[MUSIC]

My name is Heather O'Neill.

I'm here to talk to you guys today, to find out how useable you are.

My co-presenter here is gonna be a little bit silent but if I do have to

make a run for the bathroom halfway through, it's it's this person's fault.

>> [LAUGH] >> But otherwise let's get started.

So if you're here, you're probably in some forum.

UX field you know what UX is, it's probably your thing.

Anybody here feel like, they're not interested in UX,

they don't do that at all?

Cool.

So maybe you're a UX designer or strategist, or researcher or an analyst or

an architect or, you're some sort of UX person and as a UX person.

It's really your job, is to focus on, championing for the user.

Getting in the way of all the things that are gonna mess up

the experience in an application for your user.

Like marketing decisions, or

features already in development or, well, opinion wars and, I like blue better.

Well, what if I told you, that that's not your only job.

What if there is more to being a UX person,

to thinking about the user experience than just defending the user,

again all these bad things coming their way?

No, really, there is more for you guys to do than the user.

It's important to actually, take our own medicine and

think about ourselves as a product, as an application.

We have to remember, that, we have our own users, people who need to work with us.

So tell me if any of this sounds familiar.

This is Feather.

She's a user experience professional.

And she works at Initech.

And she hears things like this all the time.

Just use your design magic to make it good.

Has anybody heard that sort of thing before?

Yeah. Or

we sent it straight to development because we need to get it out the door quick.

So Feather never even saw it.

Or there's no time for all that, that research and

testing, we, we don't have time for that.

And can't you just tell us what the user wants?

Well, maybe, but it would really help if we could do that research, so

I could confirm I know what the user wants.

Or personas are great and all but

I actually just think it should be done this way.

Or this is a favorite of mine, I've heard this so many times.

Can you make it like Apple?

>> [LAUGH] >> Yeah, no problem.

We have baking software at Initech and I'm sure it can be just like Apple's iPhone or

the higher ups don't think that's important.

So we're not gonna have the budget for that.

That's a big one, and that's really tough, too.

So, at the end of all this, Feather, and probably you guys as well,

are going, well, how can I do my job, if I can't do anything?

You've basically relegated me to some sort of design magic, monkey of some sort.

And that's all it seems like you want me to do.

And, it's really tough because in theory, everyone wants a UX professional.

We are pretty the most popular profession right now

in technology aside from developers, but developers can get lumped into this too.

And, the reason is because CEOs and other high ups have realized that oh, yeah.

The experience of my application is important for, keeping customers and

that sort of thing, so they get in the board rooms and

they're like, you know, we really got to have a good experience.

Yeah, you know, I think there are people who do that, they're called like,

UX, or some, some letter, UI professional, something like that.

Yeah, let's get one of those.

And so in the next three to six months, they hire a UX professional, and

then they're all like, solved it.

Totally done, right?

We got that.

But as you guys know, and as the CEO doesn't know but

he needs to learn, it's not that simple just to solve it.

Okay, you're hired not what?

Well, all those things we ran into, just a moment ago tend to happen.

And, so, even though you know how to do your job, and

even though you can do all the things that they really want you to do,

you don't actually have the traction to do it.

And that's what I mean by,

there's more than the user, because there is more than the user.

You have your users, those CEOs, this marketing team, the developers.

Anyone you're working with internally or

as a client site, who needs to understand your process and what you do.

Who needs to be able to work with you and

who you want to say, not those things to anymore.

Those are your users.

You're the product and so today we're gonna look at,

how to make you guys more useable, because if you're hearing those things.

Maybe you need a usability overhaul.

And so we're gonna cover four basic topics today,

empathizing, speaking the language, being flexible, and surprising and delighting.

And if you're looking at this list and saying,

well gee that sounds like what I do for my users, good we're on the right track.

The first thing we're gonna do is empathize.

Now, every corporation, has their underpants.

Those are the underpinnings of a corporation.

