Part 1: An Introduction to the Series](/stories/exploring-empathy-part-1-an-introduction-to-the-series)

[Exploring Empathy Part 2: Empathy for Users](/stories/exploring-empathy-part-2-empathy-for-users)

[Exploring Empathy Part 3: Empathy for Clients](/stories/exploring-empathy-part-3-empathy-for-clients)

[Exploring Empathy Part 4: Empathy for Kids](/stories/exploring-empathy-part-4-empathy-for-kids)

[Exploring Empathy Part 5: Empathy for Myself](/stories/exploring-empathy-part-5-empathy-for-myself)


Exploring Empathy Part 6: The Conclusion

With Yahoo! acquiring Tumblr and re-vamping Flickr, I had a discussion with Garrett about what Yahoo! has to offer outside of these two websites. I then mentioned that Yahoo! is used more often in East Asian cultures (especially Yahoo! Japan and Yahoo! Taiwan). Some other websites that are used heavily in East Asia include baidu.com, qq.com, taobao.com, and sina.com.cn — all of which are quite content-heavy in the homepage, as compared to the clean and simple interface of Google.com that is used more often in North America. Why is there a huge difference in usage? Well, there are differences with regards to designing amongst cultures. Here are a few things that [UX Magazine](https://uxmag.com/) had mentioned to consider when designing with cross-cultural differences in mind.

# LANGUAGE

Direct translation of content from language to language isn’t that simple (as we’ve all experienced with Google Translate). There are certain keywords or phrases that are used in other languages. For example, in French, the direct translation of “car insurance” would be “_l’assurance automobile_.” However, the most popular keyword search for this is “_auto assurance_.” We must keep in mind the different slangs, phrases, and keywords that are used amongst different cultures.

# COLORS (or to me, “Colours”)

Colors can influence our instinctive reaction to places, products, or even people. When we see blue, we usually associate this with calmness, trust, devotion, intelligence, and truth (hence why a lot of banks use this color). Red triggers a response in the pituitary gland, therefore, evoking strong emotions, such as passion, intensity, or even aggressiveness. Red, in most Western cultures represents danger or an action. However, in Chinese culture, red is associated with luck and prosperity; in South Africa, it is a color of mourning.

# HIGH & LOW CONTEXT

Anthropologist and cross cultural researcher, [Edward T. Hall](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_T._Hall), developed a concept identifying the s in which cultures communicate. High context (a.k.a. polychronic) cultures, such as China and Japan, are usually relational, collectivist, and intuitive cultures. Words are as important as context, therefore they communicate through implicit ways or in indirect ways. Therefore, they place more importance in other communicative devices, such as body language or tone of voice. In design, high context cultures communicate through multiple areas of focus, as there is hardly any context, and try to make up for it with more text. China’s McDonald’s website is full of color with multiple areas of focus. Furthermore, in high context cultures, people are featured as much as the product.

Low context (a.k.a. monochronic) cultures, such as North America, are usually logical, individualistic, and action-oriented. People tend to communicate through clear, direct, explicit statements. In user interface design, low context cultures tend to respond to one thing at a time and detail on a product, by putting their message across in an effective manner using minimal text. Low context cultures tend to respond to one thing at a time. As you can see, the McDonald’s German website is minimalistic with a large emphasis on their product.

# WHAT DOES THIS MEAN?

When designing something, we can’t just simply use the same template and translate the content. User research is imperative, especially if we are designing for different cultural groups.  We have to keep in mind that we are designing for the user and his/her context.


Designing for Cultures

One side effect of working in the design industry is that you often find yourself thinking like a designer well beyond work hours — in a good way. Since becoming a UX designer, for which I spend my day analyzing situations and thinking about how to make things better, I have found myself tuning in more closely to the world around me. A psychologist might call this “mindfulness,” or awareness of your present thoughts and surroundings. They say mindfulness is one secret to happiness, and I can see why. When I take the time to look around and think about why things are the way they are, why people do the things they do, and whether things have to be this way, I feel refreshed. I step outside of my head for a moment and appreciate just how weird and wonderful the world can truly be. Here are some of the ways this mentality has seeped into my life outside of professional design:

# Attention to Detail

Designers make deliberate choices about every single detail in their designs, no matter how small. As such, I often can’t help but notice the little things throughout the day — everything from “Why did they decide to lay out these buttons on my coffee maker in this way?” to “There has got to be a more efficient way to get us all through airport security.” Thinking this way helps me to savor experiences that are done right and flex my design thinking muscles when I know something could be improved.

# Attention to Others

When defining a user experience, designers must deeply consider the needs and behaviors of others. I find myself increasingly curious about why people do the things they do. Sometimes when I arrive early at the Caltrain station, I like to take a look around at the crowd: how people disperse themselves across the platform, how many of them are hunched over smartphones, how long it takes someone to buy a ticket. There are so many opportunities for improvement in any given situation that it’s hard not to get excited.

# Attention to the Present

Technology is usually about speeding things up — making things faster, better, and more efficient. For me, design has afforded me more focus and, in a way, slowed my life down. When I catch myself tuning in to the details and people around me, I feel like I’ve squeezed out just a little bit more of life — almost as if I should earn bonus points for noticing something that would have otherwise floated through my day. The best part is, you don’t need to be a designer think this way. All you need is the curiosity to tune in from time to time, and you can earn some bonus points of your own.

The Mindfulness of Design

My husband and I recently spent a long weekend in Madison, WI, and almost immediately, we noticed the bright red bikes of [Madison B-cycle](https://madison.bcycle.com/) scattered throughout the Capitol Square area. Our friend Felix [spotted a similar bike-sharing service in Montreal](/stories/quebec-s-design-moxie) a while back, but this was my first time seeing this kind of transportation alternative outside of Europe.

We’d already decided to forego a rental car in favor of Zipcar on the trip, and so I was pretty excited to have yet another collective transportation option. When we decided to meet a friend several miles away, we walked up to the kiosk, hit the buttons to purchase a one-day membership, swiped a credit card, and … failure. “Card read error” flashed on the screen. The same happened with other cards and at other kiosks, and finally, we had to admit that we weren’t going to be taking rental bikes anywhere that afternoon. 

Some usability issues compounded my frustration: There was no image to show which way to hold the card when swiping it — so I wasn’t sure if the system was down or if I was just doing things wrong — and it was annoying to have to enter my zip code, phone number, and several other pieces of information before finding out there was an error. The bottom line, though, was that the kiosks just weren’t working. 

That was a shame, but I understand that it can happen. Unfortunately, no hardware or software works perfectly 100% of the time. But as I’ve been thinking about the experience over the past few days, what’s stood out is how it’s changed my enthusiasm for bike sharing as a whole. Now, that’s probably unfair and irrational, but it’s also true to how I’m feeling. And I’ve started to wonder if maybe the burden on truly unfamiliar technologies or systems to work right is higher — whether that’s fair or not. 

I can also see an argument for the opposite reaction: It’s a new program! Cut it some slack! But apparently that doesn’t work for me. If I’d gone to a familiar place — say, a Starbucks — and had a bad experience, I wouldn’t have made much of it: “Starbucks is fine, but that Starbucks was awful!” But trying something unfamiliar and having a bad result prompted a different response in my mind. Now the next bike share I see will have to prove wrong my expectations of city bike-shares being finicky, frustrating, and ultimately non-functional. 

Many of our clients, and the startups that launch every day in Silicon Valley and elsewhere, are trying to do radical things to change basic behaviors — how we power our homes or feed our bodies or get from place to place. After this experience, I want to beg those companies to be extra-sure that their products and systems are in tip-top shape, lest a failure derail their greater goals. 

But maybe I’m too judgmental in this case. Where do you fall? Are you more permissive of failure in something radically new?


Do unfamiliar systems have to work better?

This past week I had a pleasantly surprising service experience. A side-effect of this job is that I frequently find myself analyzing the components of various interactions I have as if I were at work, thinking about the various steps and systems involved, and where they might be improved. 

I recently got a piece of mail from a credit union I am a member of with new account information and it appeared that some poor data entry person (or robot?) was working off a bad hangover, because it was garbled in ways I have never seen before. Not just names misspelled or letters dropped but whole parts look like someone fell asleep on the keyboard. Because of past experiences with Big Banks, I planned my call for when I knew I had a stretch of time free and steeled myself for navigating the inevitable automatic phone menus. Low expectations. 

What happened next surprised me. I call the generic contact number on the mailing. A human picked up on the second ring. I explained my issue. That human understood and fixed the problem. And that was it! No transferred calls. No repeated explanations to multiple people or entering account numbers only to tell the same info to the eventual person you connect to. 

The credit union is a fairly large regional entity, and so it is not like I’m calling their only branch. Someone has understood that it is a much more pleasant experience to have the person who answers the phone be knowledgable about a range of bank systems and empowered to handle a wide variety of potential issues. That person was not a low-skilled worker, they knew about the format of the mailing and what needed to be corrected where, so I’m willing to bet they were not the cheapest option, but they certainly were the most satisfying for a customer compared to the other options I’ve been through. 

I’d be curious to know if I just called at a slow time or if they also have a program in place to maintain that kind service across different call volumes.

Good experiences in unexpected places

A while ago, I got the chance to beta-test a new version of a website I use several times a week. Initially, I was thrilled: Giving feedback on products is kind of what I do, so applying those skills to the relaunch of a site I loved would be even better, right? Then, the actual beta test started, and almost immediately, I turned into a nightmare user. I didn’t log into the beta site as many times as I was supposed to. I didn’t submit as much feedback as I thought I would. And worst, when I noticed errors or bugs, I didn’t always report them, figuring someone else would do it. Basically, I turned into the user I always hope I never recruit! Being on the other side gave me a new perspective on longer-term user experience projects such as beta tests or diary studies. No matter how motivated users are at the start, it can be hard to maintain that level of enthusiasm once testing has to fit the rhythms of everyday life. While I largely blame myself for my bleak levels of engagement, I also kept thinking of ways the beta could have been set up to better encourage my participation. Yes, all of my complaints could be seen as excuses for being lazy. But who among us has never had a user (or _been_ a user) who makes excuses for being lazy? Here are three ways I think the beta setup could have gotten more out of me:

1. **Make it easy.** I needed a special URL and password to use the beta site. It doesn’t seem like a big deal, but the extra step deterred me. My default behavior was still to go to the main site — which continued to be functional — and not dig out the special login details. Had it been possible to access the beta through a link on the regular site, I have no doubt I would have used it more.

1. **Send reminders.** Otherwise known as, lay on the guilt. There’s a balance between overwhelming people with requests to use the beta and just going silent and hoping they’ll do what you want them to do. In this case, I could have used one or two more reminders — let’s say, one nudge per week of the test — to urge me to participate better. Bonus: Include the login details in each of those reminder notes so participants don’t have to go searching.

1. **Provide multiple routes for participation.** I’m most comfortable reporting bugs and other issues by taking screenshots. However, the primary way to submit feedback for this test was through a survey form with no upload field for images. I’d sometimes become so frustrated by having to describe my issue in words that I worried the point wasn’t coming through — or, worse, I’d choose not to submit the issue at all. If I could have uploaded or e-mailed a screenshot in addition to submitting the form, I might have been a better tester.

As someone who’s designed studies, I see all the reasons these things might _not_ have been doable or even desirable. Putting a beta link on the main site might not have been technologically feasible or might have caused hassles when non-beta users tried to log in. There’s much to be said for streamlining feedback and capturing all of the issues in a standardized form and place. And it’s certainly imperative not to annoy your most motivated users with constant reminders to do something for you. Still, it’s interesting to realize what my own ideal beta testing experience would have been and think through the tradeoffs. It’s something I’ll certainly keep in mind the next time I’m designing a longer-term study of my own. Have you ever been “on the other side” as a user or tester? What did you learn from the experience?


I've Been a Bad Beta Tester

Ah, the task of interviewing job candidates. Millions (billions?) of dollars are spent by companies to recruit, effectively screen, develop, and retain talent — otherwise known as people. Bodies of literature, predictive tools, and educational tracks are dedicated to the cause of effective talent selection and development. Well, hmm. A person is a system — with an interface. And hey — we specialize in evaluating and designing optimal interfaces! Today’s interview should be a cinch, then.

- **Step 1:** Identify target user profiles (e.g., client, colleague, sales prospect) who will interact with the system interface (a.k.a. the ideal employee we want to hire). Understand their motivations, challenges, domain knowledge, etc.

- **Step 2:** Identify primary (most frequent and critical) use cases for interacting with interface.

- **Step 3:** Create scenarios simulating target use cases and establish pass/fail criteria.

- **Step 4:** Conduct session with interface (candidate) and identify issues. Score pass/fail and rate severity of issues.

- **Step 5:** Don’t forget to collect equally important “satisfaction” data.

- **Step 6:** Analyze and consider both performance and satisfaction data to gauge total user “Experience” and make recommendation to hire or not hire.

You can also recommend system design changes, though unless you hire this system, you cannot implement changes, and it’s unlikely you will be retesting…. So yeah, sure, the above is over-simplified and only mildly clever, but there’s a lot of truth in there. Evaluating people against a particular set of functions that they will be required to support isn’t so different from evaluating a less-human machine. The interface must be equipped and designed to provide for the most optimal Experience possible. So turning ’round the (one way) mirror for a moment to examine the Experience we each provide to our “users”…. How’s *your* interface? How easy are you to interact with? How intuitive is it for others to engage with you? Are you “friendly” and engaging? Compelling, even? (Let’s leave “sexy” alone for now.) Perhaps you are! But what about upon “first exposure”? Is the experience interacting with you just as easy for people meeting you for the first time as it is for people who know you well? Or is there a learning curve to overcome? Do you have the dreaded “discoverability” issues? How would your users rate the overall experience of interacting with you?

