Digital Library

How CX and UX work together Miniclass

Problem Space discovery in Agile Masterclass 1678 2 hours 44 min

• Not a member?  Buy this Problem Space Discovery course and get it live + the recording for only $100** USD: [wlm_stripe_btn sku=payperpost-1678 button_label="Buy Now" pay_button_label="Buy Now" coupon="1"]
• Free for UX Inner Circle Members--Join now, cancel anytime

Agenda- Problem Space discovery in Agile Masterclass

One of the biggest contributions UX makes to product management efforts is problem framing or how to frame the right problem for users and the business. Many stakeholders mistake asking UX designers to create mock-ups or visuals before vetting business requirements or ideas past the "evidence filter" of user behavior (field study research).  By starting with solutions, we give them credibility and power that they should not have until they are: either tested with users, or based on user constraints and opportunities found in their current problem-solving behaviors and expectations. Instead, we must 'deep dive' into a better understanding of the user's 'problem space' and remove unknowns, ambiguities, biases, and risks.

Understanding the problem space leads to better Agile UX

Poorly understanding the "problem space" means you are guessing or relying on your internal assumptions, hunches, and brainstorms. Or worse, basing decisions on the wrong kind of research (yeah, focus groups and surveys). UX as a field de-risks this very dangerous approach which relies on trusting yourself or internal decision-making unbalanced with a view from the user's world. Problem spaces are rich with context to understand how your features or design proposals will meet actual user needs, with the highest degree of emotional value (differentiation) delivered to users. Regularly mapping the problem space helps you build context intelligence within your team. Products and services that perform start with an understanding of context of use (where, when, how, and why) of how your features, functionality, or service will be used. Framing the problem informed by context is the starting point to ROI-based UX.

What we'll cover- problem framing, how to run a problem space discovery workshop and more!

In this Masterclass, we will cover problem space discovery in an Agile context including how to create more accurate MVP's on an ongoing basis. We will start with problem framing and learn to create problem statements. In this Masterclass, you will also learn how to run a Problem Space Discovery workshop to help guide your organization toward smarter product decision-making. Topics we will cover in this Masterclass:

• Framing the ‘right problem’ in UX
• Making the business case for Problem space discovery
• Strategies for managing your stakeholders who jump to solutions without discovery
• Identify bias in framing and product decision-making
• Introducing Qualitative Research to teams new to UX Research
• Doing the right kind of research to identify 'right problems' and understand problem spaces
• How to craft compelling Problem Statements
• Getting Agile teams to practice with problem-informed MVP
• 'Continuous Discovery' hacks for Agile
• How to run a Problem Space Discovery workshop

About Monthly MasterClasses:

These monthly meet-ups are topic-driven live events with an informal presentation by Frank Spillers and group activities and discussions. Monthly MasterClasses are included as part of your membership. They allow a deep dive into important UX topics, with insights drawn from process best practices and case studies from Frank’s two decades in the field.

Understanding the role of intangible value in S...

Interface consistency- the case for and against...

Workshop- Designing Your Life: Avoid burnout and bring calm to your day (for designers and managers) 1110 3 hours

Agenda: Designing your life

"60% of managers saying the pandemic has hurt their mental health and 40% saying they are now prioritizing their mental health over their career" (LinkedIn news 9 March 2022).

This workshop follows the mantra from TED founder Richard Saul Wurman who once said, ‘Designing your life is the most difficult problem of them all’.

Today, you need to be totally resilient and adaptable, while staying creative. Yet the world we live in throws up obstacles including daily challenges to our attention and stress. Managers and designers who work cross-functionally can feel it most. Even success can be a challenge to remaining fresh and open to new information and ideas.

As UX Designers know, good journeys don’t just happen, they are meticulously designed and tested before confidence is felt. This workshop will show you how to apply User Experience and Service Design processes, mindsets, and tools to your life at work and in today’s work-at-home mode. The research-based tools and techniques you will learn have been tried and tested by Frank Spillers, founder of leading UX firm Experience Dynamics, and come from his personal experience.