I didn't come up with the underpants theory, that is from a talk by

Tamira [UNKNOWN], I highly recommend you go and find that talk and listen to it,

but the underpants, the politics of the company, the internal goals.

The overarching structure, anything that you don't want the users to see,

you don't want the public to know about.

That's your underpants.

Like, I don't want you guys to see my underpants right now.

>> [LAUGH].

>> And so, often your job, is to make sure that these underpants,

don't end up in the application or the home page.

You don't want, people to know that, oh,

there's in-fighting, so we have to have three extra navigation links so

everybody feels like they get their face time on the home page.

No, you wanna prevent that.

But you also wanna take care of it.

And it works in reverse.

It's your job to make sure, that these underpants would sorry, you need to help

them sort out their underpants, and this is where the analogy starts to break down.

But, basically, you can become a champion of underpants.

And what that means, is really understanding the different underpants,

the different underpinnings of the different people in your company.

So, for example, you know, what do CEOs really care about?

What does Dev really care about?

What does marketing really care about, and why do they care about those things?

And this actually is something that I've learned, multiple times,

because I feel like you can never learn one thing just once, over the years.

One of the clients, that we'd worked with for a long time, recommended us to

another part of their very large company, to do some work with them.

And we were like yes, this is gonna be awesome.

We love recommendations.

So we went in, we set up some goals, we understood the project, or thought we did.

And, we got started.

And, about halfway through the project, tensions were really high, because

the people we were working with, unlike the previous team who had recommended us.

Did not understand what UX did.

And literally, they thought we were just gonna give them some designs.

And that they would have full control over exactly what the designs would be and

where they would go.

And, we kept pushing back and

saying, well no because you told us that your goal is this.

If your goal is this, that design won't work.

And it got to the point where, the main person in charge of the project,

who hadn't been involved in a lot of the conversations was extremely frustrated.

She was ready to fire us, she was not having it.

And I could argue all day long, about, yeah, I am totally right because you

said this in the beginning, but that would of lost me project.

It would have lost me any sort of good will with the team that I had already.

They wouldn't recommend me to anyone else.

Certainly these folks wouldn't recommend us.

That's a really bad place to be in.

So, after several conversations in which trying to be right didn't really work for

me, I took a step back and I started listening to what she was saying she

wanted, what she was saying she needed, and why she was saying those things.

And I started to, instead of push my agenda and

my opinions on her, I started to just repeat back what she was saying to me.

I hear you, I think you want me, us to do this, and

it sounds like we need to do that in order to help you do what you need to do.

And she started to feel a lot more comfortable with us.

And we were able to, not only do what she wanted, but

also give a little push back later on in the project.

So that we could kind of hybrid between, okay doing exactly what she wanted which

wouldn't really achieve the goals and kind of getting closer to those goals.

But if I had kept insisting, that I was right, the project would have ended.

And they actually recommended us, to another section of their company so,

it worked out really well in our favor to take the time.

And that's why it's really important to do that at every step of the way.

And it's also important to remember when you're working with people,

people don't like change.

Who remembers this Facebook profile?

Right?

So every time Facebook makes an update about 80% of the users on Facebook go

Don't, don't change it I like it the way it was.

And then we get used to it and we're okay with it.

And, it's really just, it's, it's really alarming, when a big change happens and

you're not expecting it.

And so when you come into a new company, the CEOs are all high fiving themselves,

yeah we got a U.S. professional.

They're not ready for, the change that you have to make at a really rap.

That will scare them if any of you were in Pablo [UNKNOWN] 's talk earlier,

he even said don't go in and say we need to change everything.

Take it one step at a time.

And one of the first steps is to remember that not

everybody sees everything the same way.

So, if you're planning out a project and you wanna build a tire swing,

you then have this many different opinions about what you're actually building.

And that can get really challenging because, if you don't realize that not

everybody's on the same page, you're gonna be in a lot of trouble over time.

And so it's your job as a UX professional to bridge all those gaps,

bring all those assumptions to the forefront,

to really understand where each different part of your team is coming from.

And that starts with empathy.