Do others ever become frustrated trying to achieve a goal by interacting with you? Are you available when your “users” need you? Do you offer clear feedback? Are you responsive to input? Are your responsiveness and your actions predictable? Is your system state always clear to others? Are you easy to navigate with clear calls to action? How about trustworthy — offering security for private information? Are you modal or modeless (business vs. personal, for instance)? Does your system adapt to different user types? And when someone makes an “error” interacting with you (offends, misjudges, embarrasses, or annoys you), do you provide warnings and a clear path to recovery? Or perhaps you slow down, become unresponsive, crash, shut down, throw a 404, perhaps deny their password (my personal fave). Ultimately, we want our clients and colleagues to have a productive, low-stress, enjoyable Experience each time we interact. Our reputation and bottom line demand it. And as with a product or website, even if a candidate’s core features (skills) are solid, it’s one’s UI that makes or breaks the Experience.


Hiring Candidates with the Right "Experience"

Lately with clients I’ve started (somewhat jokingly) calling us “UX therapists”. This is because no matter how much someone might want to focus on the UI, the front end designs, the _pixels_, as the output of our hard work, most of the time this is just the tip of the iceberg. The real work: the blood, sweat and tears, the endless design sessions and workshops, the arguments, discussions and brainstorms – all of this represents the _thinking_ that got us to the final design. Without the thinking you have pretty pixels that are more or less useless. There’s a constant pressure, especially with engineering mindsets, to separate the church and state of _design process_ (the thinking) and _design output_ (the pixels), but this, I believe, is a big mistake. So as UX therapists, we spend the bulk of our time thinking deeply about design problems, and **creating the space** for our clients to tackle problems and questions they wouldn’t be able to on their own. There’s a reason real therapists ask dozens of questions: it’s not their job to **tell** you what to do, but more to give you permission to work on your own sh*t in a safe environment – and provide guidance along the way. Dr Phil might only have an hour-long show, but he spends many many hours behind the scenes actually hashing out things with his clients. The key, then, is to make sure that we, as designers-cum-therapists, make our clients understand that while they will get **beautiful**, **functional** and **intuitive** designs in the end – they have to pay attention to and engage with the process as well, or everyone will suffer.


UX as Therapy

The EchoUser research team had quite a busy December. Our schedules were filled with recruiting users, drafting test plans, moderating usability sessions, writing reports, and, last but not least, arranging check-in meetings with clients throughout the project cycle. Clients — regardless of their UX background — would raise questions and concerns about UX methodology in those meetings to make sure that their studies were on the right track and that they would get valuable and defensible data from the projects. In the two usability projects I am on (both benchmark studies), I came across the following two interesting questions from our clients. Though the two questions seemed to have come from two different angles, they both point to one of the key issues in doing usability studies: how to interpret usability data with a small number of users. I thought I’d share the two client questions and hope to elicit some extended discussions here.

# Client Question 1: _How many participants is enough for a benchmark usability study? Eight, 10, or 12?_

A lot of times, the question actually becomes, “Do we need a single-digit participant number or a double-digit one?” Clients want the usability study results to be defensible both from a statistical and a PR standpoint. When time and resources allow and it’s easy to recruit target participants, the question of “Should we get two more participants for the study?” has an easy solution: Let’s just do two more sessions. However, in a scenario in which qualified participants are very difficult to find or recruit (for instance, the study requires a highly specific user profile) or time and resources are limited, how many participants are needed? Is it worthwhile to spend two more weeks on the study just to make it to a total of 10 participants? The bigger issue: What is the rationale we should use to validate the number of participants for a usability study? If we go back to the [classic model from Nielsen](https://www.nngroup.com/articles/why-you-only-need-to-test-with-5-users/), **five users are enough to uncover 85% of usability issues**. That has been the UX industry standard’ for a long time, as Jakob Nielsen and his colleagues were among the first UX professionals to calculate the relationship between the number of UX issues uncovered and the number of participants involved. The mathematical model is derived from their years of experience conducting usability studies. Faulkner challenged Nielsen’s model in 2004 with a paper named “Beyond the five-user assumption: Benefits of increased sample sizes in usability testing.” She carefully designed and conducted a few studies with different sample sizes (5, 10, 20, 30, 40, 50, and 60 participants). What she learned from the follow-up data simulation and analysis is that **10 participants are enough to identify at least 82% of the usability issues**, whereas a **sample size of 15 can help to identify at least 90% of the issues**. I even came across a sample size calculator on Jeff Sauro’s Measuring Usability site. Based on the binomial probability formula, it allows you to calculate, for instance, how many users are needed to discover 80% of the usability issues when all issues’ probability of occurrence is above 30%. All of the above can be used as reference rationales to validate using a certain number of participants for a study. However, as specifically mentioned in Faulkner’s paper, 

<highlight>

>## Having a highly representative user sample is crucial in uncovering the priority usability issues. **Indeed, beyond all those statistical models, _getting the right users_ is sometimes as important as (if not more important than) getting enough users.**

</highlight>

# Client Question 2: _Are we telling the product team that 80% of our customers will fail to use this functionality because 8 out of 10 users failed in the usability study?_

Well, the primary purpose of usability studies is to discover qualitative usability issues with an interface, as opposed to predicting the probability of those issues’ occurrence. However, the task completion rate is one of the key metrics we use to evaluate the usability of different UI features, and it is our responsibility to give clients and the product team a clear idea of how to interpret the completion rate. The confidence level of the results is, again, closely related to the number of users included in the study. From a statistical standpoint, it’s not difficult to understand that the more users in the study, the more confident we can be in the results. However, with only 10 participants, how confident can we say we are in our results? John Sorflaten has an interesting article discussing this topic. He put forward the limitation of using task success data to predict customer behavior on a larger scale. He recommended using the Adjusted Wald Interval calculator coded by Jeff Sauro to generate the lower and higher bounds of the task success data. For instance, if 8 out of 10 participants succeed in a task, how could this data be used to predict 1,000 or 10,000 users’ behavior? By using a confidence level of 95% (if you run the same test 100 times, 95 of the times the results will fall within the acceptable +/- margin), Jeff’s calculator generates a lower bound of 48% success and a higher bound of 96% success based on the 80% task success rate from the usability study and accounting for the small sample size. And the same is true if 8 out of 10 participants fail in a task: The calculator predicts a chance of as few as 48% or as many as 96% of users failing the task when the UI is actually released and on the market. In that sense, as opposed to using the 80% task success rate to predict broader user behavior, we as usability professionals can show the range between 48% and 96% as a reference range for the product manager or marketing team to make further interpretations or decisions.

Next time, when clients are debating between 8 or 10 participants, or the product manager is asking why the task completion rate does not match large-scale user data, these basic stats will help to answer the questions.

Calculating Usability

One of the ongoing challenges of user research, as well as usability testing, is trying to understand the experiences of another person, a person who may have a very different perspective than I do. This one of the things I like most about my job and is why it never gets old. While there are still/always good questions to be asked about the way we pursue this goal, I am always interested in seeing other examples of how this kind of work happens both inside and outside our field. 

Recently I came across a special feature of the Guardian (the British news organization) entitled [“Bankers: an anthropological study”](https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/joris-luyendijk-banking-blog) in which they employ an anthropologist/journalist to explore the domains of banking and finance in London. The reporter/researcher is inviting people who work in that sector to meet with him and share their experiences (anonymously). So far this has taken the form of loose and exploratory interviews which are then shared on the website, mainly through transcripts, where discussions can take place in the comments. 

This is planned as a nine month project so it is just getting rolling, but I have enjoyed reading it so far and will be following it to see where it goes. It has as one of its stated goals to help the reading audience get a better understanding for a subject that impacts us all but is difficult to understand for those outside the business. I hope the author also does some critical interpretation and analysis of this primary data that he is collecting through the interviews. 

With the financial sector so much in the news these days, I found it a worthwhile read to get a small sliver of what the lived experience is of those immersed in that world.


People (un)like myself

I love football, and I love all the ways that technology lets me keep up with my favorite team. When I can’t get to a TV, I rely on play-by-play services on sites like [ESPN](http://espn.go.com/) and [CBS Sports](http://www.cbssports.com/) to track the action on the field. From a user experience perspective, it might seem like these sorts of services would be pretty straightforward: Something happens, and you tell people about it. But it turns out to be a tougher problem. In a live event, things are always changing: penalties happen, rulings get overturned, and instant replay can take points off the board. How do on-the-go fans expect to learn about what’s happening? Recently, I tried out two different sites that took two very different approaches to that problem. I was en route home to San Francisco, following along with my beloved Pittsburgh Steelers using ESPN’s website on my mobile phone. My team had been shut out, but just before halftime, they were setting up to kick an easy field goal. Hooray! But when I refreshed the play-by-play to see the score, the update held terrible news: Players from the other team had blocked the kick and returned it for a touchdown. Or had they? The play-by-play stream started popping up a stream of ever-more-baffling updates. The points were taken away, but the report of the most recent play still read TOUCHDOWN. The game clock stalled. Was it halftime? Or was the game still going? Was there a penalty? Was the score still 10-0, or was it 17-0? Here’s how my screen looked about five minutes after the kick:

![Blog103_01.jpg](https://echouser-api-media.s3.us-west-1.amazonaws.com/Blog103_01_ccb6d87694.jpg)

Feeling confused — and unsure just how badly my team was losing — I clicked over to the similar play-by-play site on CBS Sports. Here’s how that site explained what had happened:

![Blog103_02.jpg](https://echouser-api-media.s3.us-west-1.amazonaws.com/Blog103_02_72d5aee699.jpg)

Ah. NOW I get it. The ESPN site prioritized giving me the most recent information available — but without showing the full sequence of events or any context that would help me make sense of what I was seeing. The CBS site, on the other hand, listed out every single part of the play. It verged on too much information, but it let me follow along with the steps that had led to the ultimate outcome. That approach was closer to what I would have seen if I had actually been watching the game. Ultimately, the CBS site better fit my mental model of how football unfolds and how I would expect to learn about changes in plays. It anticipated what I would need as a fan and what questions I would want to have answered — and that made it the better experience overall.

What Just Happened? Online Play-by-Play and the Football Fan Experience

UX or usability may seem common knowledge in our industry but for most on the outside, it’s still a foreign language. I’ve been traveling a lot lately to see family and old friends and most small talk conversations will turn into me explaining what I do for a living for much longer than most people (or I) want to hear. It begins the same way: “ So… what do you do again?” they’ll ask. If you say you’re a UX professional, that’ll stump almost everyone.  If you say you do research, they’ll expect you to be wearing a lab coat working on a medical breakthrough.  

One of the latest explanations I used was, “I work with designers to help make technology easier to use.”  I thought that was a rough but concise picture of what I do. The responses I got then were, “So do you do web design or are you a computer tech person?” When talking about this to my boss who’s been a user experience professional for over 10 years, she said her family still does not know what she does to this day.  

Though there are lots of jobs that don’t need 10 questions to understand, I soon realized there is quite a range of jobs that do need explaining- Information Architect, Planning Analyst, Dosimetrist, any Internet marketing job.   A friend of mine runs a non-profit program that assists court-appointed legal advocates working with children in the foster care system; her parents think she’s a child protective services agent who takes children away from their homes. 

Unless you’re a hermit, you will find yourself in various social settings (family or otherwise) where your job will come up.  You may choose to avoid talking about what you do, make up a more common profession to talk about, or attempt to spend several minutes explaining your job.  But more importantly, if you’re in professional settings- with potential clients or employers- talking about what you do in a clear and articulate way will be key. 

Wouldn’t it just be easy to give a business card that has your job description written on it to everyone you meet and asks what you do?  It would be great to have people read what’s on the card-  “I am user experience researcher.  I employ several research methods like social research, contextual inquiries, and product testing to help make products, systems, or services better and easier to use for people.”  If they’re still interested, then we can talk usability! What would your business card say?

"So, what do you do again?" Explaining your job to mom, dad, and everyone else

So a good moderator of a usability test is able to do several things at once, correct? Aside from keeping the participant in mind first, [Jared Spool](https://www.uie.com/) and other experts in the field talk about the various roles we need to play- the communicator, the listener, the observer, the note-taker, the time-keeper, the facilitator, etc.  If we are to wear these several hats, how would the moderator’s observation of the participant data differ from other session observers (project/design team members) who are listening in remotely?  Would it mean that the observers are listening more effectively than the moderator who has their hands full?  Would they have a better grasp of the details that are happening in the test than the moderator? If so, by how much? Would the differences in observations be vast or just come down to the minor details and nuances?

I just came off a usability test project and ran into a couple of these incidents where the design and project team’s notes sometimes differed from my own as the moderator.  If we’re all a part of the same event in real time, shouldn’t every individual walk away with similar perspectives and experiences? Some might say the differences are there because the session observers may not be user experience professionals or are part of the design team and too connected to the product, therefore, unable to observe objectively.  Another thing to think about is the power of non-verbal communication and emotional response.  Here’s what could happen in the testing room (and is very likely)- Though a lot is going on, part of interacting with a participant is to look out for what’s happening in front of you (them) and not just on the screen or your note-taking tool.  A good moderator always puts the participant’s comfort and ease first.  If a participant is frustrated, stressed, or giving an emotional response of some kind (whether positive or negative), only the moderator in the room will be able to see this detail and what issues about the UI are causing it.  Unless explicitly expressed, the test session observers wouldn’t know what’d be going on there.  Side note: This is tricky to do in remote sessions- you have to find participants really fit for giving feedback online. So what about the multitasking?

So much research is out there now about how multitasking is bad for the brain and could adversely affect short-term memory.  Did I walk away from my test sessions with fragmented notes?  No.  I got really good data from all of my participants.  Do I remember what happened? Yes.  Did I capture every single detail that happened? No, but I got a good summary of it and it was more than enough to help put together the results I needed to find and fix problems.  Would my results have been different if I weren’t multitasking and only focused on interviewing and delegated the note taking, time-keeping, and recording duties to other project team members?  If I look at the research out there on multitasking, I want to say “yes”, but somehow I don’t believe the results of the study would’ve changed. So what do you think? If there are differences in perspectives and experiences among you and your project team on how a session went, where do you think the differences come from?


