PROFESSIONAL USE CASES
MY METHODS
“If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together.”
African proverb
"If you want to build a ship, don't drum up people to collect wood and don't assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea."
— Antoine de Saint-Exupery
Share the
Vision
Get There
I Explore, Observe, Discover insights by doing the research. I reach out to potential customers, existing users, I go with sales, marketing, CEO, anyone, but for me learning about the potential customers is a must. If by any unfortunate or legal reasons it is not my department who are in the front line, then I learn from them and I help them to share.
Having the knowledge of the market, the competition, the buyer's behavior, the potential business opportunity - all of that knowledge is crucial. I have faced the challenge many times that this knowledge was owned by different departments and efficient sharing fell lower in their priorities. I helped them to document and publish in-house to make sure we all see the same goal. Whenever it was needed, I was ready to jump in and work with my team to fill the missing gaps by investigating in deeper detail with the appropriate research or by giving them the right tools to make their life easier, and more efficient.
It is great to do all the research on the market and learn, but in my experience, it is even more important to understand the need and find a happy place for you and the product. It requires practice and a lot of experience to understand the real need behind the stated requirements. It is some of my first advice to juniors to learn how to understand the real needs. I know it is hard not to freak out after 5 why's, but I lead by example and let people ask me as many as they want.
I have never had infinite resources in my career, and even if I would have had we know there is a fine balance in the number of features and usability. So there is a game of picking the most important things and the biggest pain points to define the MVP (Minimum Viable Product) solution or MLP (Minimum Lovable Product).
Many techniques and methods can be used and picking the right one depends on many factors, like where the product is in its lifecycle, resources, availability, goals, or the team itself.
At the end of the day, we need to figure out where to start, but there is always a need to adjust on the fly. I like making the method transparent to make sure that everyone is aligned with the real values of a product. I know if I involve people in this process they will own the problems more, which leads to much better results.
I always follow the user's mental model. Many times it manifests as creating artifacts like a workflow diagram or talking with the developers and creating UML. I like merging lo-fi or even hi-fi shots into the user flow and having them together with the designed solution.
Typical ideation happens on a whiteboard, but from time-to-time, it needs to be digitized to bring it in front of other people. This is the part most people enjoy the most, but this is the part as well where it is extremely easy to lose track and follow the loudest idea. Clear priorities, a list of assumptions through the work is a key to success, as well as keeping it at the right level. Norman, Nielsen and many other brilliant thought leaders already figured multiple principles, which need to be followed during the design of the user flow.
I motivate, empower and enable designers to shine, but I never avoid hands-on work when needed. The level of detail to be designed is infinitely deep. As Ludwig Mies van der Rohe said: "God is in the detail", which somehow changed in the everyday language to the devil is in the details. There is a nice satisfaction in polishing details, icons, optimal fillet radiuses. Unfortunately, it got more focus nowadays, and many people identify design with aesthetics. As much as I appreciate beauty, I do not like it if that goes against usability - so even if this Apple charging is beautifully hidden, it would fail on my usability watch...
I set up the KPIs at the beginning of projects. They can be tracked with Jira tickets for development or Asana or anything relevant. They can be shared in a daily standup with a team or Wiki/Confluence/Intranet page. We can talk through those regular assessment sessions, but as much as possible it is important to measure progress and success.
I do the same with my progress, others, and the product as well. In the case of product usability, I simply observe what users do with the product. On the right picture, we went a bit too wild. This particular test was done with the Ergonomics lab of the Technical University of Budapest with heart variability measurement method, which is a great way to see the smallest detail. This research gave deeper insights into a mature product to facilitate conversations for new inventions. This research was the foundation to invent a better and even more sophisticated 3d navigation interface. If you do not have a lab, a piece of paper is still good enough to test in most cases.
All the learnings during the process can be fed back to the learnings and the process continues almost from the beginning.
You can find the tools I use in my Resumé.
Some examples as the result of my methods can be found on of this the top page.