Agenda:

• Assessing your life design destination (the heuristic evaluation of where you are).
• Defining your life journey map (3 essential journeys you need to map).
• Designing a new control panel of the mind (a new UI for motivation and more).
• Strategies for resilience and momentum (quick meditation and more).
• Dealing with distractions and guarding your focus.

About UX Inner Circle Workshops:

These workshops are live events with an informal presentation by Frank Spillers and group activities and discussions, with a more hands-on experience to learning the material presented. Online workshops are included as part of your UX Inner Circle membership. They allow a deep study of UX topics, with insights drawn from process best practices and case studies from Frank Spillers two decades in the field.

Journey Mapping workshop: Creating journey maps...

Masterclass- Getting the details of usability testing right 1092 2 hr 17 min Usability testing is an essential part of steering designs in the right direction or in quantifying their efficacy with your intended audience. Getting quality insights and data is vital. User testing is not market research and should be conducted with best-practice methods. This Masterclass will cover the ins and outs of setting up and moderating user tests including how to get the best from the technique by following proven practices.  In this Masterclass you will learn how to set up and conduct a usability test, including the following topics:

• Set up and conduct a usability test: When to test? What to test?
• What type of usability test and why (Formative vs Summative; low-fi vs high-fi and more).
• Better Recruiting- no more “down the hallway testing” please.
• Sample size: when the 5-user size sample fails.
• Tips for engaging stakeholders.
• Creating a bias-informed test plan.
• Moderation insider tips and secrets of good moderation (verbal, non-verbal, listening, and observation skills).

 

Masterclass- Getting the details of usability testing right 1088 JUNE 22nd 7:00AM PDT; 10:00AM EDT; 3:00 PM BST; 7:30 PM IST 2.5 hours -(group activities, 1:1 access to Frank Spillers)  Free with Inner Circle membership

[wlm_stripe_btn sku=payperpost-1088 button_label="Buy Now" pay_button_label="Buy Now" coupon="1"]

Usability testing is an essential part of steering designs in the right direction or in quantifying their efficacy with your intended audience. Getting quality insights and data is vital. User testing is not market research and should be conducted with best-practice methods. This Masterclass will cover the ins and outs of setting up, and moderating user tests including how to get the best from the technique by following proven practices.  In this Masterclass you will learn how to set up and conduct a usability test, including the following topics:

• Set up and conduct a usability test: When to test? What to test?
• What type of usability test and why (Formative vs Summative; low-fi vs high-fi and more).
• Better Recruiting- no more “down the hallway testing” please.
• Sample size: when 5 users fails.
• Tips for engaging stakeholders.
• Creating a bias-informed test plan.
• Moderation insider tips and secrets of good moderation (verbal, non-verbal, listening and observation skills).

About Monthly MasterClasses:

These monthly meet-ups are topic-driven live events with an informal presentation by Frank Spillers and group activities and discussions. Monthly MasterClasses are included as part of your membership. They allow a deep dive into important UX topics, with insights drawn from process best practices and case studies from Frank’s two decades in the field.

Cost:

VALUE of $100…join the UX Inner Circle to get this and enjoy access to $10,385 worth of value- recording trainings from 20 years of Frank Spillers’s work. Try it for 30-days free…

FREE FOR INNER CIRCLE MEMBERS

Want to access the MasterClass? Join now starting at USD $49 Nonprofit-Student-Emerging Market/ $99 Individual/$349 Team of 4. Try it for 30-days free…