If multitasking makes you dumber, where does moderating fit in?

I recently wrapped up a project for a client that combined a fairly standard usability test with a set of in-depth interviews. User Research interviews are a method I particularly enjoy, and I am glad when questions clients are looking to better understand call for it. 

For me, the experience always prompts a great deal of self-reflection, more so than with other methods. I think it is because there is rarely much mediating the interaction with the interviewee, like tasks or tracking time, and so much depends on the interpersonal interaction. It is a situation where sincerity and openness are beneficial but it is also a self-conscious performance, since even very small things, like word choice or the inflection with which a question is delivered, can affect the interaction. No amount of preparation can make up for things that happen in the moment on an interpersonal level. 

Working to be a better interviewer can start to feel very Zen, (or Jedi, depending on your persuasion). After this latest project I encountered a nice presentation on [The Art and Craft of Interviewing](https://portigal.com/from-sxsw-diving-deep-best-practices-for-interviewing-users/) by Steve Portigal (recorded at this year’s SXSW) which is kind of like a qualitative interviewing 101 in 42 slides. He illustrates a selection of good reminders and tips and tricks for interviewing with stories and transcribed examples. 

His main points come down to a few tactics: use natural (to the interviewee) language, ask questions without giving answers, and leave room for them to talk (and then leave some more room), and some basic principles of qualitative research. At first blush the content may seem remedial, but because interviewing takes an interaction that is familiar to most of us, talking to someone else, and makes it strange by introducing behaviors we may find uncomfortable, with open-ended questions, long, potentially awkward, pauses and an abandonment of our own egoic perspective, my feeling is that no matter how many times I do this, I can always benefit from hearing about how other people think about the basic “deceptively simple” foundations. 

Also Steve has good stories. For example, I have yet to be peed on in an interview. Listen to the presentation to find out how to avoid that happening to you in your own research. 

\* for a more detailed read on this topic, I also recommend the great book “[Learning from Strangers](https://books.google.com/books?id=i2RzQbiEiD4C)” by Robert Weiss.

Interviewing myself

An article I read recently by David Gillis on “[Humble Experience Design](https://uxmag.com/articles/humble-experience-design)” resonated with me quite a bit, and I wanted to share some thoughts on this subject.  David talks about the the “dysfunctional norms and biases” that are evident in the design field, including tendencies towards egocentricity, entitlement, and the obsession many designers have about their own “personal brands.”  He writes about the importance of humility in design – and the value in “working cooperatively with others in ways that challenge singular authorship.”  

Interestingly, right after I read this article, my former design lead Jane Pyle posted a tweet where she wrote: “Unique or clever design patterns are great if, and only if, they benefit the user. Otherwise, you are designing for your own ego.”   As a designer (and former developer) that has worked in a variety of settings (start-up, academic, corporate, etc), I have struggled with this issue for myself and when working with others around me.  The temptation (and sometimes pressure) to “create something cool” that’s “completely unique and innovative” and blows other designers out of the water is often lurking in the background, even though ostensibly the focus of our designs as UX designers are the user needs, and addressing these needs in the best way possible.  Note that often addressing users’ needs does not necessarily coincide with creating something completely unique and innovative.  Managing to do both these things, however, is something of the “holy grail” of design. 

One advantage I think the field of UX design has (over more traditional design fields) is the variety of backgrounds among UX designers.  For example, many UX designers I’ve worked with have had backgrounds in cognitive science, sociology, education, and even english – they don’t come solely from computer science or art backgrounds.  I think focusing on this multi-disciplinary team environment is one way which we can combat the ego that can hover around the field of design.  Art & Technology are two fields which often breed a kind of “ego-centric” approach.  But mixing designers with these backgrounds with people of other backgrounds, with everyone recognizing the value of each others’ training, can be one way to hold this ego in check.  

My master’s degree at the [School of Information at UC Berkeley](https://www.ischool.berkeley.edu/) was designed around this very principle – the focus of much of our work was around solving real-world problems using a human-centered design process in a multi-disciplinary team.  This program was completely different from my undergraduate computer science degree, I would even go so far as to say it was a much more “humble” program, in that people were committed to working together to solve problems and less focused on their individual “rewards.”  Obviously the two degrees were different in many other ways, but I would say the variety of backgrounds and the concrete real-world problems present in my master’s but not my undergraduate program contributed to a more “humble,” less “ego-centric” environment. In his article, David Gillis suggests some ideas for moving toward more humble design.  Other, more specific, ways to deal with this in oneself or in your design team could include:

1. Make sure the “ideation” process is as all-inclusive and extensive as possible.  For example, have everyone on the team bring in 10-15 ideas so they aren’t so invested in one, and collaborate from there.

1. Have regular peer-to-peer collaboration sessions so one person doesn’t do days of work only to get negative feedback later.

1. Try to give feedback to others in a user-centered instead of innovation-based or personal kind of way, for example, instead of saying “I don’t think your design is innovative enough,” say, “do we feel like this design addresses the user need of X in the best way possible?  Let’s think of some alternative ideas.”

1. For an individual designer, periodically check in with yourself to see how much ego you have wrapped up in the design.  When people question the design, how annoyed do you feel?  How vehemently do you defend your design, and for what reasons?

If you have any ideas to add to this list, please add them as a comment. Obviously, this issue is one I’m passionate about, not just because of struggles I’ve had in the field, but also because I recognize some of these tendencies in myself, and I would like all of us to move toward the ideals of a more humble designer.  I think this shift will not only make for a more pleasant, cohesive working environment, but will ultimately result in better designs.

Humble Design

One of our core tenets at EchoUser, in addition to our [company values](https://www.echouser.com/values), is our Client-Partner philosophy. We have a triumvirate set of core behaviors that we bring to every project and every interaction with our clients. These behaviors make up our style of work and we believe, make our relationships with our clients better for both our clients and us.

We just finished up a PD (professional development) on Transparency. (If you haven’t heard us talk about them before, we conduct multiple PDs per year, driven by our team members, to grow and strengthen our skills at all levels on various topics). Transparency is the foundation of our Client-Partner philosophy: it is what we ground ourselves in to create long-lasting relationships with our clients.

Our Transparency PD focused on communication. In most workplaces and generally in life, communication is a key component of how we interact. For us and agency work, we find communication especially critical. Often, we work remotely from our clients, so the need for quality and intentional communication becomes that much greater. We use communication to drive the transparency of our work to our clients with the ultimate goal of fostering trust. 

Let’s consider the opposite for a moment. What happens if we’re not regularly communicating? Our clients are then likely to make guesses about what we’re doing. If we are working with a new client, we haven’t yet developed trust, those guesses could tend toward the negative. Through regular communication, we can appropriately tell the story of our work and gain our client’s trust. Ultimately a relationship built on trust will allow us to do our best work as well as collaborate with clients to produce optimal UX outcomes.

![Not communicating.jpg](https://echouser-api-media.s3.us-west-1.amazonaws.com/Not_communicating_80f08ea5a3.jpg)

![When_communicating.jpg](https://echouser-api-media.s3.us-west-1.amazonaws.com/When_communicating_54b3afbba2.jpg)

So, what did we teach and learn in the PD? While I won’t try to recreate it here, I’ll capture some key themes and principles that we rely on in our relationships with clients.

## #1 Get to know your client

We all communicate in different ways and have our preferred styles of communication. You (as project lead) will ultimately know your client the best. Figure out what works for them and align your communication style accordingly.

## #2 Set communication expectations upfront

At project kick-off, set up the cadence for communication and determine preferred platforms. Typically we encourage a weekly check-in meeting to ensure a regular face-to-face time to discuss the project. 

## #3 Acknowledge, and be mindful of, the pros and cons of communicating synchronously vs. asynchronously

In typical UX fashion, it depends. However, being thoughtful and intentional as to what you’re communicating and when to use synchronous vs. asynchronous communication will help you get your message across in the most effective way.

## #4 Consider when not to communicate

Communication comes with a signal-to-noise ratio that we must be aware of. Clients often don’t need to know every detailed step in our process. Reduce the noise in communication so clients can focus on the important information they need to know.

## #5 Strive to answer a question before it needs to be asked

As a final rule of thumb, we recommend regular status updates to ensure that our clients already know what has happened, what is happening, and what will happen before they even think to ask those questions. 

<br>

We concluded with the acknowledgment that at the end of the day, we are all humans working together to create the best possible outcomes. We recognize the need to remove our “spacesuit” from time to time, especially early on in a project, and meet each other as humans to create a connection deeper than our roles and the current project.

![chloe3.jpg](https://echouser-api-media.s3.us-west-1.amazonaws.com/chloe3_71fcbc5df9.jpg)

<br>

--

**Read more about our Client-Partner philosophy:**

[EchoUser's Client-Partner Philosophy—An Overview](/stories/echo-user-s-client-partner-philosophy-an-overview)

EchoUser's Client-Partner Philosophy—Transparency

When I heard that iOS4 was going to enable some kind of multitasking, my first reaction was a resounding “meh”. You see for me, even though I use my iPhone to do business related tasks and the like, I simply didn’t see the need to be able to switch between apps and keep things running. I had no trouble booting in and out of email (since it’s native, it would save my state for later, really useful when writing an email), checking my calendar, or being on a call and looking up Google Maps. For me, and I’ll wager most iPhone users, this was multitasking enough. 

But then something strange happened – namely, I started using my iPhone to listen to music, specifically [Pandora](http://www.pandora.com/) and [Stitcher](http://www.stitcher.com/) (disclaimer below). I have a pretty nice sound system at home, and since I recently re-purposed my AirPort for an extra WIFI network, I took to plugging in my iPhone instead. Everything was working wonderfully until _“Ding Ding!”_. I received a text message. 

Now, it’s not the text message alert that was annoying so much that every time I checked the message I’d have to boot out of whatever music app I was using – and interrupt the music. The first few times this happened I dismissed it with a “Tsk tsk. That’s kind of annoying”, and thought nothing of it. But a few weeks in and I was ready to throw my iPhone across the room. Not to mention that I work from home, and the incessant stop-and-start of the music was driving me batty. 

I eventually stopped using Pandora, Stitcher and a ream of other apps on my iPhone because I couldn’t take all the interruptions (I did switch to Pandora One on my computer, though, so Pandora should be happy). 

Enter iOS4. With more open multitasking I could all of a sudden start Stitcher, then check a text message, write a quick email, or check [Things](http://culturedcode.com/things/) without the jarring audio cut-off. What was once a thoroughly painful exercise became, in an instant, seamless. And, you guessed it, my use of Pandora and Stitcher has gone through the roof (same with my roomies). 

I’d wager that iOS4 practically saved some music apps, and will rapidly increase user adoption from here on out – because let me tell you: there’s nothing worse than interrupted music, and iOS4 just saved the day. 

Thoughts?

_Disclaimer: EchoUser has done some work with the fabulous team over at Stitcher, so we’re definitely biased 🙂_

iPhone iOS4 multitasking saves music apps

# Good beginnings. 

I’ve been following [WalMart’s sustainability plans](http://walmartstores.com/pressroom/news/9277.aspx) for awhile now, and I have to admit I was initially impressed. One of the world’s biggest companies actually making strides in sustainability and forcing its suppliers to come to heel?  The ripples of the Sustainable Product Index, I was sure, would spread far. That was until I read more about their plan. It’s pretty simple really, and involves three steps: 

1. Ask suppliers [15 simple questions](http://walmartstores.com/download/3863.pdf) about their supply chain and production practices. 

2. Create a Sustainability consortium of universities, companies, NGOs and government to _“develop a global database of information on the lifecycle of products…from raw materials to disposal.”_

Ok, so far so good.  And finally:

3. To (and here I quote) _“translate the information stored in the database into a simple tool that informs consumers about the sustainability of products.”_

Right. Because consumers are inherently dumb, and the complicated supply chain information needs to be “translated” before we get to have access to it.

While I’m sure that the information is complicated, and that most people buying Kraft [mac ‘n cheese](http://www.sundayswithmac.com/), jelly donuts and frozen dinners _don’t_ give a flying crap about supply chains, leaving the end user out of the equation until the very end is a huge mistake. WalMart may have made strides on its way to taking over American industry, but it committed the cardinal sin of standards creation: only including the end user, you know, the _actual people who will use the standard on a daily basis_, at the _end_ of the process.

# It’s not about the labeling, stupid.

I imagine WalMart’s thinking has gone something like this:

<highlight class="quote">

><quote></quote>
>_We have about a million moving parts to coordinate with the Index, so we’ll tackle our suppliers first because they’re more complicated. Then we’ll make things seem more legitimate with a warm-and-fuzzy Consortium _(I actually like this move, FYI)_. And finally, we’ll slap some pretty labeling system on everything so Gina from Shattunket, Georgia can choose the toilet paper that speaks to her conscience just as well as it does her bottom._

</highlight>

But this is all backwards. Creating an index to be used by regular people isn’t just about making it legible or usable (although that’s definitely important and should be thought about up front anyway), it’s about making it _relevant_.

And the only way to do that is to include the end user – you, me, everyone – right smack at the beginning the whole process. Word.

WalMart's Sustainable Product Index: where's the end user?

This morning, while recruiting participants for an upcoming startup usability study, I stumbled upon a mythical creature I didn’t think existed. After chasing it through the underbrush of the internet to no avail, I eventually gave up, disgusted and disheartened, for the creature was gone – potentially forever. And the creature in question? That rare breed of human who _doesn’t have access to a DSL connection_. 