So, what things can you do to empathize?

Use your user reasearch toolkit.

So, things like empathy maps.

You would do customer interviews, to find out what users are like.

Do that with your stakeholders.

You can, even do some persona elements like,

knowing what the different people's goals are CEOs and higher ups.

They always have some goals, they don't always know exactly what they are, but

they have them.

A lot of it has to do with the bottom line.

Developers have goals, make this as easy for me to build as possible.

Marketing has their own set of goals.

Everybody's got something going on, and using your user research tool kit to

dig that out of them is gonna work really well.

You can also put yourself in their shoes.

Remember, that the people you work with are people.

Just like the users are people,

it's important to remember that, and your job, is to help everyone else on the team.

Remember that the users are people and not metrics or sign ups or whatever.

It's also important to remember, that marketing is full of people,

you can't just bash marketing all the time even though it can be kind of fun.

You know, we can't just tell developers oh, you're just a developer.

Because everybody's a person and so

it's important to do whenever possible put yourself in their shoes.

Say, if I was that person and I had to care about what they care about,

how would I feel about what I'm saying to me?

And that was a weird statement but hopefully you got what that meant.

And that's how you empathize.

So the next thing that we wanna do, is speak their language.

If you go to Starbuck's, you can't go in there and say I want a small coffee.

You have to say a tall coffee.

You can't go in there, I mean you can go in there, and

say that but they'll give you weird looks.

You can go in there and say, I want a grande half caff no fat.

Frappuccino with light ice and that might mean something to somebody at Starbucks.

Maybe it doesn't mean anything to you or

me, but they have a language that they speak there.

And, the same way your company, they have a language they speak.

Especially, if they're an older company or a bigger company.

There are things, that are already set in place, when you come in,

that you'll have to learn, you'll have to learn how to navigate that.

And, when I say speak the language, I don't just mean using the right words.

Even though, that is part of what I mean.

I mean, thinking about how they work as a team.

How they communicate with each other.

One example of this, is I have a co-worker on my team.

Who likes to use the word strawman, to define, power points that he's built.

And now, if you guys don't know, a strawman is an argument that you set up,

where you're trying to distract from someone's actual argument by

pretending it's this other argument, and then knocking that argument down.

So you haven't dealt with someone's real argument, you've set up a fake one and

then knocked it down.

What my coworker actually means is, I've created an outline, it's got some holes,

it's got some errors, can you give me some feedback?

But he calls it a strawman and he's done this about seven or eight times now.

And eventually, I will help him

understand what a strawman actually is,

>> [LAUGH] >> Because I think that's important, too.

But I'm not just gonna go in guns blazing and say, hey, it's not a straw man.

You shouldn't call it that, and just roll with it.

Because it's helpful for him to understand that, I already know what he means.

I don't need to correct him every single time.

Eventually yeah, probably.

Another thing at my organization is, they love PowerPoint.

Like it's death by PowerPoint there.

[LAUGH] This is how I feel about PowerPoint most of the time.

And it's not PowerPoint like I've got my PowerPoint slides here, sorry.

But they have a lot of pictures and not as much on the words.

[COUGH] These PowerPoints are intended to be reference materials, and

so, they were, like, chock full of words.

But that's really helpful for the way everybody knows how to communicate.

And so, while I'm figuring out ways to teach them better ways to communicate,

the things that we need to keep track of, I use PowerPoint,

because that helps them understand, what I'm doing and why I'm doing it.

I also have, another co-worker who,when we're doing design work,

he really likes to know that somebody's done this before.

That the pattern that we're introducing makes sense and

is viable, so, it's really important if I'm saying, okay,

we're gonna use an item finder like this on the sidebar.

Hey look, there's somebody who's done this before.

This colleague is in the U.K. so we use U.K. examples.

But that's really helpful, for

him because then he knows OK I can feel reassured about this.

This is a common pattern.

People will recognize us, it makes me feel better.

And now not every single pattern is gonna have an exact corollary but

it does help the conversation move forward.

