Designing for Disrupted Journeys 2959 120 min

What is a disrupted customer journey?

Disrupted journeys are customer interaction across moments, touchpoints, and channels that fall apart. Broken touchpoints factor into disrupted journeys, causing users to abandon, switch channels, or call for help. This is why Touchpoint Mapping is critical, as well as Opportunity Mapping.

Note: Opportunity Mapping Workshop part 2 is coming up February 22nd 2024.

Masterclass Agenda- Designing for Disrupted Journeys:

The key to offering continuous vs disrupted journeys is to look at tasks as they run from start to finish in a journey. UX often focuses on one area or flow, missing details along the way or at the start/ end. Next, since customers touch multiple channels (up to 10, according to Salesforce), orchestrating their journey between channels is a must. This avoids, "Great store or employee experience- but your mobile app sucks". Finally, paying attention to empty states fails, and "What happens when...?" errors are vital. Rarely do we design a wireframe with a "Here's what the interface looks like after 5,000 records are added...", or "The UX after 8 months looks like...". As simple as this sounds, in UX, we like to build "happy paths" and overlook the dirty details of error states, the passage of time, heavy usage, inclusive design issues, and more.

Look no further than password UX these days for a report card on a few of those broken journeys.

Why this matters:

Disrupted customer journeys can have far-reaching impacts on a business. Prioritizing end-to-end UX, cross-channel service orchestration, and managing UI error states is essential for maintaining customer satisfaction, loyalty, and business success. Many broken journeys force customers to another channel-- driving up your costs. Worse, user adoption leads to customer abandonment, distrust, or defection.

What you'll learn:

In this 60-minute Masterclass, you will cover how to design or fix a customer journey that is as seamless and efficient as possible. Frank Spillers will cover the end-to-end experience a customer has with a brand or organization, from initial contact to post-product or service support.

Topics we will cover in Designing for Disrupted Journeys masterclass:

1. Understanding where journeys break down
2. Design and Research strategies for elevating the priority of disrupted journeys
3. Activity: Redesigning an actual disrupted journey (Case study)
4. Q&A

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: Not a member? $100 Members: FREE…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’ work.

• Cost: Buy this course and attend it live or get the recording for only $100 USD: [wlm_stripe_btn sku=payperpost-2959 button_label="Buy Now" pay_button_label="Buy Now" coupon="1"]
• Free for UX Inner Circle Members--Join now, cancel anytime

44 min Summary: Sample sizes in UX Research mat...

Improv toolkit PDF download     

AI for UX Masterclass 2880 Part 1 and Part 2 60 min

The urgent need for UX for AI

Shaping meaningful AI integration requires good UX strategy, research, and design. The alternative is a technology-first approach that falls into classic patterns of poor user adoption (VIDEO). At the same time, AI can be used to judiciously improve various UX Design tasks, from research preparation to data analysis and communication tasks. However, drawing ethical boundaries around AI for UX and understanding its augmentation capabilities is essential; it is not a replacement for UX roles like designers or UX writers.

Agenda:

Generative AI is set to disrupt and enhance many domains, including UX. Rather than be troubled by this development, this Miniclass webinar focuses on where, when, and how AI can have a credible impact on your UX work.

Why this matters:

Gen AI is being integrated and beta-tested in multiple domains. Slapping AI onto an interface is a short-lived experiment and a waste of time. Worse, you risk creating irrelevancy or weak value propositions, in the mind of your users. That's why: It's essential that your AI efforts make an impact. Learn how to boost AI user adoption, protect from bias, and contribute meaningfully to user lives.

What you'll learn:

In this 60-minute Masterclass, you will understand how generative AI can be governed by Human-Centered practices and how you can use it to enhance your UX work. Frank Spillers will cover specific and realistic uses of AI for UX without any predictions, threats, or hype. What we won't cover:

• Hyping AI UX tools
• Basics about generative AI
• The 'shortcuts with' AI UX mentality

Topics we will cover in this AI for UX masterclass:

1. Building a Human-Centered AI business case and process
2. Inclusive Design and AI: Ethics Fairness, Accountability, Transparency
3. Activity: Working with realistic AI UX use cases
4. Q&A

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: Not a member? $100 Members: FREE…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’ work.

Improv skills for UX workshop 2870 120 minutes

Why improv skills for UX?

