Hot answers tagged selling-ux
29
There's a million things that you could to do to grow your skills and make yourself a better UX designer. Here are some ideas off the top of my head:
Talk to your manager about how you can grow your skills to help the team out.
Conduct a baseline usability study on the most recent version of the product that you designed and determine whether users are ...
18
Marketing = UX…
There is a remarkable amount of overlap between modern marketing and UX. Marketing is more than advertising and sales. It also includes market research, which identifies what would be useful, valuable, and desirable to consumers. Modern marketing also participates in developing the products themselves, ensuring they meet their target “value ...
12
For starters there are a number of articles which call out the possiblity of doing User research on a low or non existent budget. A good article to start would be 10 Tips on Doing User Research with No Budget which has provides 10 different ways you can get research data without having to spend any of your budget.
To briefly quote some of the points in the ...
9
A very common problem for professionals in our field. I usually try to convince the powers by showing various famous sites how the web convention looks today, in order to get anything done. You turn the discussion in a different direction from "I don't want to change" to "Cool, I want that on my site as well".
I get the best response if I show the other ...
9
Your story sounds similar to my case( I am not the first UX hire but I am the first guy whom they have hired who has had formal education in UX as such). Anyway here is what I would focus on:
Find out who are the key stakeholders in the company who are interested in user experience: This is really important as you would need the support of atleast someone ...
6
I'll start this answer with a quote from Richard Reed, co-founder of Innocent Smoothies (the fruit drinks):
"90% of our marketing strategy goes into the bottle."
Innocent is not a digital company though - the point is that they invest a lot into the product quality.
Marketing is way more efficient (aka delivering better conversion rates) if the promise ...
6
In a nice way, do your job. That means do your wireframes, elicit feedback on what the team think about them. Push at the meetings to get heard. I realise that it is difficult, but you need to make your own stamp.
The problem is that while you understand the essence of what the other members of the team contribute to the project, they do not understand ...
6
For starters, welcome to my world :). Coming to how I normally handle similar situations at work :
Identify the management who is willing to listen to you: In my experience, Most managers still consider user experience as the same as UI or content management ( I had a manager who thinks all that was to user experience was proper grammar and pretty ...
6
But what about things which are simply not measurable? What if your
new design is just more competitive or reflects state of the art
design?
Surely if it's more competitive then, by definition, that is measurable?
Why should the business care about state of the art design? If I cannot explain why in ways the business values - that is the problem.
...
5
Thanks to @Tomer Sharon for mentioning his site and upcoming book dedicated to this topic, It's Our Research. I collected and filtered the main points from the different practitioner interview videos on the site. The ideas are extensive and excellent.
From Paul Adams - Product Manager at Facebook.
The most important thing is developing empathy to your ...
5
I once worked on a project where we had to replace some old (20+ years!) custom-made DOS software, with a hard requirement that we had to keep the old interface, since each employee who worked with the software knew all the keyboard shortcuts by heart (function keys F1 to F10, with different meanings in different parts of the program). The main reason they ...
5
Firstly, it is a difficult situation to handle well. If your client doesn't want you to do the user interviews, you need to help them understand the impact that will have on the end product. You need to find out what matters most to the person making the decision and frame the problem in terms that matter to them.
Lets say that customer adoption is the ...
4
At the end of the day return on investment (ROI) is key. If you can prove to your employer or client that it's worth the money you're asking them to spend, they will spend it.
I've worked on both sides of the camp, as an employed UX Professional and as a consultant.
as an employee
I realised the the value of user experience long before it was established ...
4
Just stumbled across this set of slides from Whitney Hess
Creating a Culture of UX
Creating a Culture of UX was offered as a 3-1/2 hour workshop at UX London 2010.
The workshop consists of case studies, group exercises, a short lecture, and room discussion.
Slides from the Workshop
The slides talk about a range of techniques you can apply when fighting ...