Masterclass: Journey Mapping as a Team Sport 1080 3 hrs Journey mapping is an important deliverable in your UX process that documents how customers interact across channels, and across time. However, it is more than a document. How you use Journey Mapping depends on how much ROI you want to gain from this deliverable. In reality, organizations that take a tactical view of journey mapping fail to engage key stakeholders, which slows down the implementation and measurement of journey mapping efforts. In short, ideas and recommendations are not given the justice they deserve– or that you want them to have. Journey mapping can be used tactically– by a UX designer or team, or it can be used strategically, bringing key stakeholders into workshops that surface insights, cross-pollinate key information and provide authority to decisions made about the customer, channel, or business strategy changes. This is the beauty of journey mapping as a team sport. This Journey Mapping Masterclass dives into how to run a Journey Mapping workshop. It will show how taking a stakeholder-centric approach to journey mapping can improve organizational value around UX and thereby boost your UX maturity. We will discuss measurement and implementation as well as clarification of roles in the Journey Mapping process.

Masterclass- Touchpoint mapping and cross-channel UX 1052 3 hrs 22 min Products and service systems (think mobile app orders food delivery) rely on touchpoints. Touchpoints are value-rich exchanges between customers and your business. Common examples of touchpoints include information, help, advice, or consultation. Touchpoints occur when and where the customer wants them to occur. User behavior is “choose your own channel” (omnichannel) by default. It is for this reason that touchpoints need to be observed, optimized, and made consistently available across channels. Channels are not touchpoints. Channels are just how a customer approaches your company (mobile, Chat, Web, call center, etc). Omnichannel interactions have become the default, whether your company is noticing or not. And there’s the rub. Without a full inventory of customer interactions (via touchpoints) and an understanding of these touchpoints over time (a Customer Journey), you can be wasting money. For example, a mobile app that does not offer the same form hints as the Web version (because hover is not supported on mobile and designers used hover) caused users to enter the wrong information. This serious error required a call to the call center call (expensive to the company). Had the two digital channels in this example offered consistent hints to users, errors would have been prevented. In this Masterclass we zoom into touchpoint mapping, an inventorying technique to uncover breaks in customer touchpoints. We will unpack actual customer data touchpoints and develop recommendations for optimizing touchpoints unique to that channel. This will offer attendees a mini-workshop experience or “learning by doing”.

Masterclass: Managing UX process deliverables 1049 3 hrs

Agenda:

UX process clarity and consistency can strengthen your UX design efforts. Design systems sit at the heart of operationalizing design efficiencies in teams (aka DesignOps). However, UX teams need strategies and tools to manage the deliverables and processes wrapped around those UX activities/ deliverables. Furthermore, these UX deliverables in today’s reality require agility (Agile or Lean UX) and stakeholder engagement (or “UX as a Team Sport”). In this Masterclass, we will discuss the practical side of managing actual UX deliverables including:

• Persona management- How to update, store, share and socialize personas (across global teams).
• Journey Mapping management- How to create, engage stakeholders, store, and socialize journey maps (across global teams).
• Service Blueprint management- How to build, update, reference, and keep service blueprints alive from creation to service roll-out.
• Design systems- How to establish a Design Language and a system for re-usable UI guidance and components.
• Content systems- How to bring UX Writing or copy creation into your design system.
• Accessibility patterns- How to ensure best practices in WCAG 2x/3.0 are easily reproduced, tested, and referenced for your design widgets.
• Inclusive Design patterns- In addition to accessibility, how to assetize inclusive design content, patterns, and practices.

Why manage UX process deliverables? Business environments across organizational ecosystems (remote teams, vendors, partners, 3rd parties etc) require functional and useful access to UX deliverables. Furthermore, UX plays such a high-value role in the design and development of software today. It provides the decision-making compass for teams to move in directions that improve product/service success, by lowering risks to users and the business. This Masterclass will give you recommendations for managing your UX deliverables. The goal of which is fast, efficient, reusable, portable, and cost-effective ways to socialize and manage user data, workshops, insights, changing decisions, compliance, and more.  

Artifacts, power tools for better User Research...

