The User Experience Team of One: A Research and Design Survival Guide

INTRODUCTION

In June 2011 (which feels like forever ago), this message appeared on the Interaction Designers Association (IxDA) discussion list:

I am at a point in my life where I know I want to do UX design after doing Web design for so long and then reading about usability testing, etc., 6 years ago. But my issue is I’m tired of working for organizations who say they care about their customer but don’t do testing to even know what their customers want from them … I’m kind of fed up with working for people who don’t get it.

This frustrated plea perfectly summed up the challenge that many passionate user experience professionals still face today, so many years later.

As far as we seem to have come, at a time when it seems UX is indeed a household name, many organizations still either have only a modest understanding of user experience, or none at all. In either environment, if you are the key person driving for a more user-centered way of working, you are a user experience team of one. And that’s true whether it’s your official job title or not.

But this is about more than just professional frustration. While this book is intended to be a practical resource for people who do user experience design without the support of a large UX team, we’ll tip our hand right here at the beginning and confess something:

We firmly believe that being a UX team of one is much more than just a job.

It’s also a critically important avenue for doing good in the world. The UX team of one is as much a professional circumstance as a constructive philosophy. And here are its founding principles:

UX is a force for good. In an increasingly technological world, designing products with real people in mind helps you make sure that technology integrates in your life in a human-centered, ethically responsible way. It’s a voice of reason, arguing that products and technology can support and even enrich our collective, fundamental humanity. And finally, it’s a responsibility to be ever vigilant in watching for ways in which the technology you help bring into the world can be used to harm people instead of helping them.

The world needs more of it. As the boundaries continue to blur between the technological and analog worlds, everything that you buy, use, and do will need this user-centered perspective. Companies that never thought of themselves as being in the user experience business before will realize that they are now. We all are. And with the rapid advance of powerful, cutting-edge technology like AI, VR, and AR, this field—and all the ways it shapes and influences the tech that increasingly runs our lives—can only grow exponentially.

You can make that happen. Yes, you. The person reading this book right now, whatever your job title, whatever your career aspirations, you have it in your power to increase awareness of (and respect for) the user’s perspective in the work that you do and with the people that you work with.

This book can help you spread knowledge and understanding of the power of good product design and user experience, one person, one team, and one company at a time. And what you’ll find is that once people get it, those first moments of discovery about UX can often feel like a revelation. To many who end up becoming UX practitioners, it feels as if they’ve finally found their calling. The weight of that moment—and the passion it ignites—makes these crossovers enthusiastic ambassadors for user experience.

And, of course, your humble authors have stories of their own, which made them equally passionate about this discipline and all it is capable of. The spark that started the career of many seasoned UX professionals, just like us, was simply seeing an opportunity to improve something—and seizing it.

LEAH’S CROSSOVER STORY

Here’s how I discovered UX. When I was growing up, I always wanted to be a writer. When I graduated from college, I got a job in what seemed like the most logical field—working at a magazine. The trouble was, I kept nodding off over my copyediting. There was one part of my job that I loved, however, and that was updating the website. I had picked up some rudimentary HTML skills in college. Soon I found that my favorite part of each week was the time I got to spend on the website. So, I decided to take the leap and look for a job making websites full time.

It was the early web tech bubble and HTML skills—even rudimentary ones—were in high demand. I tinkered around as a front-end coder for a few years but couldn’t shake the growing conviction that I would really rather be doing what those people with that funny title information architect were doing. Not writing code but thinking about things from the human perspective and designing systems that were intuitive. So, I went back to school to study information architecture.

While I was working on my master’s degree, I took what I now realize was my first team-of-one gig. My title was tools developer for a small company that helped law firms manage all the data that they have to keep track of when companies filed for bankruptcy. Glamorous stuff. They hired me presumably because of my technical skills, but they liked and benefited from the fact that I was interested in design and usability, too.

It was a good training ground because they had a lot of funky, homegrown applications that needed plenty of UX help. It was a great place to test out the principles I was learning in school. I designed a slew of software interfaces. I spent time thinking about solutions for navigating large repositories of information. I conducted usability tests. It also exposed me to the challenges of getting people to prioritize user needs and design when there were so many other fundamental and urgent business issues to be addressed.

