Informing Design with Data

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A Story by Ryan LaBouve (@ryanlabouve)

I wanted to do this talk on the sheer power of quantifiable data driving design

Pump through a few hundred thousand views.

Show half Button A and half Button B.

Track conversion, whichever one wins is better

But...

What if both of the options are just plain wrong?

You've just decided which of the wrong options is better

Then all I've shown you is how to make the best wrong decision

Instead...

This talk will guide you through the stages of making objective design decisions.

Using data.

Ryan LaBouve

ryanlabouve.com

@ryanlabouve

Problem Definition

Defining a problem w/ Business, Design, and Engineering

How it Informs Design

Unifies the design product vision with information from business, design and engineering

A quick tale about this...

In an agile shoppe close to you...

Grab next open task from JIRA

Design the Dashboard (3 points)

What's Wrong with this?

How did this happen?

This wastes a lot of cycles and is a common story in many companies

Lets go back to the start of this conversation

Problems are not Solutions

And this is a problem

Which largely lacks definition.

And we have to work together to do this.

Defining a problem Step 1:

Get the right people involved

Defining a problem Step 1:

Get the right people involved

Create a document answering...

• What are you making?
• What problems are you solving by doing this?
• How do you design success?

It's important that the whole group comes to terms here.

This is the time where it's cheap and easy to ask questions, disagree, etc.

Refer to this document throughout the lifecycle of a project.

It can help maintain focus, and prevent scope creep

Project Definition

Defining a problem w/ Business, Design, and Engineering

How it Informs Design

Unifies the design product vision with information from business, design and engineering

User Research

Defining who your users are and communicating that with the team.

How it Informs Design

Users are the lens through which we look to evaluates whether a design makes sense or not.

Users are the lens through which we look to evaluates whether a design makes sense or not.

#Longread

'There is this company that I worked with a couple of years ago that were doing coupons. Their site looked a little crazy. We said, “We can make this better.” We redesigned all the visual design... We put it back in front of customers, and they looked at this new, fancy visual design that looked really good, and they said, “Wait, who’s behind this thing? Are people making money off of me?” We realized that we screwed it up. We tried to make it beautiful for us, but in doing so, we broke the product.'

It's important to know our users

Users.What comes to your mind?

Google image search: Users

Tons of blank faces...

Knowing our users helps us frame our problems to our solutions.

Know our users help us know we are solving the right problem, the right way.

• Step 1: Interview Steakholders to see who we assume our customers are.
• Step 2: Rank our pool of active users by industry
• Step 3: Identify subjects from popular industries and interview, interview, interview
• Step 4: Analyze what was seen and heard
• Step 5: Share findings with team

Step 1

Interview Steakholders to see who we assume our customers are.

Step 2

Rank our pool of active users by industry

Step 3

Identify subjects from popular industries and interview, interview, interview.

How we interview users.

Step 4

Discuss what was seen and heard

Who is involved here?

Step 5: Deliver finding to company.

Examples of Hi-fi personas

Sketched Personas

• http://www.uxdesignedge.com/2011/06/personas-dead-yet/
• http://www.uxapprentice.com/discovery/
• http://www.slideshare.net/toddwarfel/data-driven-design-research-personas
• http://www.fastcodesign.com/1671571/4-secrets-for-doing-gonzo-user-research
• http://www.uxbooth.com/articles/complete-beginners-guide-to-design-research/
• http://uxmag.com/articles/personas-the-foundation-of-a-great-user-experience

Design Sprints

Utilize your whole team: The quick way to solve hard design problems, using your whole team.

How it Informs Design

Decide the right solution to build, and then build it. (Instead of deciding on a solution to build, and then figuring out you were wrong.)

Best application: Large new features/products

Sometimes the best solution will come from the least likely spot

If you are depriving teams or employees from participating in the design process, you are missing your best ideas.

