I was recently interviewed by Lewis Kang’ethe Ngugi, a London-based product designer, for his podcast, the 7 Minute Product Master Series. It was a joy to finally connect with Lewis in “real life” (we’ve been connected through socials for years), and an honor to be a guest on his exciting new show.
The things that are easy to measure are not usually the most useful things. Sometimes the things that matter the most are actually way harder to measure.
One of my biggest UX research mistakes was doing research that didn’t lead to outcomes. My lesson learned: don’t do research in a vacuum. Get the right people in the room.
Some “common wisdom” that I disagree with is that reducing the number of clicks will make your product easier to use. A better usability measure is number of attempts, success rates, and time on task.
One of the best pieces of advice I’ve received is about using the 7 second pause of silence. This gives people a chance to process their thoughts and respond.
What’s working best for me right now is collaboration. We have defined roles (design, engineering, product) but we all work together to draft our road map, identify our research questions, prioritize features, and make decisions, and removing barriers for each other.
Every UX researcher should learn how to be humble, curious, and listen more than we talk. Challenge our assumptions and interrogate our own biases.
Something I’ve learned recently is about the value of empathy for ourselves and understanding our tendencies and how we work, what our challenges are, and how we can be better humans.
I recently passed the 6 month mark in my new role at Ad Hoc. Unlike my previous organization (University of Arizona), Ad Hoc is a remote-first company, so employees are working from across the country. One of my fears was that I’d feel isolated or disconnected from my colleagues. Fortunately, that’s not at all the case!
Sharing 3 reflections on what I’ve observed that makes our remote environment effective: collaboration, cooperation, and connection.
Collaboration
Remote work doesn’t need to be isolated. Collaboration remains important to doing our best work, and we have the structures, tools, and culture that make this possible.
Effective asynchronous collaboration
Our active Slack workspace is used company-wide, with close to a thousand Slack channels! I’m most active in those dedicated to my projects and practice areas, but I’ve also joined ones that have helped me connect with people outside my team – topics like ResearchOps, accessibility, and information architecture. We had Slack at my old workplace, but it was used inconsistently. It makes a big difference when it’s an active space and everyone is responsive. We rarely use emails.
Project and task-tracking tools like Notion, Jira, and Trello can be incredibly helpful for collaborating on progress and getting feedback or support between meetings.
I’ve posted before on the power of the virtual sticky note (tools like Mural, Miro, and Figjam). While often used during real-time meetings, my colleagues often use these for activities between and in preparation for meetings.
Example of the UX team’s kanban in Notion
Effective synchronous collaboration
We have real-time sync meetings regularly (daily or weekly, depending) where we share what we’re working on, align on priorities, and ask for support or feedback. While a lot can be done asynchronously, making decisions, giving each other feedback, and building on our ideas works best in real time.
Our talented product managers and team leads facilitate structured activities like retrospectives, working agreements, and roadmapping that allow everyone to contribute and support constructive dialog on different topics.
Example of a working style activity in Figjam
Cooperation
Reliable cooperation within and between teams is essential.
Responsiveness
Colleagues are almost always responsive to requests and questions over Slack. Quick questions can be answered quickly. And when not available, people are good at indicating that on Slack.
People are good at following through on things, and when things slip, they are good at owning those things. We are supportive of one another and admitting mistakes or missteps is a common phenomenon.
Flexibility
Not all conversations work well asynchronously, so when a real-time chat is better, Slack huddles allow this. This can replicate the over-the-cubicle conversations that are helpful in office environments.
Being flexible and adaptive to others’ working style is important, since not everyone works the same way. We’ve had success using “readme” bios and teambuilding exercises to better understand each other’s styles and how we can support one another’s success.
“Readme” bio example in Notion
Connection
Work is why we’re here, but it’s not all about work. Bringing our full selves to the workplace allows us to form relationships, foster trust, and make deeper connections.
Fun
We have lots of fun channels on Slack, like #cooking, #pets, and #happyplace. We also have over 6k custom emojis allowing us to express ourselves in lots of ways.
There are regular, opt-in socials for people who are interested. We have a West Coast Social monthly that helps build connections across teams, and our new program team just scheduled bi-weekly hangouts at the end of the day on Friday to reflect and unwind. I’ve also had one-on-one informal chats with mentors and peers, where there’s no agenda but a chance to get to know one another as a person.
Social chat with engineer Christopher Keene, January 2023
Being human
Most people have their cameras on during meetings. This can support stronger communication for sighted employees, since we can see non-verbal reactions and expressions. (Cameras go off are when people have connectivity issues, are cooking/eating, or for personal reasons, and they usually let others know when they need to do this).