And so when I'm saying speak the language it's all these types of

things that allow you to.

Communicate, with your peers in a better way and so

the things that you can do is get involved in the current processes of your team.

Everybody, who is already on your team, they have their own work to do and

they do it in a certain way, and the more that you can

understand how their doing their work, the better that you'll be able to communicate,

how your work relates to their work.

And the more that, they'll want you involved in their project.

Find out how they best communicate.

You know what?

Developers like to have large blocks of time to do work.

So, don't schedule a meeting for 11 AM,

because that's gonna ruin the whole morning for them.

Schedule it at 9 AM, schedule it at noon, schedule it on the edges of the day.

Find out what works for them.

Maybe they are a night person.

And they prefer to meet at seven, and you're okay with that too.

You know, maybe your CEO really likes to get text messages.

And so, if you just text him that thing you were thinking about,

you'll get the right answer really quickly,

rather than emailing, because the CEO gets 500 emails a day.

And doesn't read most of them.

So, finding out how each person communicates best is gonna help you to

communicate with them more.

And don't hesitate to actually write down words that you're hearing in meetings and

conversations, to use later, or to ask about later if you're not sure,

what they meant in the context in which they said it.

Excuse me.

So things like strawman.

You write that down, got to use strowman.

I’ve written down, got to make sure have real world examples when

showing design stuff to my colleague, that sort of thing.

It becomes really valuable,

is less you make an immediate connection without asking them to do a lot of change.

The next thing is to be flexible.

And this is really important, because there's this phrase that used to go

around in business all the time, the customer is always right.

Now, for a long time,

customers took advantage of that to be snots, which is kind of unfortunate.

And it's becoming more and more apparent that, the customer isn't always right.

However, I hear this a lot in the UX profession,

the UX professional is always right and I get it.

We have this thing where we're suppose to champion for our users

we have to be there we have to be solid about that and decisive and that's cool.

But we also have to remember that, there is a lot of flexibility in what we do and

we can do a little bit more compromising.

And sometimes, it's not because our intuition is bad or

because we didn't do our jobs well.

But, we get defensive about our users and

that turns people off to wanting to work with us.

They think we are hard to work with or were too heavy or

there's always a strama or something.

And we come across a little bit like my way or the highway, so hit the road.

And this actually happened with us.

We were, looking to hire someone who we decided to do a trial project together.

And, he had really great work, really solid UX designer.

We had been really encouraged through the entire interview process.

And we were working with a client and this was back in 2010,

so UX is far less ubiquitous than it is now.

We were working with a client, who really wasn't sure, about a lot of the UX things.

We had a small trial project going with this client, and

they just wanted to take it slow and feel comfortable.

And we hadn't communicated this to our designer, who we were trialing out.

Unfortunately, he didn't really get what we were going for.

So, he kept pushing, to try and do research right away.

He kept pushing, to make all these really big changes to the thing,

the application that we were working on right away.

He actually went, and we said, okay, here's.

You know, the scope of what we're gonna do for this project.

Because, we want to get them with us before we push to the next thing.

He actually went and did a bunch of totally different work.

And so we didn't even have anything we could show to the client,

that was what they were expecting.

And so, it became really frustrating to work with him, and

he didn't work out, we didn't hire him.

He's happily working somewhere else,

where, that process can be done in full all the time, which is good for him.

But, he wasn't able to be flexible in order to help us teach the client.

Because again, people don't like change,

you can't just hit them with it all at once.

And so because he wasn't flexible, it made our jobs really hard with that client.

And, you know, it's tough because people don't know what we do.

They don't really understand UX.

It's a buzzword, CEOs high five when they've hired UX professional.

And the reason is, you know, this happens a lot.

Oh, what you wanted to do, the details, is gold plated,

we can't even put it on the real list, but don't worry it still needs to be usable.

Because people don't make the connection between,

the things that you want to do and the fact that it needs to be useable.

They don't understand that, they're intricately tied together.

But, it's still important to be flexible about that, while you're teaching.