I know, I know, breathe in deeply – I didn’t think they existed, either. But it turns out that this kind of person is out there, and we have to plan for them accordingly.  More and more I find that people respond to my online recruitment ads, often for a remote study that needs screensharing and the like, without having the necessary technological hardware to actually complete the study. Like that story where from the band of monkeys eventually one will write Shakespeare, sometimes potential participants make it into the pool when they really shouldn’t. 

It would be easy to blame the participant – I mean, who _doesn’t_ have DSL access these days in the U.S., anyway? As it turns out, [quite a few people don’t](http://www.internetworldstats.com/stats2.htm), so in the end it really is **our** bad as user researchers, not the participants. We need to make sure we’re designing studies – and recruitment procedures – that aren’t exclusionary from a technological perspective, _even when we’re building a product or service that requires (relatively) advanced technology_. 

Examples of non-traditional recruitment abound: Etan once stood in a BART station for hours to recruit BART riders, while [Mick](http://twitter.com/micklives) loitered in a Best Buy (with permission of course) hoping to snag potential wireless hub buyers. The main problem, however, is that these methods, while often very effective, are time consuming – and expensive. So how to recruit in an internet-ready world, when we’re not all on the same technological page?  Any thoughts? Examples?

Usability recruiting and internet accessibility?

# Dropbox and the Human Touch 

A few months back I got an email from the crew at [Dropbox](http://www.getdropbox.com/) reminding me to use their service.  If you haven’t tried it yet, Dropbox is a neat file syncing service that lets you back stuff up online as well. 

Anyway, usually I hate reminders to use a service – I find them intrusive, and the repeat offenders get put on my spam list even if the service/product is actually pretty cool. But Dropbox’s email actually made me smile:

![dropbox.jpg](https://echouser-api-media.s3.us-west-1.amazonaws.com/dropbox_0bc0d1198e.jpg)

It’s got three key attributes that make it much less annoying than other reminder emails:

1. **It’s visual.** I get it, you want me to use your service. But please don’t show me a long bullet-point list of why you think you rock.  Dropbox gets this, and replaces long text with an image instead.

1. **It’s funny.** The picture did actually make me chuckle.  It won’t win any best joke awards on BET and Carlin certainly wouldn’t be impressed, but in my book any laughter is better than none (and certainly better than a groan as I hit Spam). Further, it shows they have balls, which is always a good thing.

1. **It’s human.** This is the most important part: the hand drawn image really lets me connect with the company.  Dropbox isn’t just a bunch of faceless programmers shoving their product down my throat – somewhere somebody actually sat down to draw this picture, and that’s a powerful thing.  So powerful that I actually pictured him or her doodling away with their tongue stuck out. Pretty cool. 

Even though in the end the email didn’t get me to keep using Dropbox (I honestly don’t have a need for it), it did get me to take the time to write about it, which in the end is almost as good.

3 tips for reminding people to love you

# Culture in Decline? 

The last few weeks have seen [a rising backlash](http://www.ktvu.com/news/20353255/detail.html) against WIFI-hoarding laptoppers in cafes.  The general complaint from cafe owners is that the offending laptopping people show up, grab a coveted seat, pay for one paltry coffee – if that – and then proceed to camp out for the entire day, often at the expense of other paying customers. It’s made such a splash that even our [British brethren have picked up the story](http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-coffee-shops-pull-plug-on-laptop-lounging-1769227.html) – and their cafe culture is **way** less advanced than ours. 

On the surface, I can see why pulling the plug on WIFI hoppers makes sense: even though laptop users might make a place look busy by taking up all the seats, the truth is come lunch rush there’s nowhere for laptop-_less_ lunchgoers to sit, squeezing the ever tighter margins of coffee shop owners everywhere.  It seems that while the cafe working culture has taken firm root, as a community we have yet to learn the [rules of etiquette](http://www.emilypost.com/) that will keep us from stepping on everyone’s toes. 

OK, so there’s some room for us laptoppers to grow up.  But here’s the thing: in today’s world of A. an economic recession, where more and more people are working from home and from cafes, B. a burgeoning cafe culture that is definitely here to stay, and most importantly, C. a transparent social media culture that makes it easy for the community to interact positively with cafe owners, there’s absolutely no excuse for a situation in which cafes charge $4 an hour for internet access, or go so far as to tape over their power outlets. 

We need to work toward [building a true community](http://blog.doyouviv.com/), where laptop users and cafes alike co-exist in a symbiotic relationship that helps both grow, such that I tell everyone I possibly can about [Simple Pleasures Cafe](http://simplepleasurescoffee.com/) and Epicenter because they have great food and coffee, but mostly because the people who work there make me feel at home, some are even my friends, and at the end of the day they let me use the internet for hours with nary a disapproving glance. Amen.

Cafe Culture

# Make me smile… 

It really isn’t a difficult concept to grasp: the presence of a smile is a strong indicator of happiness (at least in the moment). So many product designers and marketers just don’t get this.  If your product and/or service doesn’t include the option – nay – the _requirement_ that I smile at some point (indicating that I’m happy as a result of the interaction), there really is no point.  

Paul Annett at [Clearleft](http://clearleft.com/) gets this, and [lays it out clearly in this presentation](http://konigi.com/notebook/oooh-thats-clever-unnatural-experiments-web-design) (which is designed to elicit smiles). 

A friend of mine who works as a Cafe Mistress at a local java joint recently made me smile tremendously when she mentioned that for every customer who comes in without a loyalty card, she puts the coffee credit (which eventually results in a free coffee) into my account.  It’s not her job to do this, but since we’ve become friends, she did it anyway. 

Lesson learned? Treat all customers as friends (and they will eventually become them).  And I don’t know about you, but if making my friends happy with a smile isn’t priority numero uno, then I don’t know what is.


Products and Happiness

# Introduction

We've been diving into the three core tenets of EchoUser's Client-Partner Philosophy: [Transparency](/stories/echo-user-s-client-partner-philosophy-transparency), [Collaboration](/stories/echo-user-s-client-partner-philosophy-collaboration), and Integrity. Chloe previously wrote about Transparency and Rally wrote about Collaboration. In our final installation on EchoUser’s Client-Partner Philosophy, Chloe and I, together, talk about Integrity.

# A Conversation about Integrity

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>Rally:
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>Let’s talk about “integrity”, our third core tenet of how we interact with clients. This is actually a little hard to talk about because it seems really obvious and straightforward. Of course, we act with integrity! But what does that really mean, especially in the context of us and how we work? I’m going to pass the buck and ask you, what does integrity mean to you?

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>Chloe:
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>Yeah, I agree with that. It’s kind of like the standard mode of operating. But it is actually something that is important to dig into and ensure that we are all on the same page. My core understanding of what integrity, or acting with integrity, means to me is that we do what we say we’re going to do, and we are transparent and honest when we make a mistake. This applies to our relationships with our clients, our relationships with each other within EchoUser, and the relationships we have as researchers with the participants we engage in research studies. We have an ethos at EchoUser to act with integrity and to act ethically with all.

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>Rally:
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><quote></quote>
>Oh, I like that—we do what we say we’re going to do. You actually just inspired me to ask ChatGPT (and Bing and Bard) to define integrity. <Checks the various AI things.> Well, I can’t say they added too much clarity, but all their responses made me focus on these core things: 1) do what we say we’re going to do; 2) be honest; 3) be transparent even when things are going wrong; and, 4) adhere to a set of moral and ethical principles and values.

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>Chloe:
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><quote></quote>
>Okay, thanks, ChatGPT! So, let’s dive into those pieces a little bit. We do what we say we’re going to do. We make commitments to our clients both verbally and in the statement of work form, to commit to delivering an outcome. Our ethos of working and engaging with our clients demands that we’re going to follow through on delivering that outcome. We know that our best work and our focus on getting to that outcome (not just on the letter of an SOW) is how we develop lasting relationships with our clients.

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<highlight class="quote">

>Rally:
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><quote></quote>
>Absolutely. When we enter into an agreement with a client, we will deliver what we’ve agreed to deliver. There are no questions there. This is especially important if (when) things don’t go exactly as the original plan. Our team does pretty well with unpredictability since we all embody a common North Star to deliver what we agree to deliver, no matter the path. But I think it’s just as important that we exhibit this attitude and behavior for the smaller things too. For example, agreeing to set up the next meeting invite and actually doing it, or saying I’ll send you directions to our office and actually doing it. On the surface, forgetting to do things like this is not really going to derail a project on its own. But over time, not doing what you say chips away at people’s trust. So, when the questions or the challenges are larger and more difficult, it’s that much harder for others to believe that you will ultimately accomplish what you say you will.

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<highlight class="quote">

>Chloe:
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><quote></quote>
>Yes, I totally agree! Following through on the “little” things is so important to build the trust we need when projects get thorny. Of course, as much as we’d like it to be, nothing is ever perfect. Unplanned events, obstacles, challenges, and mistakes happen. We have the responsibility to deal with anything that comes up in a project with transparency (going back to our previous pillar). In particular, if we make a mistake, we own up to it and make the situation right. In one personal example (though this was prior to working at EchoUser), I made a copy-paste error, copied the wrong data into a research report, and sent it off to the client without checking my work. I realized my mistake the next day and felt terrible. I requested a quick phone call with the client to describe the mistake, apologize, and communicate how I would fix the issue. This is often an example I think of when I think of integrity—it’s owning up to and acknowledging the mistake I made and clearly communicating what I’ll do to fix it.
>
>There are also times when the situation can be a bit trickier. In one project we were recruiting participants for a client who had a tight deadline. We recognized that the recruit was at risk. We were having a difficult time finding the right participants, so we began to clearly communicate the risks, as well as start on contingency plans for how to address the situation. In the end, we were not able to fully complete the project as outlined within the deadline. We had some hard and transparent conversations about the different ways we were trying to address the issue. Essentially, we did the best that we could, and we were honest about what we could and could not achieve for that project.
>
>Those are tough situations, but our commitment to integrity dictates that we must approach them with transparency and accountability.

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<highlight class="quote">

>Rally:
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><quote></quote>
>Those are great examples of being honest and transparent when things go wrong. I especially like your last example because there are usually going to be very good reasons that we’ve landed in a place where delivering the initially promised outcome looks at risk. When we’re transparent about the challenges that we’re facing, reasonable clients will understand why, and that paves a path to a mutually acceptable solution even when compromises need to be made. 
>
>You know, this does make me think about the challenge of making more broad and philosophical decisions with integrity. There’s been a lot of chatter over the last few years blaming a lot of societal ills on social media and, more relevant to us in UX, putting some of that blame on the design decisions that went into how social media products work. There’s an argument that applying more integrity to our UX work should have prevented some of these negative outcomes. To be honest, though, that is a very complicated ball of wax that, in my opinion, is way too complex to be explained by the assertion that people should have simply known better and done better. So let me step back from that ledge. There still is something broad and philosophical that I can buy into - having a consistent underpinning for what it means to act with integrity. I do believe strongly that we need to have a consistent belief and understanding of what is right and wrong. This is actually the fourth part of that definition I laid out earlier—adhering to a set of ethical and moral principles.

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>Chloe:
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><quote></quote>
>Okay, yeah I think I see where you’re going with this, though philosophical discussions, especially about social media, aren’t really my thing! But digging into your point in a concrete way, I think what you’re saying is that there is a set of ethics and principles by which to adhere in running our business, and that are fundamentally important to the running of the business at a deeper moral level.

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<highlight class="quote">

>Rally:
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><quote></quote>
>Yes. Although, like everything interesting in life, it’s not always so simple. When you start invoking morals, it gets complicated. Didn’t Google used to have a very simple mantra, “Don’t be evil?” That didn’t last. I think the best we can do, at a company level, is to be consistent. We’re lucky, many years ago, we defined a set of values that we felt both represented who we were and what we wanted to continue to be. Over the years, the values have stood up pretty well and have been a great baseline for how we want our team to behave and ultimately have served as a model for integrous behavior.

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<br>

_[Here are EchoUser’s values](/values)_

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<highlight class="quote">

>Chloe:
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><quote></quote>
>Rally, are you sure “integrous” is a word? I guess I learned something new….
>
>Anyways. One other aspect I want to bring here about integrity that I feel is important as a UX researcher is our commitment to acting with integrity with respect to the participants that we interact with for our work. We have a duty, to our participants and to our profession, to bring integrity to that relationship. To me that means clearly communicating the purpose of the study, what we will do with participant data, and ensuring that we are fulfilling the promise of “informed consent”.

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>Rally:
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><quote></quote>
>And I’ll add to that, ensuring the safety and well-being of every participant has to be at the forefront. Even though nothing we do puts anyone at any risk of physical harm, there are instances where sometimes people can experience a lot of mental stress. I’ve certainly experienced times when it was in the best interest to simply abandon a usability test because the participant was getting too stressed out. I wonder how self-trained or boot camp-educated UX people learn about ethics in UX practice these days. I remember having to take an “ethics” course back in university and even though it was boring (admittedly, I found most classes boring), I realize that it really set a philosophical foundation for how I approach any UX activity. I hope it’s something that is still prioritized in all of these programs and in other organizations’ best practices.
>
>This does remind me, we’ve talked about acting with integrity to our clients and to our research participants. But there’s another very important group we should discuss, our peers.

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<highlight class="quote">

>Chloe:
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><quote></quote>
>I see this as pretty similar to the way we interact with clients. Do what you say you’re going to do, and be transparent and honest, even when it’s hard. I’m curious to hear your perspective Rally.