We’re a big company, recently surpassing the 500-employee mark. Our opt-in “Donut meetings” Slackbot allows us to meet up with a random colleague for a 30-minute chat. This has helped me feel connected to others, having conversations about everything from vegetarian cooking, to dog training, to immigration, while also broadening my understanding of the work we do.
537 Donut meetings held in 2022
In short, remote work environments can be collaborative places where you feel connected and supported as much as (or more than!) you might in an office environment. I was skeptical of remote work, but forced into it in March 2020 and then deciding to try it full-time last summer, I’m now a convert.
At the close of my UXLibs keynote earlier this year, I asked the audience to share their ideas on building UX maturity at their library organizations. The specific prompt was:
Build UX knowledge and make it visible. Let’s hold workshops, form learning communities, bring senior staff and colleagues along, advocate, and sell by doing.
Break down silos. Let’s collaborate across departments, bring people together, and foster relationships with our colleagues.
Do some lightweight UX. Let’s do small things often and celebrate small wins; let’s create pop-up stations and cafés, install graffiti walls and talk-back boards, and do rapid prototyping and ideation.
Put UX to work. Let’s unpack pain points and frustrations, identify specific projects, get creative, and get to work.
Use UX on ourselves. Let’s harness our UX skills to explore problems, listen, ideate, and analyze what we find out.
Look beyond our own libraries. Let’s get inspiration from other libraries, other departments, and other organizations.
Bend the rules and get creative. When other things fail, maybe we can carve our own paths, breakout from the predictable, or just ask for permission later.
Use food and drink to recruit. Let’s build relationships and recruit others with food and beverages. [This one might seem silly or trivial, but some of the best ideas can emerge over a cup of tea or a pint].
Improve documentation and process. Let’s improve efficiency by creating templates and repositories and speeding up our processes.
Other ideas? Successes to share? Post them in the comments!
In a remarkable way to cap off my career as a UX librarian, I had the privilege of presenting a keynote at UXLibs VI in Newcastle, UK. The conference theme was a big one: organizational culture.
I believe that UXers are well positioned to influence cultural change. Titled “Harnessing our Superpowers,” the focus of my talk was on how to use our UX powers of curiosity, empathy, ideation, and iteration to advance UX maturity within our organizations.
I’ll be writing a chapter inspired by the talk for the UX in Libraries Yearbook (a version of conference proceedings), but in the meantime here’s the slidedeck. You can also access the Google Slides version.
On my team, we’re just past the two-year mark of a fully remote work environment (with a few rare exceptions). I sometimes long for the days of sketching on a massive whiteboard, bringing pads of sticky notes and boxes of sharpies to almost every meeting.
UX team in-person debrief, 2019
I’m not a fan of talking-only meetings, which is what we expect from most of our Zoom meetings. Too often, one or two people dominate the discussion and others don’t contribute, often because they aren’t encouraged or given the opportunity. And when you have sometimes 6 or 7 hours of Zoom meetings in a day, it can be especially rough.
I would much rather be doing things in our meetings: visualizing concepts, generating ideas, solving problems, creating something new. We used to do this with whiteboards and sticky notes in our physical meeting rooms. Fortunately, we have tools that can mimic the experience. So I thought I’d share some examples.
Retrospectives
We love our retros, and sticky notes are a must to allow people to generate all their thoughts on what we’ve learned for the future. When we did our first Tiny Café since the pandemic began, we did a retro to discuss how everything went. On top of using sticky notes to share comments, we used stamps to up-vote things we agreed with.
Retrospective using Figjam
At the end of last spring semester, we did a broader team retrospective using the 4 L’s: what we liked, learned, lacked, and longed for.
Retrospective using Miro
At the closeout of the recent Advancing Research, my attendee cohort did a version of a retro by using Miro to share what stood out to us, what we wanted to do next, and how we might stay connected with one another.
Retrospective using Miro
Debriefs
Soon after a research session (e.g., user interview, usability test), it’s helpful to debrief on what stood out and begin to identify any patterns. More in-depth debriefs after a lengthier studies are also important as you start to dive in to the analysis. This is usually a wall of sticky notes in a physical space, but virtual can work just as well.
Debrief on employee experience study using Miro
Emotions check-in
How we feel matters and impacts how we approach our work, and I’ve found great value in practicing awareness and naming emotions out loud. In a recent meeting where we were tackling a thorny issue around organizational structure, we started by asking how everyone was feeling. Using a Figjam board with some pre-populated descriptors on sticky notes (as well as the option to write something new), people named their emotions with stamps.