And, finally, it was where I learned the hard lesson that not all companies need or are ready for their team of one. That’s okay. Eventually, I knew it was time to move on. What I learned there I put to good use in my next job as another team of one.

So, what skills and experiences got me on the path? Just a handful:

Familiarity with the concept of user experience

Interest in how people think, understand, and see

A little bit of technical know-how

An opportune environment to tinker and practice

Just enough education to fuel my experiments

JOE’S CROSSOVER STORY

I had artistic talent from the time I was old enough to hold a crayon, and I drew on anything that didn’t move (including school tests). I grew up in a very small town in Ohio that you could drive through in three minutes, which is a tough place for a sensitive artist to grow up in. But where this all started for me was a meeting with my high school guidance counselor, when I was about to graduate. I went to this guy and said, I want to do something art-related with my life. He looked me straight in the eyes and suggested I join the Army. He said people like me are better off taking orders from other people. Again, this is a small town, so to him I’m just another useless dreamer. I said some very bad words, stormed out of his office, and decided I’d figure it out myself. I found Graphic Design in the Kent State University catalog and took a shot at the program; it sounded creative, and it sounded like something I could get a job doing.

Kent’s program was extremely tough and rigorous: both a sophomore and junior review determined whether or not you could go on in the program. If you failed, they suggested you find another career. My great stroke of luck being there, though, was that the emphasis was on design as a problem-solving discipline. On human cognition and expectation. And while user experience wasn’t a thing yet, the questions we were taught to ask were UX questions: Does this communicate to the intended audience? Does it meet their expectations? Does it motivate them or help them to act? Is it helping or hurting in terms of their ability to get what they need?

In other words, all the tenets of UX that we know now were there—but at the time, we just called it design.

Anyway, I graduated with a degree in Graphic Design. I worked at an agency the last two years of my college tenure, which was invaluable on-the-job learning. I bounced around a few design and ad agencies, and then this thing called THE INTERNET happened. I couldn’t convince the old men who ran the agency I worked at that it wasn’t a passing fad or trend, and that we needed to get into this work. They thought I was crazy. So, I jumped ship and started my own Experience Design firm.

It was the Wild West then; nobody knew anything about designing or building for the web because it was all so new. So, we said yes to every do you know how to question our clients asked, even when we had no idea how to do what they were asking. We figured it out as we went along, like everyone else at that time.

A big part of what enabled that jump was due to being exposed to people like Alan Cooper and Jesse James Garrett, who were talking about interaction and UX. To me, everything they talked about was exactly what design was, as I knew and practiced it—just applied to a digital medium, meaning websites, software, and Internet-based Software-as-a-Service (SAAS) products.

So, all I did when I crossed over to UX—all I’ve ever really done—was apply what I’d learned about graphic design: pushing clients to take a harder look at the people their communications and products and services needed to serve. To design those things around their expectations, needs, and cognitive behavior, so that value was communicated. So that value came back to the business from use of those products.

I grew that company, Natoli Design Group, to six employees, and then sold it to an IT firm in 2004. A few years later, I went back to independent consulting, speaking, writing, teaching, and product team training. Which is what I do to this day.

PART I

Philosophy

What makes a team of one special is that you find yourself in situations where not only do you see an opportunity for a more user-centered approach, but you also need to lead the charge, bringing others along with you. A team of one has to challenge the mighty forces of the status quo, inertia, and other people’s ways of doing things. That’s brave and ambitious work. It requires not only technical know-how, but also vision, conviction, and a soft touch.

This part of the book will arm you with all of the above. The approach outlined here can help you enter, impact, and evolve this exciting field. And it may just help you convert the masses as well—one person at a time.

PHOTO COURTESY OF ANGELO AMBOLDI

CHAPTER 1

UX 101

Defining User Experience

UX in Context: It’s Not Just One Thing

Where UX Comes From

Where UX Professionals Come From

A Typical UX Team of One Job Description

If You Only Do One Thing …

Talking about user experience (UX) can be a bit like looking at an inkblot test: whatever matters the most to you ends up being what you see. People find their way to this industry through a variety of pathways, and they naturally apply their own lenses to how they think about and describe the work of UX. What’s more, the definition of this field and the work involved varies widely across the industries and organizations who hire people to improve the experience of using their products and services. As a result, user experience is a famously messy thing to describe. This chapter will attempt to balance out the picture by giving you a simple definition of UX to work with, a little more information about where it comes from, and an understanding of how it’s different from other fields.