Improvisation or "improv" offers a set of communication and collaboration techniques that can supercharge your UX and Service Design efforts. Using improv can bring improved UX deliverables and stakeholder communication to life. In this workshop, we will learn to use improv to improve your results from generative AI. We'll use it to 'bodystorm' personas:

In a past workshop on Product-Service prototyping in the UX Inner Circle, we stumbled upon the use of improv to bring personas to life. In this unscripted activity, participants brought the pain and drama of research-based personas to the prototyping workshop. The result was hilarious and powerful. This workshop buildsthis essential skill.

What we will cover in Improv for UX:

In this workshop, you will learn how Improv can make a difference in your communication and collaboration. Why?

• It is a good super 'soft skill' to learn: It boosts creativity, communication, and collaboration skills. Plus, it's well-researched (See Elizabeth Gerber at Stanford) and central to a Human-Centered AI future.
• Improv is used regularly in VR design and Service Design prototyping, where intangible value might be more difficult to understand 'on paper'.

In this workshop, we will use an Improv for UX Toolkit to explore:

1. How Improv can improve your influence over stakeholders and work with diverse teams.
2. How Improv can improve your exploration of context of use and understanding behavior and motivations from Personas.
3. How Improv can help you get better results from using and creating AI-enabled solutions.

More topics we will cover in this Workshop:

• Boost stakeholder engagement and communication through improvisation.
• Break down barriers and foster open dialogue with clients and team members.
• How to create richer, more empathetic personas through improvisational role-playing.
• Generate innovative design ideas on the fly.
• How to "out-improvise" your generative AI work.

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.

Opportunity Mapping for UX- Part 1 2836 Part 1: 90 minutes Part 2 Recording is here... Mural access to UXIC megaboard

Looking further with Opportunity Mapping for UX

Opportunity maps tell a story of possibility, priority, and value. They provide a platform for exploring the potential for business and design impact. They prioritize what’s essential for both users and the business. First, Opportunity Mapping clarifies customer needs and pain points. Like Journey Mapping, it proves valuable in bringing visibility to stakeholders of the opportunity space. Opportunity maps also boost user adoption through better decision-making: The more stakeholders understand user priorities, the better they shape relevant solutions. Next, mapping your opportunities helps raise the inflection point of user desirability. They answer the question: Where can the business gain value alignment with user needs?

Why this matters: Understanding the opportunity space from the perspective of customers is critical to bringing balance to the goals of your business and, more importantly, your customers.

Finally, aligning opportunities with Key Results is critical. Opportunity maps can inform OKR’s (Objectives and Key Results). Likewise, bringing MVPs (Minimum Viable Product) in line with MDPs (Minimum Desirable Product) is advisable for good  Agile UX collaboration. This starts with understanding a holistic cross-channel, touchpoint perspective of your opportunities. In this way, Opportunity mapping for UX is a valuable design decision-making artifact with tremendous potential to positively influence stakeholders toward acting on evidence-based UX and Service Design.

Topics we will cover:

• Understanding Opportunity Mapping
• Step-by-Step Process for Conducting Opportunity Mapping
• How to best prioritize your opportunities
• Managing stakeholder engagement

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.

54 min Speculative Design for UX Miniclass Spec...

Managing Stakeholders in UX Masterclass 2640 120 minutes

UX impact follows stakeholder management

How well you manage stakeholder expectations in UX directly influences the success of your project. By prioritizing the needs and expectations of various stakeholders, including clients, users, and internal teams, UX professionals can align project goals with business objectives and user requirements. When stakeholders are appropriately managed, the resulting collaborative environment fosters a sense of ownership and commitment, leading to better outcomes-- and more robust user advocacy.

Why this matters: Internal stakeholders and senior managers can crush a UX or Service Design effort. Worse, if they do not deeply understand UX and Service Design value, they can create cultural patterns that reverses UX gains. An example is having UX focus on Visual Design or primarily supporting technical delivery.

Good design decision-making needs stakeholder management.

Collaboration practices that align stakeholders with UX teams is critical. UX is fundamentally cross-functional and multi-disciplinary. UX requires lots of collaboration. Good design decision-making relies on effectively managing and including stakeholders. Why? To ensure that their diverse needs and perspectives are considered and integrated into the design process. By engaging stakeholders, UX teams can get better traction and alignment. How? With stakeholder input, you are more likely to de-risk political damage aka stakeholder sabotage. The more you have a process for stakeholders, the more opportunity to socialize them to user advocacy, which is key to UX health and maturity.