Learning how people are feeling using Figjam
I helped lead a similar activity at the end of the Advancing Research conference to see how people in my cohort were feeling after three days of conferencing.
Learning how people are feeling using Miro
Team planning
We do kickoffs at the beginning of each semester, and use remote collaboration tools extensively. At our most recent one, we found Figjam helpful for identifying skills areas to build. Since we all had Figjam accounts, we were able to place our avatars on sticky notes.
Identifying learning goals using Figjam
Team thank-yous and celebrations
Virtual parties can sometime be awkward and sometimes a bore. Inviting colleagues to share their kudos and thanks can be a great way to foster appreciation and recognition.
Employee farewell recognition using Miro
Idea or artifact reactions
When we were embarking on a website redesign project last year, we put a screenshot of the existing homepage up in Miro, then asked people to add their comments and observations using sticky notes and reactions.
Getting feedback on a design using Miro
Notetaking
Less about collaboration, but I’ve been playing around with using these tools for visual notetaking. Sometimes I’ll use physical sticky notes for capturing takeaways when attending a conference. Virtual tools have some benefits and more flexibility to add screenshots, connect ideas, and re-group things as you go.
Notetaking using Figjam
Getting creative
These are just a few examples of some of the ways I’ve used virtual sticky notes to facilitate engagement, participation, and richer employee experiences.
Are you working remotely? What are some other examples of ways to leverage the power of the virtual sticky note? Share in the comments!
UX@UA emerged in 2017 as a learning community for people doing UX work at the University of Arizona. In a recent presentation at the eduWeb Spring Innovation Showcase, I gave a whirlwind tour of where we’ve been, what we’re learning, and what we’ve accomplished to date.
Breaking down silos and barriers, UX@UA is building UX capacity campus-wide and is committed to making our university a more human-centered organization.
We’ve been using personas at the University of Arizona Libraries for a good while as design and communication tools for different projects. I’ve learned a lot from our different attempts at persona development, so wanted to share my learnings here. In particular, how we’ve collaboratively created personas, leading to buy-in and shared ownership across the organization.
Previous personas
I believe it was 2011 when we first tinkered in persona development. But we made several missteps on our first attempt. We:
based them on assumptions (rather than research)
created them in isolation (by the 4-person Website Steering Group of the time)
used stock photos and stereotypes
They were pretty silly and simplistic, and didn’t really help us build empathy for our users. I remember the donor persona, in particular, was inspired by Daddy Warbucks and became more of a joke than an actual tool for our conversations.
In 2014, we gave it another go. This time, we created personas specific to our Website Redux project where we were re-designing the digital user experience. We based them on data, including web analytics, usability testing, and surveys. We shared them with the library at a “Meet Our Personas” open house event.
“Meet Our Personas” event
These became much more useful, particularly as we incorporated them into the Redux project. We used them in:
User stories, the framework for all web development work (e.g. “Cheyenne wants to reserve a room from her smart phone.”)
Content planning, as we associated every new or revised web page with particular persona(s)
Project updates, as we held monthly brown bags and used them as a basis for much of our work
We also distinguished between our primary and secondary audiences. We had 4 primary personas:
Cheyenne, the freshman
Brandon, the PhD student
Emily, the graduate student and teaching assistant
Renee, the faculty member
And 3 secondary personas:
Donald, the potential donor
Elle, the library staff member
Craig, the community user
Snapshot of personas from 2014 website project
2018 Persona Project
Context
Come 2018, a number of things had changed. Our content strategist who provided leadership in persona development, Shoshana Mayden, left for another position on campus. We had hired a new content strategist, Kenya Johnson, who also played the role of marketing and communications manager. I had moved out of the technology unit into our administration, providing vision for our UX work library-wide. We also realized that hey, it’s 2014, and Cheyenne the freshman is graduating.
Most of the library staff were familiar with personas. In addition to having used the 2014 personas for several years in the context of our website, we’d also had a design thinking project in late 2017 that gave library employees the experience of creating their own student and faculty personas. This design thinking project also gave us a wealth of new user research data.
So in spring 2018, Kenya and I started working on developing new personas that could be used library-wide.