It's important to have good balance, too.

Because if you're too flexible, you can get steam rolled.

And then it's okay, this is the eighth project where you've told me we can't

do testing this time.

You're probably never gonna let me do testing unless I push back a little, and

it's finding that balance as well.

So, what can you do?

Plan in advance places where you know you can compromise.

When you're coming in, know that, all right, well.

We don't have to do testing this time, but we'll do it next time,

because of this thing that we can do or because of

this conference that's coming up that we really need to hit that deadline.

Or, okay we don't need to do all the research up front.

We can do some of it as we go, start with assumptions and

then validate them as the signs are being worked through.

You know, figure out those moments where you already know you can come.

Compromise.

Match your process to the desired outcomes.

As I mentioned earlier, everybody's got their own goals.

Especially, stake holders.

If you can tie back, what you're doing to, a specific goal.

So, say you need more sign ups.

If you can say, this research and

this testing, will help us figure out how to get more sign ups and

then you can put that into some tangible numbers if you even can.

That's gonna go a long way,

to getting your process more involved, in the overall process of the team.

Anything like that is gonna be really helpful and don't be afraid of data.

Don't be afraid of metric points.

Use persuasion to stand your ground.

It's really important sometimes to stand your ground.

But, your UX professionals,

your job is to figure out how to persuade users to do things.

Same thing for your team.

Persuade them to do things.

Figure out, what things you can share or how you can communicate.

In order to, get people to do that one thing that you know can't compromise on,

that's really important and crucial for the project.

Figure out how to make them understand, how important that actually is.

And be a little sneaky.

Don't be afraid you know?

Okay, we don't have the time to do testing?

Go do it on the side while Deb's working anyway.

Just to see what happens.

You know.

Okay, we don't have time to do that user research.

Well call up your mom and ask her some questions.

Maybe shes not the ideal user but maybe you'll get somewhere.

You know there's a lot of things that you can do.

Create quick personas for the project.

Just something to have on the side whether your allowed to or not.

Something that we started doing,

is baking into our design process of iterations of design, usability testing.

We had listed it as an ad, ad, separate line item previously.

We stopped doing that, and then people stopped objecting to it,

because it was just part of the design process.

Sorry, can't take it out.

And they didn't know, so they'd just say, okay.

So it's okay to be sneaky sometimes.

And the last thing I want to talk about is surprise and delight.

And if you went to Pamela's talk yesterday,

you know that she talked a lot about happy moments and not just about delight.

And I think the same thing goes through with anyone you work with.

The idea here is you're garnering their good will.

And part of that is also, being proactive about garnering their good wills.

So, surprise and delay.

And the same thing you wanna do for users, and this doesn't have to be big.

Somebody, at our office left the conference room open over the winter.

[LAUGH] So, we got some snow.

[LAUGH] Cuz, it was a snowy winter.

I'm from Boston.

I know it's not snowing in North Carolina.

This is pretty unfortunate, could've ruined our conference table.

One of the other employees found it and he said, you know what?

I'm gonna build a snowman.

>> [LAUGH] >> And so what could've been

a really annoying, aw, you left the window open and

there's snow everywhere and I had to clean it up.

Turned it into this really fun, cute thing.

I don't know what's going on with the nose there.

[LAUGH] But, but it was a nice surprise and delight.

It didn't cost anybody anything and it turned a bad situation into a good one.

Another example, this is a client of ours and his newborn son.

We found out he was having a baby and he's out in California.

So we found a bakery in California and

got them to make the baby's name in letters of, on cookies.

And they were so excited they tried to feed the baby cookies, but

they realized that he didn't have teeth, so it probably wasn't a good plan.

But they were really thrilled.

They were so thrilled they sent us this picture.

It was really great and we're happy to do it.

Another example is I had someone on my team who we hired as a project manager and

she had no UX experience.

She had worked at BU's IT department, but

she seemed to have really a lot of the skills I wanted.

And within the first year she went from.

Not really knowing anything, to being a super star.