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>Rally:
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><quote></quote>
>Yes, very similar to how we interact with clients, but turning the lens specific to your teammates. You have to treat your teammates with the same level of integrity you do your clients and I’d say the hardest aspect is what you mentioned—being transparent and honest, especially when it’s hard. We’ve never had issues with doing what you say you’re going to do, being honest, or displaying immoral/unethical behavior.  Where we do sometimes have a challenge is with being transparent and honest with what I’ll call harder truths. These are things like being particularly tough (but fair and constructive) in design reviews, or telling a teammate that they’re not meeting your expectations. Our team is made up of nice people, but I think it can result in not wanting to make people feel uncomfortable, even when we see things we know need to be corrected or improved. I will admit, this is definitely something I’ve needed to work on through the years (and continue to work on). I remind myself, it’s not about being unpleasant or mean. It’s about having a consistent standard for what I think is the right way to do things, feeling comfortable and free to make sure our team is doing things this way, and just as importantly, believing that that standard applies to myself and expecting everyone else to call me out when I’m not doing things to our standard.
>
>Well, thanks, Chloe. I appreciate you indulging me and sharing your thoughts on integrity. It’s interesting, we don’t talk about this explicitly very often. But I do believe that it weaves its way through in everything we do, all the time.

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# In Closing

This completes our deep dive into EchoUser’s Client-Partner Philosophy. We hope that it gives you deeper insight into how we interact with our clients and why. To read the complete series, follow the links below:


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**Read more about our Client Partner philosophy:**
 
[Part 1: EchoUser's Client Partner Philosophy — An Overview](/stories/echo-user-s-client-partner-philosophy-an-overview)

[Part 2: EchoUser's Client Partner Philosophy — Transparency](/stories/echo-user-s-client-partner-philosophy-transparency)

[Part 3: EchoUser's Client Partner Philosophy — Collaboration](/stories/echo-user-s-client-partner-philosophy-collaboration)


EchoUser's Client-Partner Philosophy—Integrity

There is something so delightful about a user experience that is well thought out and supports you throughout the entire process. Being in the UX field for the last 15 years, experiences of products, services, and even spaces are something that I often think about as I navigate life. And it annoys my husband to no end as I go on and on about apps/devices/services that just don’t work well. These things get under my skin, especially because I recognize that often (seemingly) a little effort into UX research and design would have made the thing so much better. It’s often the little annoyances, the experiences that are just a tiny bit off, that bother me the most.

This is interesting to me. I seem to be more attuned to the experiences that don’t work, and I have fewer encounters with experiences that do work. Perhaps sometimes it is, as they say, the best experience is one you don’t even notice (or perhaps, it’s the best interface… anyways, I digress). This is why I’m so pleased to write about an experience that is exciting and pleasurable in the way it works so well. And it’s not just one aspect of the experience. It really is the full end-to-end journey. And, in a true, iterative fashion, the experience has seemed to change and improve over time.

So what is this pleasant and well-designed experience? Getting my blood drawn at Quest Diagnostics. I know. Of all things (I’m sure you’re asking yourself), how can that be a pleasurable experience? It is, because of the support I feel at every step of the journey.

Let’s first start with my expectations. This is, likely, part of why the experience with Quest is so good—I have relatively low expectations for getting my blood drawn due to past experiences. In the past, I found the process was relatively slow; I couldn’t schedule an appointment, meaning when I show up, I may have to wait some amount of unknown time. Once I arrived, it took several steps to check in: writing down my name, waiting, then talking to the in-take staff, waiting again (while terrible day-time television is playing in the background), finally being called to get my blood drawn, and then consuming my lab results via a horribly formatted printout.

Of course, being a UX person, I figured creating a journey map would help me better understand and convey my experience… so voila! And as you can see, low expectations indeed.

[![Previous experience journey map_larger.png](https://echouser-api-media.s3.us-west-1.amazonaws.com/Previous_experience_journey_map_larger_298126c28b.png)](https://echouser-api-media.s3.us-west-1.amazonaws.com/Previous_experience_journey_map_larger_298126c28b.png)

Contrast that with the experience of going to Quest Diagnostics, where they have streamlined and simplified the process to make it as convenient as possible. Plus they’ve added some delightful (ish… you’re still getting stuck with a needle) pieces to the experience. 

[![Quest Experience journey map_larger.png](https://echouser-api-media.s3.us-west-1.amazonaws.com/Quest_Experience_journey_map_larger_40b307968d.png)](https://echouser-api-media.s3.us-west-1.amazonaws.com/Quest_Experience_journey_map_larger_40b307968d.png)

Let’s dive into the details of the Quest experience.

To start, I can schedule my appointment online using the Quest website, so I already know that I’ll have a minimal wait time. The experience of scheduling is very straightforward and pleasant. I would say it is relatively standard, though aspects of it just “feel better” than other scheduling experiences I’ve encountered. In revisiting the scheduling process to take screenshots for this post, I picked up on a few design elements that I quite like, though I have to say, I hadn’t remembered noting them in previous times I’ve scheduled an appointment. And likely that is the point. The process is so easy and quick, I hardly remember what it’s like. In some ways, those are the best experiences, the ones you don’t even note because nothing impedes you from completing your desired task. 

At any rate, something I liked on further inspection is the added details that are given in the step-by-step wizard to note your selections in previous steps. What a great way to provide system confirmation and transparency and reduce the cognitive burden on the user.

[![Screenshot 2023-05-25 at 11.32.46 AM.png](https://echouser-api-media.s3.us-west-1.amazonaws.com/Screenshot_2023_05_25_at_11_32_46_AM_70ba1e3966.png)](https://echouser-api-media.s3.us-west-1.amazonaws.com/Screenshot_2023_05_25_at_11_32_46_AM_70ba1e3966.png)

Then (again pretty standard) there is a confirmation email sent. Not much to note here, though I honestly don’t know if this is a Gmail perk—regardless, I love the familiarity of the Google Calendar event at the top of the email, and the link to add it to a calendar. There are further details in the email, which frankly, I didn’t read.

[![Screenshot 2023-05-25 at 11.35.06 AM.png](https://echouser-api-media.s3.us-west-1.amazonaws.com/Screenshot_2023_05_25_at_11_35_06_AM_ec2533d75d.png)](https://echouser-api-media.s3.us-west-1.amazonaws.com/Screenshot_2023_05_25_at_11_35_06_AM_ec2533d75d.png)

The morning of my visit, I received a reminder text with instructions to check in via my phone once I arrived in the parking lot. Additionally, they provide a reminder of the facility’s location and a link to access a map. Great! I appreciate the anticipation that I may have never visited their facility, or at the very least don’t go there often enough to know the way. What a convenience to provide me with a link to directions!

[![crop - Screenshot 2023-05-25 at 11.36.01 AM.png](https://echouser-api-media.s3.us-west-1.amazonaws.com/crop_Screenshot_2023_05_25_at_11_36_01_AM_e0d11f3999.png)](https://echouser-api-media.s3.us-west-1.amazonaws.com/crop_Screenshot_2023_05_25_at_11_36_01_AM_e0d11f3999.png)

Additionally, I love that they provide the link to check in right in the text. Within the confirmation email, there was information and a QR code provided for check-in at arrival, which, as I mentioned, I didn’t care to read. But they’ve provided another way for me to check-in directly within a reminder communication.

There are a few things that strike me about the elegance of this solution. First, they provide multiple ways for people to check in. Imagine if I didn’t opt-in for text messages, or didn’t have a mobile phone; maybe I’m the type of person who would print out information about my upcoming visit. They’ve covered that type of user and interaction. But they’ve also accounted for (actual) me, who didn’t read the email. Additionally, consider that they could have decided not to develop this additional route for check-in and simply notified me in the text message to refer to my email confirmation for check-in instructions. But they don’t force me to take that extra step to dig through my emails. They provide an easy access method right in the text. They also consolidate and present two pieces of information in one clean text, which I appreciate—I don’t need multiple messages from them. Finally, they support the user who has done no preparation, making it possible to check in on-site (without the text or QR code) and they also accept walk-in appointments. I really love that they have thought of several important user groups/journeys and supported them all.

I will note. The first time I visited their facility, I did get tripped up. I checked in, in the parking lot, but then was confused when I went into the building, as I immediately saw the “check-in here” sign and assumed (who knows why, as the check-in confirmation assured me I was all set) that I needed to check in again. However, the second (and most recent) time I went, the first thing I saw upon entering the building was my name on a TV screen, which immediately let me know that I was already checked in and next in line to be called! 

[![Quest_entryway - small.jpg](https://echouser-api-media.s3.us-west-1.amazonaws.com/Quest_entryway_small_e0ee05c938.jpg)](https://echouser-api-media.s3.us-west-1.amazonaws.com/Quest_entryway_small_e0ee05c938.jpg)

I’m not sure if I just missed that the first time, or if this was an improvement they had made, but at any rate, the experience of seeing my name as confirmation is an excellent example of how system feedback and transparency are so important in supporting the user.

Continuing on with my experience, my wait time was non-existent, barely sitting down before the technician came out and called my name. This brings me to the physical and human aspects of this experience. The Quest lab facility was clean and bright and carried the Quest branding throughout the physical space, going so far as to have “Quest green” nitrile gloves for the technicians! It was a visually appealing and comfortable environment. 

The next steps of the process all occur within the same space, enabling me to stay in that space and streamlining the process of ordering the labs, checking insurance, taking my payment, and finally drawing my blood. I don’t need to interact with multiple people or walk to multiple stations. It all happens at once.

The technician was quite friendly, walking me through the process, and notifying me upfron, that one lab wasn’t covered by my insurance. She was even able to tell me the price so that I could make an informed decision (and decline the service). Then I needed to provide my signature and hand over my HSA card. And finally, the blood draw could begin. The whole process took less than 15 minutes, and I was on my way home.

The final touchpoint to this process is receiving the results. In my situation, I review my labs with my physician who has printed them out and she gives me the printout at the end of our appointment. I found it interesting to compare the two printouts (one from the lab I previously went to, and one from Quest). Even the printout has Quest’s branding and in general is better formatted, making it easier to read and understand the results. Related to the formatting, the Quest printout is six pages long, as compared to 20 pages for the prior lab’s results. (Note that I did not consume my lab results via the Quest portal and so it’s not part of the experience I’m commenting on - something for me to follow up with!)

[![Labs_documentation.jpg](https://echouser-api-media.s3.us-west-1.amazonaws.com/Labs_documentation_43da918627.jpg)](https://echouser-api-media.s3.us-west-1.amazonaws.com/Labs_documentation_43da918627.jpg)

As a whole, this experience with Quest is so impressive considering the omni-channel nature of the process. It involves the website for scheduling, email for confirmation, text for instructions and checking-in, a TV screen for confirmation, the physical design of the space, the human interaction, and finally the physical results. Every aspect of those modalities has been thought through and designed to produce an end-to-end journey where I, as a patient, feel fully supported throughout. I really feel like I am at the center of this experience. What a wonderful feeling!

As a final thought, something that stood out to me when I drew up the journey maps representing my blood draw experience is that the lowest point in the Quest journey was at the point where I was stuck with a needle. Seems like that is as it should be! 

[![Journey maps comparison_larger.png](https://echouser-api-media.s3.us-west-1.amazonaws.com/Journey_maps_comparison_larger_0171675aef.png)](https://echouser-api-media.s3.us-west-1.amazonaws.com/Journey_maps_comparison_larger_0171675aef.png)

My hat is off to the Quest team that designed this experience. I thank you!


The Blood Draw Experience

Recruiting participants for a research study can sometimes be time-consuming and energy-draining, especially for products and organizations that do not have a pre-screened customer base or community to reach out to. In this article, I’ll share a recent experience in which we were looking for a very niche user group. We switched from traditional recruitment strategies to targeted internet recruiting and actively reaching out to potential recruits. This unusual project came with a steep learning curve. I’ll also highlight the strategies we used to tackle those challenges and our key takeaways.

# Context

Earlier this year, another researcher and I worked on a research project that truly made us scratch our heads when it came to recruiting. We were targeting a very niche group of users — small-business salon owners who serve Spanish or Portuguese-speaking clients who use a particular app for communication. We started with our normal recruitment strategies, including using multiple recruiting platforms and posting on Craigslist and related social media groups. After a week or so, we received no one matching our criteria, so we pivoted to more targeted internet recruiting, which brings us to the first point.

# Figuring out users’ digital behaviors and how they connect

As we pivoted to targeted internet recruiting, we first used search engines to find businesses that fit our criteria. But that only got us so far. We furthered our search on social media, hoping to find small businesses that would place ads and promote their profile, with their contact information available. We got some early wins with that. Next, we took some time to study the profiles of these small businesses that match our recruiting criteria. Bit by bit, we were able to find out some tags or channels (or followings) these targeted profiles have in common. Through that, we uncovered a large pool of like-minded candidates. We generated a long list of potential recruits, noting their digital behaviors and why we think they’d be a good fit for our study. Then we started reaching out to them individually.

# Reaching out to users where they feel comfortable communicating

Cold messaging or cold calling is always nerve-wracking, so we did extra preparation to help boost our success rate. We know it’s all about building trust with potential participants. So we set up a professional profile to represent EchoUser on our recruits’ preferred communication tool, making ourselves less “scammy-looking.” When we messaged potential recruits, with the help of modern translation tools, we made an effort to speak in their language (Spanish or Portuguese) as we learned that many of them don’t feel as comfortable speaking in English. We made it clear that we don’t speak their language and that we’re using translation tools but we would love to understand them as much as we can. Transparency plays a key role here. 

We also included a graphic that showed what we’re hoping to achieve and who we’re looking for to bring legitimacy to the opening messages. 

![Recruitment Poster.jpg](https://echouser-api-media.s3.us-west-1.amazonaws.com/Recruitment_Poster_0f610fdec8.jpg)

We also set up templates and scripts for cold messages and cold calls to maintain consistency in our outreach. We used trial and error and experimented with the first batch of potential recruits to come up with a good flow. In the end, based on our learnings, we consolidated our outreach flow to the following: 

1. Explain the research study briefly and include the incentive for participation
1. Ask for permission to share more information with them
1. Follow up with a graphic that details the study’s dates, duration, incentives, and who we’re looking for
1. Attempt to discuss and answer any questions they may have over a short phone call
1. Move forward with scheduling a video interview if they agree to

We used this method of cold messaging for 2-3 weeks (a much longer recruitment process than most projects) and we continued to learn more about their objections and how to address them. For example, we started by explaining how we got their contact information and acknowledging that it was an unusual request. We also adjusted our requirements and tried to minimize and balance that with revealing more information over time. For example, we threw away the online screener and replaced it with our own screening through a combination of their digital behaviors and some initial answers they gave us through messaging. We aimed to move them forward by scheduling a video interview before we lost them in the messaging process.

