Each week when my co-editor Jess and I meet, we not only talk about upcoming UX Booth articles, but also great articles from other publications that teach, inspire, or otherwise make us better UX practitioners and editors. Here are a few of our recent favorites.
When a designer is taking care of customer support
To many, spending time on the customer support desk isn’t a design activity, but for Florent Lenormand it is a great way to get to the heart of design problems that plague users.
“…in a startup, we have to push a new version of the app every week. Even if we always start from a user need, my job is focused on goals I have to reach and metrics I have to increase. We measure our impact on numbers, and numbers make users abstracts.
Talking with users every day makes them real. After a few minutes sending support emails, I discovered stories and real user’s problem behind numbers. It gave me some fresh air and helped me keep in mind that I first design for people, in a business-driven company.”
Find out why you should be spending time with the customer support team.
Responsive roadmaps
What do product roadmaps and geography have in common? A mental model mental that is key to designing in more usable, more maintainable, and more accurate ways. Like maps, product roadmaps are reductions.
“Roadmaps reduce product strategy down to a very digestible (and very power-pointable) format. In doing so, roadmap-makers ask questions: who will be using this map? Is it for education or navigation? Which information should be preserved, and which can be distorted?”
Learn more about how to create and use responsive roadmaps. (And geek out to some geography too.)
Implementing Lean UX in the real world
I didn’t need to read any further than the third sentence to know this article was for me. At my new full-time job, I’m embedded with a Scrum-based development team and weaving my UX work into their sprints can be a puzzle at times.
“’Lean UX’ was the ultimate pep-talk that had much of the design community pumping their fists and shouting like over-excited 17-year olds at a pre-game rally, yet 6 years later many of us are still scratching our heads trying to figure out how to actually implement it in the real world, with real deadlines, and with real product development teams who have near-instinctual aversion to spending time doing anything but coding.”
Find out 5 keys to overcome the obstacles that often prevent Lean UX from getting off the ground.
How to choose the right UX metrics for your product
Google’s HEART Framework helps measure the quality of user experience, but how do you know that you’re measuring the right elements? The Goals Signals Metrics process facilitates the identification of meaningful metrics you’ll actually use.
This quick read gives definitions, tips, and a downloadable worksheet to get started.