Give everyone on your team a way to take part in design process

The 5 Day, 6 Stage Sprint (GV)

• Understand
• Define
• Diverge
• Decide
• Prototype
• Validate

Product Definition

We already did this!

Brainstorm Alone

Empower everyone to do this, not just designers.

Your most surprising and innovative ideas will come from the least likely of places

A few ways to empower individuals to brainstorm.

Especially those who don't feel "that creative"

Bad Sketching

Group Convergence

Sticky Notes & Dot Voting

How a design shop might do this:

• The facilitator presents the design on a big display, or prints it out and put it on the wall.
• We go around the table, over and over again. During their turn, each person can share one (and only one) tension she or he has with the presented design, elaborating on the tension to the extent they deem necessary.
• Tensions don’t have to be exclusive — you can repeat or add to another person’s prior tension.

How a design shop might do this (con't):

• Or you can skip (pass) your round if you can’t think of a tension at this moment.
• Cross-talk (other people speaking out of their turn) is discouraged, unless it is used for clarification (“Wait, what did you mean by…?”).
• The whole thing is capped at 20 minutes, or whenever we run out of things to say (everybody in the room skipped their round in sequence). The facilitator takes care of the order and keeps the meeting running smoothly.

Some of our personal rules (at Raisemore):

Prototype

"We’re going for “goldilocks level fidelity; just good enough to suspend disbelief."

This also give design a good place to start working.

• Flinto
• inVision
• * whatever you are comfortable with (more on this later.)

Validate

Talk to those users we defined earlier!

Design Sprint

Use the whole team to explore a design problem.

How it Informs Design

Produces prototypes, validated by users, agreed upon by your team that help you avoid costly mistakes.

Effective Prototyping

Building highly expressive prototypes to help

How it Informs Design

Determine whether an idea is worth investing in to build using minimal resources.

We talked a little about prototyping in the last slide.

"We’re going for “goldilocks level fidelity; just good enough to suspend disbelief."

Low Fidelity = Primitive Form

Old Version = Primitive Form

Prototype = Smoke and Mirrors

Potentially, All 3!

But today, we'll focus on smoke and mirror...

In a previous job, I worked for OU...

Boss: We are re-designing the OU homepage. We need a final direction on design by tomorrow, and would love your oppinion.

Me:...

Original Site

TL;DR

This is what I delivered the next day

MGMT's Reaction

This truth is, all of this took 1 hour...

Smoke and Mirrors via Dev Tools

Modern, with Traditional Roots

...Harvard

Sturdy and Approachable

...Bates

Techie and Scientific

...Michigan

Classic

...Cornell

Rock Magazine

...Whatever this site

Honest and Trendy

Australian Catholic University

Effective Prototyping

Trying other solutions on for size

How it Informs Design

Quick, cheap, and surprising helpful in making decisions.

Measure, Audit, and Plan with Numbers

• We defined the problems
• We know our users.
• We are using our whole team to design future features
• We have prototyped and built features/products

Everything, to this point, was a precursor for...

Using Numbers!

Numbers are good at telling you what's not working, or what to work on next.

Not how to fix something.

• Track Stuff (lots of it)
• Measure Changes
• Make it accessible to folks
• Use it to help you make decisions

Your Data Is Your Lifeblood — Set up the Analytics It Deserves

"Seriously, Do Not Wait. As soon as your company has users, you need to set up a solid analytics framework. It's not a waste of time or money."

DON'T FLY BLIND!

Basic Usage

How much traffic did we get last week from facebook?

What was the response like from our email campaign this week?

What was the response like from our email campaign this week?

Segmentation, Funnels, Retention, A/B Testing, Etc.

Tracking Funnel, allows you to measure changes and improve funnel

Awesome Resources

Lean Analytics

Intercom on Product Management

Expanding this to Guide Roadmaps

For features, it's easy to think:

What you will likely find:

Possible Disruption:

Measure, Audit, and Plan with Numbers

Track everything.

How it Informs Design

Numbers can tell you what's working, what's not, and what might be worth it.

End