Podcasts – UIE Brain Sparks

Getting two people to agree on something is a difficult task in any aspect of life. Getting a whole team to agree on a design, where underlying feelings, ownership, and organizational hierarchy are involved, can be an even greater challenge. That’s not even counting the dreaded “swoop and poop” scenario. The trick is to get everyone involved early in the design process and a design studio is a perfect tool for just that.

Dan believes that collaboration and conflict—that’s right, conflict—are the basis for good design. The book itself evolved from his Surviving Design Projects card game. Dan joins us for this podcast to discuss his book, and his thinking around collaboration and managing conflict.

Steve’s book is a distillation of his years of experience conducting research with users. Somehow existing as both a handbook of sorts and as a casual conversation with one of the sharpest minds in the field, it’s a must-have for anyone thinking about the research side of things. Steve breaks down interactions with users to illustrate when, and how, to ask the right questions to uncover valuable insights.

In some scenarios, getting a user to convert or react to a call to action is the desired outcome. It means your design and experience work. But if users are coming to and then quickly leaving your site, what are they really experiencing? If they don’t take the time to explore and discover they may not have any loyalty to you or the experience. And if you’re dealing in complex decisions, you want your users to take the time they need to fully understand and commit to their choice.

UX folks often have to sell the importance of the field to stakeholders. That’s also the case with user research. The costs and time associated with starting a research program, and actually interacting with users, are sources of a lot of friction. Organizations are now seeing the value in user research but it’s daunting to know where to begin. It’s also difficult to fit research into an already established process.

Critique is often confused with being negative and critical. However, the basis of critique is communication. Having strongly grounded communication is necessary for any relationship in life, work related or not.

Culling through massive amounts of data is a headache. A dense table of aggregated data points can be useful in theory, but the manner in which it’s displayed is often a hindrance. Even more than that, showing that data in a chart or graph is confusing if it’s not effectively labeled. Data is useless when you can’t make good decisions from it.