Clients actually asked for her by name, when we started to do repeat projects.

Will, Megan be on that project?

Yes, Megan will be on that project.

Okay, good.

So, she was really rocking it.

She really expanding her breadth of knowledge.

She started public speaking within the first year.

She did, all these amazing things.

And we're a small company so you know we do the best we can with raises and

that sort of thing.

But I wanted to make sure she understood that we really knew all

the effort that she was putting in so we changed her job title to UX strategist.

Which goes a long way when you're applying for a jobs and that sort of thing because

you sound a lot cooler as a UX strategist than you do as a project manager.

Regardless if people don't know what that means that's cool too.

But that gives you a lot of license.

So no matter what you're doing there's always opportunities so

surprise and delight people even if it's just a card on someone's birthday.

And it doesn't have to be spend money and buy them a present sort of things.

It can just be anticipating their needs, the same way you would for

a user on an application.

Figuring out what they're gonna need in advance.

And so what you can do, keep your eye out for the little moments.

Birthdays, special occasions, you know, maybe just,

somebody just ran a marathon, and they're really excited about it.

Or maybe they're just getting back from a really long trip.

And you want to do something nice one time.

We, our CEO was in Japan for two months and

he came back and that day we had brownies delivered, one per hour for

like the whole day because he really likes Starbucks brownies.

And it was hilarious because he was like, the first one he was like oh cool,

a brownie but then they kept showing up and it was a really surprise.

And so there's always these opportunities to do silly little things like that.

To remember that you're all people and you're all in this together.

And the second thing is to find ways to make their jobs easier by and

which will by doing your job better.

So I used to work with someone who said my job is to make my boss look good.

And so he would go out of his way.

To do things with that in mind.

And so that's kind of the mentality you can take.

My job is to make everyone else look good and to feel good.

So, anticipating that developers will want to

see these greens before they're finally approved just so they know what's coming.

Or anticipating that the CEO is going to be really busy so

you want to minimize his.

Wasting his time.

And you can, you know,

send in the designs right when you have a minute at lunch together.

Something like that.

There's a lot of ways that you can think about and

anticipate what people are doing and then make their jobs easier.

So, just wrapping up.

Your success as a UX professional is in your hands,

much like this tiny chocolate penguin,.

[LAUGH] You know,

you guys already have the tools that you need to get your team on board with you,

and to stop hearing those things, and to start changing people's minds.

It's not as much about brute force as it is about persuasion.

And the results are really good when you do these sorts of things.

You get to do better work.

When you overcome the internal barriers that make it hard to work as

a team you get more done, you get better things done.

When you guys can all work together I mean I'm sure you guys know when you're on

that team.

You're like rocking it at a workshop or

something you're like yeah this is awesome.

And you have all these amazing things as an output.

Same goes at your regular job too.

You're gonna be personally satisfied with your contribution and

with the product as a whole.

You get to be more focused.

You don't have to spend all your time fighting with people about what you wanna

do versus what they want you to do.

You actually get to do the things that you wanna do because you've convinced everyone

that they're a good idea.

And you know that there's gonna be more opportunity to continue to move that

forward, because you've already got some wins under your belt.

You can be an agent of change.

So, like I said, change is hard.

Paul Balag said it earlier today.

It's important that we step up and start educating people on how to change.

And when you go in and you treat.

Your team, like people who are using you, the product,

you're able to help them figure out how to change, the same way you would for

a user, you don't want to introduce the feature and just blindside them.

So the same way, you don't want to just introduce this whole new process and

say, that's it, we've got to do it this way, but you can affect change over time.

And you guys know this because you do it with web applications.

And the world or at least your organization becomes a better place,

becomes a place you want to be.

You're happier about your job,

other people are gonna be happier about their job too.

It's gonna be a really good opportunity on all sides,

and then you can take this to other places as well so you don't have to stay there.

If you have affected change.

Or you could come do a talk at a conference like this,

telling about how you can do change and that sort of thing.

So that's what I have for you guys.

Do you guys have any questions?