Slides from my talk at #UXIndia14

1. How I stopped Designing and Started to
love my Developers!

2. I stopped designing and my developers
started to love me!

3. “I facilitate & guide
teams to build usable
products & services”
Praneet Koppula
Senior UX Specialist
MathWorks Inc.
@mphaxise
UX Designer
at UX Consultancy
2006
CX Manager
at Telco
2010 2012
UX Specialist
at Product Companies
present

4. Businesses
UX’er the Grey: Gatekeepers to keep bad design choices away
Customers

5. “A company has to believe that user experience is part of broader
recipe for success”
-Jeff Gothelf
http://www.jeffgothelf.com/blog/there-is-no-such-thing-as-ux-strategy

6. Businesses
Customers
UX’er the White: Support the orchestration of organizational resources to deliver great experiences

7. “We describe the role of the “User Experience Architect’s Office”, which
works across the divisions, helping to harmonize the human interface and
industrial design process across the divisions of Apple and ATG.”
-Don Norman
http://www.sigchi.org/chi95/proceedings/orgover/dan_bdy.htm

8. Responsibility of delivering a
delightful experience
through the product cannot
be with a person or a team

9. Persuading teams is one of the top UX activity
Top 10 UX activities that UX Designers do:
1. Present solutions / concepts
2. Persuade others
3. Analyze tasks or activities
4. Build prototype or wireframes
5. Collaborate with subject matter experts
6. Gather requirements
7. Specify interaction design
8. Conduct in-person usability studies
9. Make storyboards, user journeys, flow diagrams
10. Perform design reviews or heuristic evaluations
-UX Careers Survey
Nielsen Norman Group

10. What new skills do UXers have to learn?
What new processes allow us to do our jobs more efficiently?

11. What new skills do UXers have to learn?
Inward Empathy!

13. Building Empathy
How we see people isn't necessarily how they see themselves.
We need to learn to see them the way they do.

15. Empathy towards inward teams
Know the teams’ mission/objectives
Understand their goals/task flows/pain points
Practice active listening with colleagues in cross functional teams
Know when to push / pull back

16. What new processes allow us to do our jobs more efficiently?

17. Research & Testing
Documenting research for what reasons?
“ .. You will be recording right, I will go through the recordings next
week…”
“… can you summarise your findings in bullet points in an email…”

18. Research & Testing
Involve your project team in the research and testing phases.
Video recording is not a substitute for attending research.
Buy-in for both budgets and resource time for research.

19. Case Study 1 : GrameenPhone
“Data collection and on site visits done by the product managers/dev,
UX team facilitates and trains them on moderation”
Benefit:
“Drastically reduce idea to execution”
A strategic new business user voice plan was released in record time
giving the organization first mover advantage.

20. Case Study 2 : MathWorks
“ UX team will test designs/software only if there is at least 1 team
member observing”
Benefit:
“No more long hours of report generation and convincing teams about
your design decisions”

21. Who owns the design?

22. Who owns the design?
Responsibility vs ownership
Be an advocate of the user
Let go of the design: Design owned by the team
- your design tools play a major part: low vs high fidelity
- hand hold your team during the initial steps
- let them create the design artifacts

23. Designing Interfaces with or by Developers
Using paper/whiteboards gets everyone to participate
Wireframing tools are great for documenting digitally only!
Let your developers design the UI first as part of their process
“Designing in the Browser”

24. Building EHQ Mobile
Day 1: Ideation Day 26: Demo Day 86: Final Launch

25. Conceptualization and Story Boarding
Paper Prototypes
Day 1
Building EHQ Mobile : Design Workshop
Design workshop agenda:
- Brainstorm
- Affnitization
- Story Boarding
- Paper Prototypes
Design workshop outcomes:
- Problem and pain points clearly defined
- Project plan with priorities
- Everyone knew what was being built

26. Day 6
Winner
Building EHQ Mobile : Visual Design

27. Day 26
Building EHQ Mobile : Demo for Testing

28. Building EHQ Mobile : Final Launch
Entire App Mobile Ready + Visual Refinements Day 86

29. “Some user experience skills are always better than no user experience skills.
With no UX skills on the team, there’s a good chance that whatever the team produces will
have a poor UX. Probably close to a 100%. Any designs that aren’t a poor UX are just
accidents that work out in the users’ favor.”
-Jared Spool
https://medium.com/@jmspool/hiring-ux-experts-versus-giving-your-team-their-own-ux-skills-c1fd9e4e480

30. I will try not to say “IT DEPENDS”