Defining User Experience

UX, despite having been around for quite a while now, remains a controversial concept. At this point, hundreds of thousands of people have offered their own definition, and yet no single one has prevailed as the clear favorite. Part of the confusion stems from the fact that user experience is a general term that describes not only a professional practice, but also a resulting outcome. Another part stems from the fact that there’s a lot of disagreement about what people who do UX work should call themselves (see sidebar, What’s in a Name?). The situation is further complicated by the fact that the companies who hire people in UX roles don’t always know what to call them either.

Essentially, to work in user experience means to practice a set of methods and techniques for researching what users want and need, and to design products and services for them. Through good UX, you’re trying to reduce the friction between the task someone wants to accomplish and the tool that they are using to complete that task. But the job of doing that is bigger than it sounds.

The degree to which people find an app, site, or system useful, usable, or valuable is dependent on any number of influencing factors, and that list is so vast that no one person, team, or even technology can claim to be responsible for it (see Figure 1.1).

As a simple working definition, you might say that a user experience is the overall effect created by the expectations, perceptions, and interactions that someone has when using a product or service (see Figure 1.2). The quality of UX is often determined by how large the gap is between what a user expects (how they expect it to work) and what the product delivers (how it actually works). People usually describe the size of that gap—and the experience of using the product—with words like love or hate, or phrases such as easy to use or pain in the butt.

FIGURE 1.1

Often, the term user experience refers to the encounters that people have with digital products, from apps to websites to software to gaming and beyond.

FIGURE 1.2

User experience is not just restricted to what you do on your phone or your laptop. This bank ATM has an interactive user experience that impacts how easily people can withdraw, deposit, or transfer money.

UX VALUE LOOP™ FROM JOE’S POV

For as long as I’ve been doing this—three decades now—not a week goes by where someone doesn’t ask me to define UX, to explain what it means to me. The answer to that question is a model I’ve developed that reflects a reality almost always left out of the conversation. This piece that we don’t talk enough about is the critical relationship that makes UX, design, and development efforts successful; it ensures that we design, build, and deliver something of value. I call it the UX Value Loop, and it works like this (see Figure 1.3).

FIGURE 1.3

Joe Natoli’s UX Value Loop.

You’ve got a product in the middle: a site, an app, a system, a printer, a guitar, whatever the case may be. On one side, you’ve got a user, the person who is going to use this thing. And on the other side, you’ve got the business that created it, who spent the money necessary to make it a reality.

The first critical part of the loop is that the user has to perceive there is value for them in this product. Let’s say you and I are talking about work, and I say, You should check out this app; it’s totally helped me get organized. From that conversation, you perceive that this app may help you as well. So, you read some reviews that convince you to download and try it, or even buy it.

Once you take that action, here’s what has to happen next for the loop to work: the very first time you use or interact with that app, it’s got to give value back to you in some way. Something has to happen, almost immediately, that makes you think, Wow, this is really cool. Or Wow, that was easy. Or Wow, this is going to make my life so much easier because I won’t ever have to do A, B, C, or D ever again—I can do it here in this app! Value of some kind has to come back to you from that first use.

That’s half the loop. The other half is this: In addition to the value that goes out to the user, value also has to come back to the organization as a result of that use (or download, trial subscription, or purchase). This value is usually in the form of money made or money saved, but it can also be in the form of greater awareness of the product in the marketplace, more people signing up for something, or more social media followers. Whatever it is, it’s got to help that business in some measurable way that every stakeholder in that organization is tasked to care about.

So, value has to come back to those stakeholders and to the company as a whole. Performance or efficiency metrics met, sign-ups increased, money made, money saved, etc. If that happens—if they get some positive result from people using what they put out there—now they perceive the product is valuable. Which is critical to enabling the next part of the loop.

Now they’re willing to invest in improving, redesigning, or otherwise updating it. This could mean improving existing features, simplifying and streamlining processes, or increasing speed and performance. Now they roll out successive, updated releases that make users or customers say, Wow, this just keeps getting better and more awesome! Which ensures that those people keep using it and keep paying for the upgrade or subscription. Which keeps this entire cycle going.