Masterclass: Organizational Design- Building a UX Center of Excellence 1036 No matter where you are in the UX org chart, organizational design has always got to be on your radar. Why? Because UX in many organizations has been traditionally misunderstood, misrepresented, manipulated, or marginalized. Many UX professionals don’t actually get to do the full complement of what they should be doing. This is a serious ROI issue for organizations that do not have a strategic view of managing UX excellence. Building a UX Center of Excellence requires a clear definition of how value is created and shared with customers and stakeholders. It requires strategic intervention as well as tactical processes and procedures. Growing UX as a discipline requires nurturing buy-in, and participation from grassroots stakeholders (eg developers) all the way up to management. In this Masterclass, we will build on the UX process case studies–UX management in action Masterclass by mapping out boundaries and pillars that need to be redrawn, removed, or created. Ultimately, organizational excellence in UX efforts comes down to team collaboration, decision-making, and the holy grail–process repeatability. In this Masterclass, Frank will cover tips and techniques for ‘redesigning’ your organization based on what he has learned first-hand from helping dozens of organizations build UX groups. In addition, Frank will share research he conducted for his upcoming book on UX management (and the best-known methods of UX Directors and Managers worldwide). Topics to be covered in this Masterclass:

• How to manage UX deliverables for ‘UX as a Team Sport’ vs the ‘everyone doing UX’ dilemma.
• Noticing your organization’s actual vs perceived UX maturity, and how to bootstrap for growth.
• Operationalizing UX excellence- tips and tactics for moving your org forward.
• Developing a business case for UX Management and growth.
• Understanding how to confront organizational ‘force fields’.
• A checklist for what helps establish a Center of UX Excellence.
• Getting it right: confronting UX Theater, Baby Step Syndrome, and other threats to UX excellence.

Miniclass: Designing Context-aware experiences

Miniclass: From mental models to design of con...

Masterclass: UX process case studies–UX management in action (1 of 2) 1014 2 hrs 51 min See part 2 here Agenda It does not matter what you design, or even how you design it, if you do not have stakeholders on board and organizational buy-in, your UX can suffer. UX process sculpting is the ‘holy grail’ of UX management. Re-working how your UX comes together, by whom, and when certain activities and decisions are taken is critical to success. In this Masterclass, we will review best practices in UX process and UX maturity. We will hear from three UX Inner Circle members (a non-profit and two banks) who will present their current efforts to impact organizational transformation. Topics to be covered in this Masterclass:

• Determining UX maturity- what works and what doesn’t
• What’s missing from your UX process
• Guerrilla tactics for getting organizations to embrace UX process
• UX process mapping and process redesign
• UX process case studies
• Troubleshooting your UX process including for Service Design and Inclusive Design efforts

Insight Sprints- bringing your team along the user research journey- Workshop part 1/2 911 1 hr 44 min Part 1 of 2 This workshop builds on the ‘This is Ethnography Doing’ workshop. Insight Sprints are a new method proposed by Etienne Fang (Principal Researcher at Amazon). The Insight Sprint builds on the Design Sprint method of socializing the design process in your organization and making informed decisions fast. This workshop focus on the Insight Sprint method applied to real data captured in our previous workshop: This is Ethnography Doing. Socializing user research and giving teams a first-hand view of evidence from the field study is key. For example, exploring user pain points and context of use can inform better design decisions. Better still, product and service teams that are engaged in UX Research spot more opportunities and are better capable of responding to them. The result? Longer-term views of customer value and exchange of value between your company and customers. Moreover, teams that leverage user research insights tend to be more Outside-In design-driven. The Insights Sprint is a practical tool to get teams to use and value customer behavior data. This workshop will map out a practical Insight Sprint approach for conducting workshops with your stakeholders that can be used in parallel to the Design Sprint method developed at Google.