4
BenBrocka's comment on "user friendly" is absolutely correct.
The problem with the term "User Experience" compared to "user friendly" is that it is too vague and too comprehensive (and perhaps too technical) for marketing purposes.
The criticism (we professionals) raise against the "user friendly" term is exactly what makes it so marketing friendly:
1) We ...
4
There is a wealth of studies looking at subjective things like aesthetics and their effects on the user that you may be able to use.
The Effect of Aesthetics on Web Credibility argues that the look of the website can make you look more or less legit.
Attention web designers: You have 50 milliseconds to make a good
first impression! says that it only takes ...
4
User experience design is a comprehensive role and it is not limited to UI or interaction design alone. If you are looking to expand on your skill-set under UX umbrella and contribute to your organization more, you might want to look into following aspects to take its User Experience a level up further. Consider following points
Do user-testing with ...
3
I feel sorry for your situation. It sounds as though you may need to take a leading role for these meetings, you need to demonstrate some work where you can gain insightful input from your fellow engineers.
As for having one no wire-frames, I would be very tempted to do these anyway and present them at your meeting to elicit feedback.
That said, are they ...
3
There are a couple of videos out there produced by Human Factors International and TruScribe (the videos you see of people creating large dioramas on a whiteboard). They are very well produced, commonly being drawn to a talk at a conference.
One specifically that I like to show is "The ROI of User Experience with Dr. Susan Weinschenk". It is good for the ...
3
Jacob Neilson has written a lot on the benefits of usability, more than once. He also sells a report ($150) detailing exactly how they tested this, how the sites improved, and the costs and revenue these changes brought. He also discusses quick and cheap methods of doing testing that can yield significant benefits without a whole ton of expensive eye ...
3
I also empathize with you situation. We have all been there.
I would also suggest doing some guerilla user research/testing, even if it is just within your company. For example, walk over to a few different people's desks and quiz them quickly to get some feedback on the weighting and importance of items in the data model.
Users and user feedback are ...
3
If practical/possible, grab some potential users and record their interaction with the software carrying out representative tasks related to your intended research area. Produce a video montage with highlights of the successes and failures of the interaction. Show it to the stakeholders, get their reactions, ask them questions along the lines of "Did you ...
3
Find a way to do your interviews through the "gatekeepers" that are telling you that you can't do direct client interviews. In my software design career, I've run into this exact problem more than once. While initially frsutrating, it doesn't have to be an impediment to your design process.
Make a focused effort to figure out exactly what you want to know ...
3
Jakob Nielsen, a personal hero, champions his approach of "Discount Usability" (a summary available at http://www.nngroup.com/articles/discount-usability-20-years/).
One of main principles is "You need only 5 participants for a usability research", and I can testify myself that you don't need more for significant results.
All in all, he promises "Fast, ...
3
Couple additional ideas
Start a UX brown bag activity. Find a topic that is interesting from UX standpoint (good/bad products, interesting UX/HCI article or research), send invite with reading material to discuss with people who might be interested. Have a informal presentation and discussion about what your learned and how you could use it for the ...
3
On the contrary; it is my perception is, that when he envisioned the
store, he did it out of a hunch, rather than market, cognitive or UX
research, and as the product of the artistic and functional snobbery
he practiced
I think your perception is incorrect ;-)
For a start the vision behind the Apple Stores was driven by Ron Johnson not Steve ...
3
The UI is probably the most important thing when talking about selling a product. The first thing people see, as of my experience, is the UI.
You get a lot of feedback about "Wow your interface is nice"/"There is that or that in the interface that could be improved", but rarely about the fonctionalities themselves. To the point where sometimes it's kind of ...
2
Often, showing is better than telling.
Try to find out the users' pain points by gathering data (hat tip to Phil), so you can address them accordingly. Then build a mockup or demo UI that addresses those pain points and test it with some actual users. You can even do this with paper prototypes.
Bundle all this together for a convincing proposal for ...
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