I want to stress again that the business side is the side we all forget about all too often. Some people believe (for reasons I don’t understand) that only people with the title product designer are supposed to care about business goals, which is both untrue and ridiculous. If you design anything in any way for an organization, you had better have some understanding of what the business folks who work there need from that product’s existence. All UXers and designers are responsible for designing well for both sides of the value loop.

Why? Because if value doesn’t come back to the business from that product, they will have no reason to want to improve the experience of using it.

Given that we transact so much of our lives through technology, how easy or difficult something is to use is what really matters. And that’s what user experience is all about.

But while user experience is obviously about meeting the needs of users, it’s also about meeting the needs of the businesses who fund the creation of these products and services. This part isn’t talked about often enough, but it’s of critical importance. Any investment in improving UX or product design comes with an expectation that there will be a return on this investment. Joe describes this need to serve both users and businesses with what he calls the UX Value Loop.™

As a field of professional practice, UX encompasses several disciplines. The main contributors are user research, information architecture, interaction design, and user interface design:

User research is about understanding users and their needs, not just what they want or expect, but why they want or expect it.

Information architecture (IA) is about uncovering and determining how information should be labeled, organized, prioritized, and related.

Interaction design (IxD) is designing how people move through that information onscreen, how they interact with content or data, and what the system does in response (and when) to their actions.

User interface (UI) design is designing what people see on the screen—fonts, colors, images, buttons, menus, etc.—and how those elements serve to create and reinforce understanding and guide the user through screens, content, and interactions.

As a result of this interdependence, it’s become common to see people and companies mixing and matching these terms into inventive (and often confusing) titles. A rather large percentage of those titles have been adopted for user experience roles. Which one you use depends largely on what terms your employer believes are appropriate. The professional UX community, at the time of this writing, is extremely divided on the topic of what we should call ourselves.

And things get even trickier when you start talking about the subdisciplines that make up UX. Historically, the user experience community hasn’t done a great job of standardizing its job titles, so the confusion that people new to this profession have is understandable. By way of example, a quick scan of user experience job postings will unearth a grab bag of job titles:

UX Designer

UX Architect

UX Analyst

UX Specialist

UX Researcher

UX Writer

UX Engineer

UX Developer

UX/UI Designer

UX/UI Developer

UI Designer

Experience Designer

Product Designer

Service Designer

Business Designer

Behavioral Designer

Interaction Designer

Content Designer

Human Factors Designer

Human Factors Engineer

Usability Analyst

Usability Researcher

Usability Engineer

To add to the mix, there are other disciplines and roles that directly contribute to the resulting experience that a user has with a product, even if they may not fit as snugly into the job description of a user experience designer. Roles that impact and shape the UX of a product include Product Owner, Product Manager, Project Manager, Business Analyst, Front-End Developer, Software Architect, Engineer, Programmer, Database Architect, and many more. And for the sake of brevity, we’re not even going to get into the influence of Sales and Marketing departments!

In this field (and especially online), you’ll find no shortage of heated discussions about who gets to claim ownership of the user experience. Without fueling the flames, let’s just say that for the purposes of this book, if you do any of these things, you’re contributing to the user experience of your product. As such, this book is for you.

WHAT’S IN A NAME?

Along with that rather complicated list of titles, there are also infinite permutations on all of the above. Ultimately, though, these roles all address product design. They all require an understanding of the needs of users and customers who use the product, as well as the goals of the business that funded the creation of the product. The bottom line here is that no matter what the job title may be, the work that people do in UX typically falls into one of the following categories:

Interaction Design and Information Architecture. Someone who designs the structure and detailed interactions of a site, app, or system. This person decides where people can go, what they can see and interact with, how they get from one place to the next—along with what signposts and con1e trols should exist, where they belong, and how they’ll be used. Once upon a time, these were separate roles, with good reason, but it’s become commonplace for one person to be responsible for both.

You could certainly argue that interaction designers focus on screens, detailed interactions, and workflows, whereas information architects focus on information structures, controlled and uncontrolled metadata, and ultimately, findability. However, both roles share a fundamental goal: designing how a user moves through a complex information system from moment to moment. So, for the sake of simplicity, we’ve combined them together here.

Visual or User Interface (UI) Design. Someone who focuses on the visual layer of an application or product, employing clear and intuitive elements, such as buttons, icons, menus, and navigation, making it easy for users to understand how to interact with the product, guiding them through the interface seamlessly, reducing cognitive