Topics we will cover in this Masterclass:

• Defining stakeholders & stakeholder personas
• Identifying stakeholder engagement guidelines and boundaries
• Mapping stakeholder influence
• Biggest stakeholder problems and confusion
• Tactics for engaging stakeholders in 'Team Sport UX'
• Accelerating UX maturity: how stakeholders can rev UX results

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.

Policy Design workshop- part 2/2 2602 1 hr 41 min Mural board access: (lower right corner) Part 1 recording here

Why is Policy Design the mother of all leverage points?

Policy design refers to the deliberate creation and implementation of rules, guidelines, and protocols that govern various aspects of an organization's products and services. Take a standard everyday process of logging into a website service, such as Microsoft Outlook 365. A policy of locking users out after eg. five attempts or of suspending an account with a message of "contact your administrator" can create barriers to access and erode customer satisfaction. Policy design says there's got to be a better way! In Service Design, good policy design is integral to service orchestration.  For example, imagine policies that impact the quality and accessibility of education. For instance, policies that promote inclusive education by providing resources for students with disabilities or ensuring equitable access to educational opportunities for marginalized communities can help reduce educational disparities and foster social inclusion. Well-designed policies in this area can drive systemic change and create a more equitable and inclusive education system.

Policies are rules, and rules need to be deliberately designed.

While design strategy and organizational design play crucial roles, an often overlooked yet powerful tool for driving customer satisfaction and business success is effective policy design. Policies can serve as the backbone for organizations, shaping customer experiences and influencing their interactions and long-term relationship with the brand or product-service. A policy in an interface or a service interaction among employees and customers reflects rules. Rules reflect decisions. The better your rules, the more intentionally noise-proof your decisions. "Noise," according to Daniel Kahneman, refers to how flaws enter human judgment. For instance, most business teams develop policies based on intuition, which can lead to flawed decision-making if not corrected with evidence of user behavior. In the UX field, this is a classic problem that causes downstream user experience problems. For example: "Make users do this, before they do that", or "First, we require they do this before doing the thing most desirable to them".

Policy Design is possibly the one tool to rule them all

Policy design is a critical element in improving products and services. By focusing on consistency, customer empowerment, and risk mitigation, well-crafted policies can accelerate user adoption and drive positive business results.  To stay competitive in today's fast-paced marketplace, organizations must prioritize policy design as a strategic tool for creating exceptional product and service experiences. In this workshop, we will discover how to introduce Policy Design through a step-by-step approach to policy design.

Topics we will cover: (2 parts, 1 hour each)

• Understanding the absolute power of policies on products and services
• Diagnosing policy problems and framing policy challenges
• The Policy Design Process
• Steps to facilitating a policy design workshop with stakeholders

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.

Using Surveys for UX like a pro 2560 90 minutes

How can you build strong UX research surveys?

Why this Matters: Using surveys as a primary tool to learn about their users raises the cost of learning. This is risky because surveys can yield incomplete insights. They need to be used alongside user observation/interviews. And how surveys are built and used matters. They need to be carefully constructed and de-risked by techniques like nested conversations and progressive insights.

See UX Research vs Market Research pros and cons

Why this Matters: Using surveys as a primary tool to learn about their users raises the cost of learning. This is risky because surveys can yield incomplete insights. And how surveys are built and used matters. They need to be carefully constructed and de-risked by techniques like nested conversations and progressive insights.

Learn to craft effective UX Research surveys

In this masterclass, we'll learn how to construct surveys to extract maximum insights. We'll walk through the only way you should be building surveys. This method is based on Experience Dynamics 23 years of using methods in UX research. You will learn to avoid the mistakes of when surveys don't work for UX insights. First, we will cover survey intent: what is your objective with your survey? Are you looking to recruit participants, gather initial insights, or build on existing data? Next, crafting clear and concise questions is paramount. For example, avoid complex language and ensure each question serves a specific purpose. Use simple, non-leading language to encourage honest responses. As a UX team, we will learn how to think about structuring questions to create a conversation flow rather than an interrogation. Finally, we will cover the best ways to use surveys to amplify UX efforts, including recruiting, screening, and preparing for Ethnographic interviews with survey insights. In this masterclass, Frank Spillers will share how-to practical skills to create surveys that gather valuable data and engage participants in meaningful conversations. We'll emphasize survey tactics and strategy including ways to improve upon survey weaknesses to ensure your surveys are a powerful tool in your UX research arsenal. Topics we will cover in this Masterclass:

1. Using surveys, eyes wide open- know your pros and cons
2. What surveys are good for in UX
3. Conversation, segmentation and logic branching
4. 5 strategy pivots with surveys (as we practice them at Experience Dynamics)
5. Q&A

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:

Not a member? $100 Members: FREE…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’ work.