Masterclass: Accessibility ready with WCAG 3.0 855

Agenda:

If you are working on an Accessibility project, you ought to be paying careful attention to the WCAG 3.o Guidelines. Note: Yes the guidelines are currently in draft mode now, but they will be standard very soon. In this Masterclass, we cover the latest Accessibility guidelines from the W3 consortium, as well as the US Section 508 Refresh of 2018 + EU Accessibility Directive of 2018. This Masterclass aims to get you ready for adjusting your accessibility efforts around the new approaches and criteria contained in WCAG 3.0. To be clear, WCAG 3.0.is a welcomed update that improves how we deliver accessibility commitments. It moves us toward a more accurate and inclusive approach to how we evaluate, test, and optimize the accessibility user experience for persons with disabilities. Topics to be covered in this Masterclass:

• The business case for accessibility.
• Tools for engaging stakeholders with accessibility.
• Bringing in a disability-centric model to Agile accessibility.
• Navigating the WCAG 3.0 guidelines.
• Adjusting your “pass” and conformance criteria.
• Conducting ‘Holistic testing’ with users with disabilities.
• Re-evaluating your inclusion commitments: What’s beyond “AA” compliance?
• Updating how you evaluate including VPAT reporting (Voluntary Product Accessibility Template).
• Tips for implementing an accessibility program.
• Scaling accessible User Research or aUXR and inclusive ResearchOps strategy.

About Monthly MasterClasses:

These monthly meet-ups are topic-driven live events with an informal presentation by Frank Spillers and group activities and discussions. Monthly MasterClasses are included as part of your membership. They allow a deep dive into important UX topics, with insights drawn from process best practices and case studies from Frank’s two decades in the field.

This is Ethnography Doing workshop- part 3/3 851 3 hrs 12 min See Part 1 here See Part 2 here Essential documents/ links:

• Member log-in, see this group

About the workshop: The focus of this hands-on learning experience is on how to do Ethnography. In this workshop, we will learn all the steps in Ethnography. First, we will start with recruiting target users for the actual study. Next, we will learn how to moderate user interviews, with an emphasis on the capture of quality data. Finally, we will unpack and analyze the data and insights. Participants will learn by doing. The UX Inner Circle provides supported mentoring with opportunities to practice skills with peers. The workshop will be led by industry veteran and Master UX Trainer Frank Spillers. Frank will share tried and tested process know-how he uses daily at his award-winning UX Consulting firm, Experience Dynamics. Note: This workshop will be split into smaller working sessions. In addition, participants will be required to spend time outside of class managing users. Bonus workshop: The real data gathered in this workshop will lead to a second workshop. “Insight Sprints- bringing your team along the user research journey“. This workshop is focused on organizational process and evangelizing insights.

Designing your life Masterclass: creating good experiences at home & work 842 3 hrs 50 min In designing experiences for others, we focus a lot on how to make life better for our users.  Alongside this is the recognition that how your team creates good experiences comes down to how they work and think together. Rarely, do we, or teams, stop to design their own lives or cultures. In this Masterclass, Frank Spillers tackles the farreaching topic of “right living”, or as TED founder Richard Saul Wurman once said, ‘Designing your life is the most difficult problem of them all’. Today, you need to be totally creative, adaptable, and innovative. That is to say, these design skills and mindsets are highly sought-after and guarded by designers, innovators, and teams. Yet the world we live in throws up obstacles including challenges to our attention and stress. Teams and individuals that can solve problems elegantly and that demonstrate success thrive. However, even success can be an obstacle. The more familiar you become, the more confident you become of what constitutes the right path. However, as UX Designers know, good journeys don’t just happen, they are meticulously designed and tested before confidence is felt. So how to apply User Experience and Service Design processes, mindsets, and tools to your life and your team? In this Masterclass, Frank Spillers shares what he has learned applying Human-Centered Design to daily routines and rituals while empowering teams to improve, make better decisions and get better results. Leveraging a couple of decades of experience, Frank will show you how you can mirror healthy cognitive practices at home and with your team while feeling happier and getting better results from design efforts at work. This course is based on Frank’s experience as a design researcher, entrepreneur, and category leader. You will get Frank’s experience of what he has found to work and how to tackle the challenges of life and designing, including Wellness, Purpose, Curiosity, Motivation, and more.