Intention
We wanted the new personas to be a bit different. We wanted them to:
Be useful and adaptable for different project needs
Be inclusive and diverse
Avoid stereotyping
We identified the purpose of personas as design and communication tools that:
consider the users’ perspective and experience, not ours
help us understand our audience
encourage us to question our assumptions
ensure we focus on what matters to people and has the mostimpact
provide a useful foundation and starting point for any project
We wanted personas to help us:
describe and empathize with our target audience
get on the same page about who we are designing for
guide decisions related to services, products, content, design, and more
Workshops
We invited all library staff to attend collaborative workshops to build our personas. We held multiple workshops at different times to allow people to attend no matter their work schedule.
We ultimately had 35 attendees including people from varied departments including technology, access services, research and learning, health sciences, and marketing. In the first 1-hour workshop, we:
reviewed design thinking personas
conducted mock user interviews
identified behaviors, motivations, and constraints of particular user types
Second persona workshop
In the second 2-hour workshop, we:
created teams; created goals, behaviors, constraints for 5 personas
identified names, quotes, and photos for personas
presented personas to the larger group in a creative way
Our new personas
Final persona for Nate the navigator
Informed by the outcomes of the workshop, we created the following primary personas:
Nate the navigator
Sam the scholar
Isaiah the instructor
Linda the learner
And secondary personas:
Esmeralda the explorer
Evan the employee
One of the main shifts from our previous set of personas was that these were structured around purpose rather than status. We had discovered over the past few years that many of our services weren’t geared specifically to a demographic such as undergraduates, graduate students, or faculty members. Rather, they were geared towards an audience based on their purpose.
Our research services serve all researchers, whether they are faculty, staff, students, or visiting scholars. Our instructional services serve all instructors, whether they are teaching assistants, faculty, or adjunct faculty.
When consulting with staff on projects, such as research support services, we’d often hear things like, “Well, it could be a PhD student or a faculty member, or maybe even an undergraduate.” So we’d often end up with three or four personas listed as an audience for a service, which was less helpful. So we shifted from thinking about students vs. faculty members and started thinking about learners vs. scholars. And recognized that depending on context, an individual could play the role of different persona identities throughout their experience with the library. Someone might be working on a class assignment in the morning, teaching a course in the afternoon, and navigating library spaces in the evening. We’ve found this to be a much more helpful framing.
Final persona for Sam the scholar
Rollout and training
Kenya and I presented the final personas to our library leadership team, encouraging them to use them in upcoming projects and to share them with staff. We also provided hands-on training to departments upon their request. In one-hour training sessions, we presented the personas and had people break into small groups. They worked through a Project Starter where they came up with a project (usually a real one), identified their primary persona(s), adapted them as needed, and thought through how the persona would help guide their design and communication decisions.
We were hopeful that by developing the personas collaboratively and through the hands-on training sessions, people across the library will find them useful in their daily work.
Adoption and adaption
Since launching the personas, they’ve proved helpful for a variety of projects, including the design of new websites, tutorials, and services. The staff who attended the workshops are also now equipped to develop personas whenever they find them useful.
I’ve probably found our new personas most useful as a starting point. Project teams will take one of the personas and adapt it to best fit their purposes. Since these were created in Powerpoint, they are easy to update to fit a particular need. By providing complete personas as well as adaptable template, we’re helping empower staff to place users at the center of their projects, informing their conversations and their decision making.
Last week, I presented a talk titled, “Fostering a UX Culture Across Campus” at CNI’s Spring Meeting (the Coalition of Networked Information). It was originally going to be in San Diego in late March, but moved online due to the COVID-19 pandemic, with talks spread out throughout March, April, and May. The slide deck and full recording are below.
Description of the talk:
User experience (UX) is a multidisciplinary venture that encompasses research, design, content, architecture, engineering, and systems. At the University of Arizona, an informal community of practice emerged in 2017 called “UX@UA” to support cross-departmental learning and sharing of resources. This community now includes over 400 students, faculty, and staff who are studying, teaching, and doing UX. Members of the UX@UA leadership team are from the Libraries, Department of English, Eller College of Management, and Digital Learning. In addition to monthly meetup events for sharing knowledge and networking, the group is supporting campus initiatives such as lightweight user testing through a “Tiny Cafe,” a shared participant pool, a drop-in UX consulting hour, a toolkit of reusable templates, and a UX/UI testing zone in the library. In this talk, you will learn how we are building capacity, breaking down silos, and fostering user-centered thinking and practices campus-wide.
I was honored to be invited to the University of San Diego in January to facilitate the annual retreat for the staff of the Copley Library. Dean Theresa Byrd was interested in something hands-on focused on user experience and design thinking that addressed one of their strategic priorities: student success.