Buy this Project Management for better UX Masterclass and get it live + the recording for only $100** USD: [wlm_stripe_btn sku=payperpost-2354 button_label="Buy Now" pay_button_label="Buy Now" coupon="1"]

Why Join?

The UX Inner Circle is a professional learning community with a program of monthly events for UX researchers and designers, managers, and directors practicing UX and Service Design. We are a small group of 50+ UX and Service Designers, Directors, and Researchers currently 100% working in UX. Attendees come from orgs like Harvard, Google, IBM, Accenture, Deloitte, Capital One, US Bank, healthcare, government, and non-profits. So why join?

• Refine or expand your current skills-- push the boundaries of your learning.
• Get advice and guidance: Put a top-performing UX expert (Frank Spillers, CEO of award-winning UX firm Experience Dynamics and top instructor at Interaction Design Foundation) in your pocket. Stay connected with the latest on what Frank is thinking and prioritizing in UX and Service Design.
• Ask anything to other UXIC colleagues on a dedicated private Slack channel. Also, collaborate during monthly meet-ups (Masterclasses).
• Get a promotion at work or upgrade your skills, portfolio, or process knowledge. This is the #1 reason folks keep subscribing to the UX Inner Circle.

Ready to Join the UXIC?

30- Day Free Trial (billing starts month 2) Membership includes access to ALL monthly event recordings and more (going back 20 years of Frank's UX career). 150+ recordings.  Monthly live meet-ups (Masterclass topics) and workshops (every other month). Miniclasses (short webinars) and access to longer webinars Frank provides with his UX firm Experience Dynamics. Financial inclusiveness membership: USD$49 per month for Nonprofit-Student- or you live in the Global South/ Emerging Market (.org; .edu) Regular membership: USD$99 Individual per month 20% discount on Annual Price; switch anytime, cancel anytime. Review the Pricing Options ***THIS EVENT IS FREE WITH UX INNER CIRCLE MEMBERSHIP***

Improv for UX Masterclass 2552 NOVEMBER 3rd 8:00AM PDT; 11:00AM EDT; 4:00PM GMT; 6:00PM CET Note: US clocks go back Nov 5th; UK BST and EU CEST end Oct 29th. 60 minutes

How can improv make UX better?

Improv offers a set of techniques and mindsets that can supercharge UX and Service Design efforts. By leveraging improvisation skills, we can improve UX deliverables and stakeholder communication. It can even be used to improve your results from generative AI. In a past workshop on Product-Service prototyping in the UX Inner Circle, we stumbled upon the use of improv to bring personas to life. In this unscripted activity, participants brought the pain and drama of research-based personas to the prototyping workshop. The result was hilarious and powerful. This Masterclass aims to continue developing this essential skill.

What the research says about Improv for UX

Improv's power is undeniable. Research has shown that improvisation techniques make us better listeners, communicators, collaborators, and innovators. Specifically:

• Improv improves design brainstorming. Not only are results better from this classically weak technique, but studies show it is enhanced through 'bodystorming'.
• Improv is used regularly in Service Design prototyping, where intangible value might be more difficult to understand 'on paper'.
• Improv boosts creativity, generally, since it is believed that it may be how we engage our creativity abilities.

3 ways Improv can help your UX efforts

In this Masterclass, you will learn how Improv can make a difference in your everyday communication and collaboration. Specifically, you'll learn:

1. How Improv can improve your influencing of stakeholders and work with diverse teams.
2. How Improv can improve your exploration of context of use and understanding behavior and motivations from Personas.
3. How Improv can help you get better results from using and creating AI-enabled solutions.

See Why improv is key for Human Centered AI

How does Improv improve UX? Topics we will cover in this Masterclass:

• Boost stakeholder engagement and communication through improvisation.
• Enhance the creation of user personas using improv-inspired methods.
• Break down barriers and foster open dialogue with clients and team members.
• How to create richer, more empathetic personas through improvisational role-playing.
• Generate innovative design ideas on the fly.
• How to "out-improvise" your generative AI work.

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.

49 min >>Check out the March 21st 2024 Ma...