# Key Takeaway #1 — Be extremely flexible

Setting stricter criteria for recruitment at the beginning makes sense, but if things aren’t working, figuring out where you can be flexible is your best friend. We pivoted our recruiting strategies fairly quickly when we found no matches in the first week of normal recruitment. We adjusted our recruiting criteria as we kept learning more about our target users and their digital behaviors. 

Normally, we only pay our research participants their incentive after the interview. However, in this study, we encountered one participant asking us to pay half of the incentive as a deposit, just like how they’d ask customers to pay deposits to secure a reservation in the salon business. It made sense to us so we went with it. Along with that, we switched from paying our participants through traditional reward systems like Tremendous to day-to-day cash transfer apps like Venmo or Zelle. 

Not only did we switch up our recruiting strategies and incentive payment methods, but we also changed the way we conducted those 1:1 video interviews. Originally, we prepared a co-creation section within the interview so we could collaborate with participants. But our participants turned out to be a mobile-first population and there was no way they could view our shared screen and whiteboard clearly. We found a way to scrap that co-creation part and replaced it with more follow-up questions. All of these point to what we mentioned earlier — meeting our users where they are and understanding how and in what way they are most comfortable communicating.

# Key Takeaway #2 — Acknowledge our limitations

Our team doesn’t have any fluent Spanish or Portuguese speakers, and it was not easy to conduct a study that targets non-native English speakers. At certain times during the study, with language barriers and imperfect translations, we questioned how valuable this research would be. Conducting research with non-native speakers isn’t new to us, but using translation tools so often seemed to push the limits as we could miss valuable cultural context. While we moved forward with some of the recruits and interviews with the help of live translation, we made it clear to our client that there were cultural expressions and product implications that would need further investigation before they decided to expand their product to these new markets and countries. In the end, we did receive valuable insights from our research participants, but acknowledging our limitations and pinpointing what was out of our capabilities to uncover were equally important.

# Conclusion

Our recent experience showcased the power of adaptability and the art of meeting users where they are. Navigating the challenges of recruiting a niche group led us to pivot from conventional strategies to targeted internet recruiting. By understanding potential recruits’ digital behaviors and preferences, we not only bridged the gap but also established trust by communicating in their language. 

As we charted this path, the process revealed itself to be a reflection of genuine user empathy. Our story isn't just about recruiting participants; it's a testament to the value of creating meaningful connections that bridge researchers and users. The strategies we honed along the way, from tailored messaging to flexible methodologies, can serve as guiding principles for researchers seeking to forge impactful interactions. Ultimately, this journey reinforced the notion that by embracing the fluidity of user preferences and acknowledging our limitations, we can illuminate uncharted territory and uncover insights that reshape our understanding of user-centric research.


User Research: Meeting Users Where They Are, Starting From Recruiting

User personas: an aspect of UX design that sparks varied opinions. For someone like me, who entered the industry two years ago, completed a UX boot camp, and worked on three client projects, I'm still in the process of determining whether this approach is outdated. Firstly, a user persona serves as a fictional portrayal of your ideal user or customer. Researchers and designers use this technique to define the audience for their products. This concept aligns with the fundamentals of product development, emphasizing the importance of understanding the end users and their specific requirements. It offers valuable insights into the issues to be addressed, the essential features to include, and what won't be effective.

# User personas vs. Market personas

Now, what makes up a user persona? From my knowledge, a user persona is made up of the target’s goals, needs, motivations, and frustrations. The idea behind this is to help a researcher or designer get a better understanding of the user’s goal and empathize with them. Along with the four elements I described before, these user personas also include demographic-based descriptions like age, place of residence, etc. This is to help bring the fictional character to life. 

A user persona is very similar to a market persona. Which is where the line between the two gets a bit blurred. A market persona is a fictional character created by a marketer to represent a certain demographic in their target audience. The biggest difference between the two is that user personas are a bit more detailed and represent a type of user within the target audience. Whereas market personas focus on a more broad market or customer group. 

So why am I talking about market personas? Well, through my experience, I find that a lot of user personas are either built more like market personas or too detailed only to be catered to a select few users. The question is now, are user personas outdated? An argument I’ve seen online is that they can be overgeneralized. This ties us back to market personas, that they are based on too much demographic and psychological data that makes it difficult to capture the traits of users in a specific group. But the counter-argument to that is that user personas are too detailed and descriptive and it wouldn't be able to encapsulate a wider group.

# No user persona?

The scope of the project I worked on necessitated the complete process. We had to conduct user research and use it to design the final product, and the timeline stretched over approximately 8 to 10 months. The project was structured with multiple teams, each comprising a designer, a product manager, and a team of engineers. Each team had its own set of responsibilities based on the features they were developing. To assist with research efforts, a single researcher was available, whom all designers and product managers relied on.

As this was my first project with this client, I was uncertain about the workflow. To kick things off, I reached out to the researcher to help me create a user interview script and my product manager to recruit participants. After some initial preparations, we were ready to proceed. We successfully conducted the interviews and gathered all the data.
At this point, I followed the researcher's guidance on how to handle the data. To my surprise, we decided to skip the step of creating user personas. At that time, I believed that using user personas was a logical and essential aspect of the project. The product we were designing catered to a broad spectrum of users, making it challenging for me to discern their specific needs. I couldn't afford to waste time due to the project's timeline. However, I was also repeatedly reminded of the importance of this step, and I couldn't let go of the idea of not creating user personas for this project.

# School and the UX World

Having balanced both school and work at the same time, I've gained insights into the contrasting nature of these experiences. In the academic setting, the process typically involves conducting research, analysis, creating personas, and progressing through defined steps until completion. However, the real-world scenario doesn't strictly follow this linear approach. To my surprise, not every step of the design process is invariably utilized.

I used to believe that each step in the process was foolproof, but in practice, it's crucial to discern when to apply a particular step or method. Over time, with hands-on experience in the professional realm, I've come to realize that various factors come into play. Project timelines, for instance, can significantly impact the process. When time is limited, we must make informed decisions about which steps to skip and which ones to prioritize.

With practical experience, I believe I can develop the skills to navigate these decisions effectively. While school provides a solid foundation in UX fundamentals, applying them in real-world situations requires an understanding and adaptability.

# Now what do I think?

I believe I can confidently state that I have gained a better understanding of the question being posed: Are user personas necessary? While user personas are theoretically beneficial, their necessity depends greatly on the project's scope and timeline. It's not a question I can simply look up and expect a definitive answer to. Based on my observations, the primary factor influencing the utility of user personas is the approach used to create them. This was not a concept covered in my UX boot camp course; instead, we were provided with a template to fill out, which I can understand some may view as stereotypical. My deeper insights came from practical experience and studying how other professionals employ them.

Why should we confine ourselves to using a template and imposing limitations on the number of personas for a project? It ultimately falls to the designer's judgment and what feels most appropriate. As designers, we must ask all the necessary questions to shape the product and tailor our user personas accordingly. Who are our users? What are their needs, preferences, and dislikes? How can we enhance the user experience for them?


First as a UX Designer: Are user personas helpful? 

What’s it like to work with someone closely for more than two years, completely online, and then meet that person for the first time in real life? Welcome to EchoUser’s 2024 offsite!

We've been fully remote since 2020 and our team, which has worked together closely for multiple years, has never met in person. This offsite, held in EchoUser's former hometown of San Francisco, brought us together in person for the first time since 2019. Big takeaway? It was great, and well overdue.

Given the opportunity to interact in person for the first time, our overriding goal was to hang out as a group and do things together. San Francisco, with its natural beauty and abundance of iconic sites, gave us plenty of interesting things to see and do. My personal highlight was one of our most informal activities - picking up a slice of Golden Boy pizza and enjoying it in Washington Square Park, followed by a meandering walk up and down the (in)famous hills and staircases around North Beach and Telegraph Hill.

![lunch.png](https://echouser-api-media.s3.us-west-1.amazonaws.com/lunch_1c395973c4.png)

Beyond the social aspects of the offsite, we focused on aligning everyone around our big picture strategy. 2023 was a tumultuous year and 2024 hints at continuing challenges. Accordingly, we've adjusted and we needed to share the updated vision with the team. Just as importantly, we wanted the team to react and engage with it. We centered this part of the offsite around a couple of interactive group activities that involved the team interpreting and envisioning how the strategy could manifest itself in the team's day to day work. I feel good about how this went. We generated specific, relatable, and achievable things that we will be focusing on going forward.

![work.png](https://echouser-api-media.s3.us-west-1.amazonaws.com/work_723dfe2c58.png)

Looking back, we're all happy with how this offsite went. It was already a success once our team members connected in person. As effective as remote working is, there's another level of connection that comes from interacting in-person. Building on that, we were able to have deeper and productive conversations around big picture strategy. I'm confident that the team is coming out of this with a shared sense of where we're going. At an organizational level, that's a win. The one thing I'd do differently? Not wait so long to do this again.

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<p><a href="https://www.instagram.com/reel/C5HE9NGAFWJ">EchoUser 2024 Offsite</a> on <a href="https://instagram.com">Instagram</a>.</p>


EchoUser 2024 Offsite

# A little history

Usability testing showed me that UX was legit.

At the beginning of my career I was a “Junior Human Factors Engineer” and my job involved reviewing specification documents, painstakingly red-lining individual words and sentences across pages of text to ensure they properly described how our products would meet human factors requirements. I didn't feel particularly impactful doing this and it didn't feel like I was using anything I learned in school in my job. But then I ran my first usability test and wow, that was a revelation.

For context, this was the mid-90’s and “usability testing” was not common to see in practice. Where I worked, no one had ever conducted a usability test, much less knew what it was. I was tasked to assess a prototype product and I remember thinking, this sounds like the exact scenario for this method I learned in school, usability testing. To justify this approach to other engineers I told them, “we’ll get more valid results if we watch the people we’re building this product for (aka, target users) actually use it.” It was a little bit of a hard sell. Assessing a product in this manner was very unique at that time. Normally, we would sit in a large conference room with all the stakeholders and look at engineering drawings projected on a wall, one page at a time, point out flaws and argue about them. 

I used low fidelity prototypes (paper) to conduct the usability test so test participants completed tasks by interacting with hand-drawn “screens”. I still remember two eye opening moments.  First, I was genuinely surprised at how participants generally lost themselves in the interaction with the paper screens. This exposed actual interaction usability challenges and the participants generated insightful comments around usage and how things worked as opposed to just look and feel. Second, and even more importantly, the engineers who watched the sessions believed the problems we saw were problems that they needed to fix. I had been working with this group for many months and convincing them to change anything was always extremely challenging. 

This pattern played out repeatedly over the course of my early career. We’d run a usability test and a skeptical product team would watch real people struggle and suddenly be convinced that yes, we have issues, let’s fix them. It's been a key factor in solidifying usability testing into a foundational tool in our UX toolbox. Over the years, usability testing methodology has become more streamlined and efficient. Remote testing is the norm and unmoderated testing (with no facilitator) is commonplace. At the same time, perhaps as an unintended consequence of its ever increasing efficiency, usability testing has become viewed as a tool with clear limits on its scope of impact. Anecdotally, usability testing doesn't inspire the same excitement with a lot of UX researchers since it doesn't drive innovation like discovery research techniques. I think it's a good time to revisit just how much impact a simple usability test can have, and a recent project gave us the opportunity to do just that.

# Revisiting usability testing

One of my favorite client scenarios is introducing UX methodology (aka user centered design) to UX immature organizations. As an established UX research and design firm, we have the advantage that UX-immature organizations that reach out to us already believe that UX is important. They just don't know what it looks like to properly apply UX methodology. They've never felt that "aha" moment when you connect the dots between really understanding your users and using that information to impact how you design your product.

Recently, a product manager reached out to us with an initial ask (paraphrased): "We need to base our product decisions on understanding our users, and we don't. Can you help?" The product manager felt that ideally, we'd do an extensive discovery activity to build detailed personas and journey maps. However, with a limited budget and a management chain that did not fully appreciate the value of UX work, we decided that a usability test would give the best bang for the buck. Not only would it identify immediate and actionable things they could improve (addressing their management's desire to see tangible payback on their investment), but we hoped it would lay down seeds for teaching the product team the value of understanding their users at a deeper level. 

This usability test was a throw-back because we ran it fully in-person. The test participants came to a specific testing location, the facilitator facilitated the test face to face, and the product team stakeholders attended and observed the test in person (from a separate observation room). We also dedicated a larger than normal portion of the pre-test interviewing to understanding the participants' backgrounds and motivations for using the product.

The usability test was, as typical, very effective in identifying problems. But what stuck out to me this time was how the product team’s in-person attendance enhanced the impact of the usability test. After each session, I would immediately walk to the observation area and engage with the product team. What stuck out to you? Do you have any follow up questions you'd like me to ask? This is where the in-person interaction really showed its value. I could see the expressions on team members' faces and read their body language which helped me to guide our conversations - pushing topics that resonated with them and building their enthusiasm towards wanting to fix things. I could also guide the conversations to focus on root causes of issues and away from reflexively trying to create solutions for the most recent problems we saw.

# The impact

For this project, we had an important underlying goal: to educate the product team on a user-centered approach to product development. The usability test was our vehicle to do that and the in-person nature of the activity really enabled us to tailor how the team received the information from the testing. We drove these in-person discussions to force the team to constantly talk about the characteristics we were learning about their target users, especially, their users' goals and motivations, the paths their users took in trying to achieve their goals, and using that information as the basis for product design decisions. The basic structure of the usability test - real users doing real tasks and the opportunity to talk to them more deeply about their goals and motivations - gave us a solid foundation to learn more deeply about their users. But the additional aspect of the in-person stakeholder attendance greatly enhanced our ability to embed and teach basic principles of user centered design. 

I'll leave you with one anecdote that made me feel that we really did accomplish our larger goal of educating the team. At the end of the project, we did a findings workshop to immerse the team in the results and kick-start their design solution process. When every group's proposed solutions all started with commentary around what they saw users trying to do, I knew we had accomplished our higher goal of getting them to think more user centric.



The Power of a Simple Usability Test

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Grit

Designing dashboards may sound like a daunting task to many designers, at least that was how I felt when I got started. At EchoUser I’ve worked with a few clients on enterprise design projects. When it was time to design a new dashboard, I couldn’t help but procrastinate, stress eat, and pull my hair out. I dare say that dashboards are one of the most complex digital design components. It intertwines all the functions, features, and pages of the entire product; it provides a sneak peek into what the users are about to experience; and oftentimes it offers a birds-eye view of the whole system. It is entirely its own beast.

I’ve made many detours, several mistakes, and experienced occasional success by trial and error during my journey of dashboard exploration. By no means am I an expert in this domain. Yet, I’d like to share a few things that I’ve learned, steps that I’ve taken, and questions that I’ve asked in my struggling design process with fellow designers who may be staring at a blank art board right now, pulling their hair out and struggling with the same problems I’ve struggled with before.

Before we get down to the nitty-gritty, let’s be clear on what you should have done before you start designing:

1. You’ve done or read a decent amount of user research to understand your users, their pain points and needs;

1. You’ve developed some thoughts on how the product works as a whole system; and

1. You’ve sketched some conceptual models or user flows for the system.

We believe in a research-first design approach at EchoUser, and all the design decisions should be based on solid user research. Only when the designer gains a deep understanding of the users and the product as a whole system, will you be able to deliver a dashboard that serves the users’ needs.   

#### Step 1: Start with the content, information hierarchy & jobs to be done

Take a step back and look at the app as a whole system. You want to try to understand what role the dashboard plays in a systematic view and what jobs users are trying to accomplish on the dashboard. It could be one or a combination of the following components:

- Navigation or shortcuts to the most commonly used features/pages

- Information visualization of what is happening (e.g. performance data)

- Anything that needs users' immediate attention (e.g. alerts, system updates, warning)

Lisa Battle summarized the 10 most commonly used dashboard components in [her talk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZqNRywpO3bE) at the UXPA International Conference 2016, which are:

1. alerts

3. “to-do” items

5. performance stats

7. current status

9. search

11. task starting points

13. social components

15. recent activity

17. news, events announcements

19. push content

Her list is by no means exhaustive, but I found it useful as a prompt during user interviews to find out what components were most important to them.  It also serves well as a checklist at client check-in meetings to make sure we are not missing anything.

![Dashboard-IA-1-e1560295020426-1024x555.png](https://echouser-api-media.s3.us-west-1.amazonaws.com/Dashboard_IA_1_e1560295020426_1024x555_3fd5cec3cb.png)

Once you jot down a list of dashboard components, it is time to do an exercise with your product managers, engineers, clients, or stakeholders to co-create an information hierarchy for the different layers of information. Questions to be answered based on user research:

- What information do users care about most?

- What actions do users want to perform?

- If there are different types of users, how might their needs be different? What do they want to see differently?

The information hierarchy diagram below was created for one of my clients and it served as a stepping stone to a low-fidelity wireframe.

![Dashboard-IA-2-1024x637.png](https://echouser-api-media.s3.us-west-1.amazonaws.com/Dashboard_IA_2_1024x637_5f88ea6e67.png)

#### Step 2: Craft your stories with wireframes, layouts and data visualizations

Once you get a good sense of the critical content, the next step is to play with the layout and start wire-framing. This is the most challenging step as it is like you are building the bones and muscles from scratch. There could be many different layouts possible, and sometimes it is hard to tell which one works better. My mentor Steve Fadden, who taught me everything I know about UX when I studied at UC Berkeley School of Information, refers to the “one second story” principle: by skimming through the dashboard for just one second, users should be able to quickly grasp a story of what is going on and get a rough sense if anything needs their attention or concern. Ideally, users don’t have to scroll down the page to get the “one second story”, which means you want to put the most important information on the top of the dashboard. Your “one second story” might answer these common user questions:

- What is going on?

- Has anything changed since the last time I logged in?

- Is there anything that needs my immediate attention?

- Do I need to worry or be concerned?

- Do I need to take any actions?

The information hierarchy that you developed in Step 1 should help answer these questions. Once the users have developed a good picture of the system in their minds, they might want to dig deeper into the data or navigate to other sections of the product. You want to think about the rest of the story you want to provide to the users.

After you answer the “what is your story?” question, you need to figure out how to tell the story. When it comes to the dashboard, it is often a question of what graph will best  display the data? Andrew Abela’s diagram, the [Chart Chooser](chrome-extension://efaidnbmnnnibpcajpcglclefindmkaj/https://extremepresentation.typepad.com/files/choosing-a-good-chart-09.pdf) (later he created a new version Slide Chooser) could help you decide which chart is a better fit for your data, and Cleveland and McGill’s levels of graphical perception can help you fine tune and choose the appropriate graphical properties that are the most effective way to convey information.

![A_Abela.jpg](https://echouser-api-media.s3.us-west-1.amazonaws.com/A_Abela_e6ee1e1da1.jpg)

>Andrew Abela’s The Chart Chooser. Source: [The Extreme Presentation(tm) Method](https://extremepresentation.typepad.com/)

<br/>

![data_viz_accuracy_levels.jpg](https://echouser-api-media.s3.us-west-1.amazonaws.com/data_viz_accuracy_levels_87688e7ddd.jpg)

>Cleveland Mcgill’s Graphical Perception. Source: [Interaction Design Foundation](https://www.interaction-design.org/literature/article/visual-mapping-the-elements-of-information-visualization)

<br/>

One challenge in dashboard design is information overload. There are two types of information overload: data overloading and non-data overloading. Data overloading is  often caused by lack of focus and prioritization. Designers often have to resist the temptation to dump more and more datasets, features, or shortcuts to the dashboard. When the users (and/or clients) describe what they want for the dashboard, the list could get long quickly, making the dashboard a dumping ground before you realize it. If you find yourself struggling with overloaded information, go back to Step 1.     

#### Step 3: Use visual design to convey values and emotions...a harder job than you may think

Visual design is the last step of dashboard design, and here it may introduce the second type of information overload – non-data overload, such as UI decorations, excessive icons, grids, or any other visual elements that don’t represent any content. Edward Tufte referred to them as "**chartjunk**" in "The Visual Display of Quantitative Information", one of his most famous data visualization books. He acknowledged that “chartjunk” may exist for a reason – either “to make the graphic appear more scientific and precise”, or “to enliven the display”, or to satisfy the designer’s ego by giving the designer himself/herself “an opportunity to exercise artistic skills”. Regardless of its cause, it is the designer’s job to “ruthlessly prune out” unnecessary visual elements to keep the dashboard clean and simple, and let the numbers and content gracefully stand out on their own and serve the users’ needs.  

Of all the visual attributes (typography, iconography, illustrations, imagery, etc.), color is probably the most tricky one in dashboard design. Established companies often have well-defined color palettes as parts of their design systems. As a result, designers may not have much freedom to use colors as they wish.  Nonetheless, the importance of colors cannot be underestimated in dashboard design.

Color is also a type of information that should be used with purpose. Otherwise it could introduce too much visual noise and become “chartjunk”.  Even worse, it could make the information confusing or misunderstood. Certain colors are associated with certain meanings and could bring out certain emotions, not to mention the cultural factors of different color use and interpretations. For instance, in Western culture, most people associate red with alarming, dangerous, and urgent, and think of green as good, healthy, and peaceful. When designers apply colors on the graphics and text, you need to ask questions such as:

- Does the value of information match the common interpretation of the color among your users?

- Which information is the most critical one that need users attention? - Does the color of the information communicate that urgency?

- Are you using the appropriate visual cues such as color hue or color intensity to encode the data?

- Does the information involve a positive or a negative notion? Does users’ interpretation of the color match that notion?

- Does the color enable efficient comparison of data? Does the grouping of colors follow the Gestalt law of good form, which allows the users to quickly perceive the same color attributes in the same group of information?

As dashboards are often data intensive, they is often color intensive, too. Designers should never underestimate how long it may take your team to reach consensus on the color choices. Leave some buffer time in your visual design schedule. This leeway in project planning could help keep your design projects on track. And don’t forget that colors could be interpreted as a personal and subjective matter. Be well prepared to receive strong sentiments and pushback from others during the visual design iterations. You should always be ready to elaborate on your color choices – what other alternatives you’ve explored, what constraints you’ve considered, and why you reach this design decision.

#### Test, test and test

In each step of the dashboard design, I cannot emphasize enough how crucial it is to test your design with people - real users - to verify your design assumptions. It is even more crucial with dashboards than the rest of the product, given their design density. There might be tons of use scenarios, and some of them you can only learn by talking to the people who use them on a regular basis. There might be concepts or flows that experienced users have learned to live with but make no sense to new users. Only by talking to the end users who are living in what you design, designers gain a deep knowledge on whether your design makes a delightful experience, and hopefully, improve someone’s lives.

#### Conclusion

I hope you’ve gained some confidence in dashboard design, and maybe learned something useful. Once you tear down a big design problem into chunks of small design problems, the daunting beast might not be intimidating anymore, and your life might be much easier. Of course there is no one-size-fits-all design solution, I’d love to hear your ideas, comments, and thoughts on what works or not work from your experience.   


Let’s talk about dashboards

As a graphic designer, I used a sketchbook to take notes, make small sketches and conduct calculations. These annotated diagrams were always intended to organize myself, not to be artful layouts or page spreads. I never included those sketches in my portfolio because my book was always focused on final, production-ready products.

#### Making it pretty (fast).

After shifting from graphic design towards design strategy in grad school, I now find myself in the SF UX/tech industry dealing with similar challenges again. I’m shocked by the intense focus on making high-fidelity, pixel-perfect designs as early in the process as possible, often facilitated by UX prototyping tools, like InVision below.

![invision-prototyping.png](https://echouser-api-media.s3.us-west-1.amazonaws.com/invision_prototyping_a989da6ae3.png)

While learning the user-centered design process, I came into the habit of whiteboard sketching, using post-its for more than notes, making paper models and acting out scenarios. I learned from my colleagues and adapted designs collaboratively, on-the-fly. We created artifacts that sometimes had little to do with the final designs, but kept our design process moving forward.

[There's no definitive data to prove low-fidelity works better](https://ux.stackexchange.com/questions/39693/low-fidelty-vs-high-fidelity-do-they-elicit-different-types-of-reactions), but there are a lot of reasons to put it to use.

#### Fidelity what?

Since UX is famous for confusing terminology, let’s define fidelity here. Fidelity is the volume and granularity of detail in design elements. So, low-fidelity designs are “rough cuts” of design ideas that contain little of the actual content, using placeholders and blocks to indicate content areas instead. On the other end of the spectrum, high-fidelity designs include actual content, a clear typographical hierarchy, images and icons in the correct position and, sometimes (though I see it more and more), visual design elements such as colors, typefaces and artwork.

Thanks to the new high-fidelity world where everything seems to be rendered in visual design, we have a tendency to describe our artifacts with phrases like sketches and prototypes, using them interchangeably. But in a classic sense, sketches and prototypes are different beasts and are used differently in phases of a project.

![sketch-v-prototype.jpg](https://echouser-api-media.s3.us-west-1.amazonaws.com/sketch_v_prototype_6ef50c25fe.jpg)

The crux determining the fidelity of a design artifact is it’s purpose — not if it’s done on paper or on the computer. The volume of detail depends on what you need to learn. With a few bits of paper and markers, a small group could simulate the user experience of a genetics-based dating app (which one group of EchoUsers did at our bi-yearly offsite, seen below). With some roleplay and hand-drawn artifacts, it’s possible to determine if the idea would resonate with users, if the process too long, what the service journey looks like, what channels work best, how many elements would need to be developed, and even how you’ll make money.

![echouser-prototyping.jpg](https://echouser-api-media.s3.us-west-1.amazonaws.com/echouser_prototyping_362abd2855.jpg)

#### Why it's worth making ugly things

“Fancy” prototyping tools afford us the ability to design in high-fidelity quickly and early on in the project, but there is some value to making low-fidelity ugly artifacts.

![links_prototype_2013 (1).jpg](https://echouser-api-media.s3.us-west-1.amazonaws.com/links_prototype_2013_1_07ca7062a6.jpg)

#### You can make new screens fast and cheap!

Stacks of post-its stuck on a smart band (like the photo above) can be tested in real time, in the real world. And, if you need a new screen or the user wants to see it done differently, it’s just takes a couple minutes and a pen to make one. If you had to do that same work in InVision or Sketch, it will take more time and effort to get that feedback.

![sketch-wireframes.jpg](https://echouser-api-media.s3.us-west-1.amazonaws.com/sketch_wireframes_1bc93bb1df.jpg)

#### You can share sooner and focus critique on what you need to know now.

Low-fidelity designs really shine when you share what you’re working on. Without socializing the ideas, you could end up making a lot of assumptions in your high-fidelity Sketch designs. You would spend precious design time debating between the inclusion of the Facebook social graph or asking for email addresses before you’ve gotten critical feedback, which might reveal a user’s friends don’t actually give a crap.

In recent projects, I’ve noticed that early concepts rendered in a “shiny” glory look like final ideas. I personally struggle to provide good critique because it’s much easier to focus on easy stuff (like “fix this type weight”) than to tell a colleague, “I’m not sure I believe your concept.”

#### You can more easily involve your users and non-design teammates.

By starting in low-fidelity, the design process is more accessible. Involving non-design teammates and users in early design reviews allows you to learn how the product fits into their lives.

Users looking at high-fidelity concepts will be more likely to judge it like any other product on the market: do I love it or hate it? Users won’t necessarily see it as something they can mold into what they need or want– even if the design could be changed.

Designers will always finish projects in high-fidelity to bring an idea to life. But, I think we’re mistreating a critical part of the design journey by hiding low-fidelity work like a dirty, little secret. If you haven’t tried these types of low-fidelity sketches and prototypes, you could be missing important reality checks needed for your idea to succeed. And, if you keep low-fidelity work only to yourself, your clients will continue to misunderstand your process and your users won’t be given the space to help you.


Why Go Lo-Fi?

Have you ever experienced something you don’t like, but you can’t explain why? Maybe you just have a bad feeling about it, but you can’t put it into words? I’ve interviewed handfuls of participants who make comments like, “I don’t know why, I just don’t like it.” I can’t always understand my own needs, translate them into tangible solutions, and articulate or act on those solutions; so as an Experience Researcher, I don’t expect the participants I recruit to be great interpreters and relayers of their minds, emotions, and reactions.

If someone makes a mistake or show signs of struggle, we conduct something called a root cause analysis — a strategic and intentional discussion approach intended to determine the root cause of the problem. To best understand the participant’s perspectives, we follow a protocol of carefully crafted questions. Well-designed questions are open-ended, unbiased, and invite participants to explore and share introspective thoughts. Finessing a question and laboring over subtleties in verbiage can have great effects on productive communication. In fact, whole fields around question cultivation exist and have great application in qualitative interviewing.

Researchers can also uncover the user’s perspective with repeated, similar but slightly altered questions. Restructuring the question, or asking participants to rephrase their response can encourage use of new language, discovery of new angles, and uncovering of unexplored avenues.

The **“5 Whys,”** developed by Sakichi Toyoda, the founder of Toyota, works as an effective way to unpack and understand an issue. The concept is relatively simple: If a participant expresses dissatisfaction or confusion, ask, “Why?” Once they provide a response, continuing to ask “Why?” will encourage participants to share the basis and evolution of their thought process. To record and attempt to follow someone’s stream of thought is a very personal request. When granted permission to enter someone’s mind, you must show endless respect. Consider the following:

- Never mock or judge; always listen with openness and try to empathize with their position.

- Allow the participant time to finish their thought.

- Let them set the pace of the conversation.

- Recognize the power of pausing for a few moments before asking the next question, as this often encourages the participant to expand or move in a new direction altogether.

Dissecting the origins of dissatisfaction can be challenging for some participants. Using certain techniques to encourage introspection and create a safe space for sharing thoughts can accelerate the process of identifying the root of the problem, which accelerates the designer’s task of generating a design solution.


Getting to the Root of the Problem

[Yodlee](https://www.yodlee.com/) came to EchoUser needing to create a financial iOS mobile app for the [Fall Finovate 2013 conference](https://finovate.com/fall2013/). Working with Yodlee’s UX director, a visual designer, I, the UX designer, quickly refined and redesigned the mobile application from the ground up. With about 6 weeks to create the design, prototype, and rehearse the demo-ware, we worked at a quick pace to make the conference deadline. Being new to designing and prototyping for mobile, there were tons of new learnings. Aside from ramping up, I encountered a couple of hurdles and challenges. Here are some solutions and tips to the challenges we faced:

- What prototyping tool can we use to allow for all the cool touch gestures such as pinch to zoom, or swiping right? The answer is: [Proto.io](https://proto.io/). It’s an awesome web application that lets you quickly wireframe and prototype for mobile devices ranging from iOS, Android, to tablets. Learning how to use the tool was relatively easy to pick up, and you can upload final mockup files, creating a pretty realistic prototype. You can customize your own resolutions as well, and theoretically it can prototype for any device including alarm clocks, cars, and even refrigerators!

- How can we get the prototype to run as a native iOS app. on a mobile device offline, without compromising on speed? Conferences are notorious for bad internet connections, so we wouldn’t want to depend on it for the demo. The prototype was typically viewed in a browser from a link, accessed via the interweb. Even if we exported the html files, and viewed it from DropBox or some file sharing application, it would open the prototype in a browser which would take away the native app. experience. We found ProtoSee, an iOS app was essentially created to view off-line HTML prototypes. They have great options in customizing the native app. icon, as well as changing the splash screen. It was relatively easy to download the prototype into the app./device, and customize the view settings.
Overall, we made our deadline with a little time to spare and all our hard work paid off: We won a [‘Best in Show’ award](https://finovate.com/finovatefall-2013-best-of-show-winners/) out of 69 live demos. The audience votes determined the winners, which totaled to 8 demos. View the demo [here](https://finovate.com/videos/finovatefall-2013-yodlee/).

Yodlee takes home the win "Best in Show" this year at Finovate 2013

Done! 

At 5pm today, after I signed off from my EchoUser Analytics account, said goodbye to my 10th participant, I officially finished the testing part (oh yeah, the research and report writing part is yet to come… 😉 ) for this usability benchmarking study on an upcoming Cisco router product. This new router product will be used to set up networks in small business environment, so that means, if you are reading this blog post right now, my dear readers, most likely, never once in your life, you’ll be put in a position to use a product like this. 

So who are the users? Engineers or technicians who work at Cisco resellers. People who usually have years of experience working in the field, at clients’ sites, helping tens if not thousands of companies setting up their wired and wireless network, configuring the network’s security services, customizing VPN accounts, etc. They have to be the **power** users of the UI of router products. This is their job, so for one thing, they interact with UIs in this domain on a daily basis; for another thing, it’s their expertise in this domain that makes them special and let them be able to earn their living. 

I did expect those power users to go through the router configuration tasks we prepared for them in a logic and efficient way. However, what I did NOT expect was how they felt extremely “rewarded” after they had overcome the obstacles in the UX and UI design of the router product. Normally, users are supposed to feel defeated when they make errors and mistakes when interacting with a system. 

One interesting anecdote: there was this one task I asked the users to establish a site-to-site VPN tunnel (simply put, just to let two routers on the Internet to talk to each other). There was this technician from San Jose, who had more than 20 years of experience dealing with router products, sitting in front of the desktop to finish this task. Despite various of hurdles he had to go through to be able to get to the last step of the whole configuration process, what finally threw me off was, in order to complete the task, as the last step, the user needed to click this super tiny and grayed out “connect’ icon which was hidden among a group of other icons on the screen, it was as if a joke the product designer intentionally played on the users to NOT let them accomplish what the users hope to accomplish. 

After exploring on the configuration page for over 5 minutes, perhaps guided by some supernatural forces, the user actually did find that little “connect” icon, and clicked on it. Mission succeed! With all those frustrations and confusions I observed in this process, I would expect this San Jose network engineer to give me some feedback like “that process was frustrating” “they could have designed in a better way to make the icon more obvious.” However, in fact what I heard was “that wasn’t too hard”, “glad that I did find that button to click.” He seemed to have enjoyed this “intellectual battle” with the product designers. 

On one side, the product designers were creating these super hard “mazes” for power users to solve; on the other side, the more difficult these “mazes” are, the more rewarding these power users would feel, and to some extent they are actually proud of the fact that they are given “mazes” like these to solve. Those “mazes” are the watermarks for their professionalism.

I recently came across this interesting perspective from Alan Cooper‘s book “[The Inmates are Running the Asylum](https://books.google.com/books?id=04cFCVXC_AUC&printsec=frontcover&dq=the+inmates+are+running+the+asylum&hl=en&ei=PcVATuTRJMbjiAK9o5mXBQ&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result#v=onepage&q&f=false),” he categorizes the modern technology users into two groups: 

<highlight class="quote">

><quote></quote>
>_High cognitive friction polarizes people into two groups. It either makes them feel frustrated and stupid for failing, or giddy with power at overcoming the extreme difficulty. These powerful emotions force people into being either an ‘apologist’ or a ‘survivor.’ They either adopt cognitive friction as a life, or they go underground and accept it as a necessary evil.” As Cooper put it “regardless of how hard an interaction is, or how uselessly obscure a feature is, the apologist will unerringly point to the power and functionality of the gadget, blithely ignoring the difficulty of actually using it._

</highlight>

I wouldn’t say that was exactly what had driven the engineer who apparently “suffered” from the user experience of the router product to still give me positive feedback, but I think Cooper has given a quite reasonable explanation to it. Indeed, engineers like to work in an environment where their special skills and domain knowledge can make a difference. That’s how they differentiate themselves from the crowd. In a sense, they are shouting at the product (the product designers indeed), saying “the tougher the better!” However, should that be the criteria for UX professionals to design products for them? Perhaps not. The increased level of complexity of a system would increase the possibility of human errors, the possibility of project failures and the level of education/training needed to operate a system. Well, if the price we are going to pay for implementing simpler and more usable UI for power users (like those network engineers) will just be: the lowered self-efficacy for those powerful power users, I’d say “deal.” 🙂

That's why we call them POWER users

I’m running a _stealth_ usability study for an iPhone app at the moment, and we’re on a tight 4 week RITE (Rapid Iterative Test and Evaluation) schedule. For those not in the know, RITE is a way of condensing the usability and design prototyping process into a short time frame.  Instead of testing a dozen users in one big batch, writing a report with design recommendations, submitting the report, making some of the design changes (or not), and then starting the testing all over again, RITE lets us do the same thing in about a month. 

We test 4 users every week instead of 12 once a month; we make design changes on the fly instead of waiting for a report to be produced; we get all the stakeholders involved so things can happen today and tomorrow, instead of next week or next month.  In many ways, RITE is the way that usability – and design more generally – should always be done (in my opinion). 

One of the problems with RITE, however (and there are a few, believe you me) is that recruiting users becomes a pressure-filled activity. Instead of having weeks to schedule participants, fill in missing slots, etc., we have days to schedule people, sometimes only _one_ day.  For example, I scheduled 2 users yesterday for a session _today_ – pretty nuts if you ask me. 

But this entry isn’t so much about RITE, or how to test an iPhone app, or why an external USB camera doesn’t play nice with live streaming and a screencast – I’ll get to all these issues in good time. No, this time I want to focus on a particular user (who shall not be named for obvious reasons), and how persistent she was today.  If any of you live in the Bay Area you’ve probably heard that the [Bay Bridge is closed](http://online.wsj.com/article/SB125684650150716859.html), which is wreaking havoc on…well, just about everything.  

And this poor _user-who-shall-not-be-named_ made a valiant effort today to get across said closed bridge, only to spend another hour and a half trying to get into town from the East Bay.  She finally gave up when she realized that making the session would mean leaving her daughter stranded at school without a ride. 

So to every user who has ever spent an inordinate amount of time getting to a session, all in the name of a better product, I salute you.

And the trophy goes to...the user?

# Design from a Distance

I spent part of the morning last Friday with the team at [Architecture For Humanity](http://www.architectureforhumanity.org/) (and a South African [Design Fellow](http://www.architectureforhumanity.org/getinvolved/designfellowship) on the ground), brainstorming potential design solutions for [FIFA’s Football For Hope program](http://www.fifa.com/aboutfifa/worldwideprograms/footballforhope/).  As it turns out, FIFA has decided that the World Cup 2010 will be like no other: rather than just a sporting event, FIFA aims to use the Hope program to “bring together, support, advise and strengthen sustainable social and human development programmes” in areas affected by the tournament.  FIFA’s plan? To build 20 community centers and football pitches throughout Africa, part of its “20 Centres in 2010” program, and a concerted attempt to leave a legacy beyond the World Cup 2010.

To me this sounds like a great plan but, were it not for the involvement of Architecture For Humanity, whose team brings an amazing breadth and depth of community design knowledge, I would mostly write it off as a CSR/greenwashing play.  I mean, let’s be honest, do 20 towns in Africa actually need community centers?

As it turns out, the answer is yes – mostly because FIFA and its stakeholders and sponsors have decreed it thus. So…if we _have_ to build 20 community centers, how do we make sure that they are built in accordance with user wants and needs? And how to do it separated by 6000 miles and a crappy Skype line?

From an experience design perspective, the architecture and urban development space is an interesting animal, dominated – at least as far as I can tell – by a long list of constraints: dozens of stakeholders (expert and not), local political schisms, material limitations (brick, wood, adobe, stone, metal…which to choose and where to source it?), local construction capacity, etc… The list goes on and on and on, and kudos to the Architecture For Humanity team for sticking with it.

# The feedback loop

There is something to be said for a situation in which authentic, relevant feedback from the end user – in this case, local African villagers – is absent from the picture.  It’s normal for designers to ideate and brainstorm potential solutions, then test them against the list of user wants and needs to see what sticks (and with the Architecture For Humanity team, there’s always plenty of great sketching and brainstorming going on).  But in this case, the sketches were being (mostly) tested against the requirements of major fiscal stakeholders and sponsors, not the actual end users.

When you are Microsoft, and your end users can express their displeasure by no longer buying Microsoft products, the feedback loop can be a powerful tool for change. But when you are a big sponsor and/or development organization, and your end users have no way of providing positive or negative feedback, or they don’t even know that _they have a voice_, the system breaks down and the design process fails.

So while I admire the folks at Architecture For Humanity for their tenacity and creativity under pressure, I don’t envy them at all.  Are there any potential solutions to this impasse?

Designing for Hope

grit_streamline-icon-fitness-dumbbell-lift@140x140.svg

Creative Spirit

Empathy

Grit

Growth Mindset

Harness Ambiguity

Humble, but Confident

Love of Craft

Optimism