Good Gift Giving is User Empathy

This is a major gift giving season, and there are countless gift guides being published by retailers and media outlets. These gift guides typically group folks into broad groups by demographic like “Top Gifts for Dads” or “Gifts for your Girlfriend”, or by interest-group like “Gifts for the Cook” or “Hostess Gifts”. However, this season, Vox published a slightly different take in an article How to become a truly excellent gift giver. I was struck by how many of their points are actually UX principles or practices.

The first lesson listed was to pay attention to the recipient, even writing a mini bio of the person. This of course is UX research at its core, creating a user profile to build a user journey. The article also introduces a three point framework to ask yourself when gift giving: “Can I introduce you to something you might not otherwise know about? Can I get you a nicer version of something than you would buy for yourself? Can I make you feel seen?” These roughly apply to user experiences when we convert them to: Can I introduce you to an experience you might not know about? Can I delight you by providing a better experience than you were expecting? Can I meet your needs, perhaps needs you might not even realize you have?

The more we pay attention to our users, the better the outcomes. This is true whether designing and building a digital ecommerce experience or finding a meaningful gift for a recipient. When doing the below exercise my team generated many themes that are applicable to both problems. Create a similar seasonally-themed learning activity with your team below.

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STAND-UP EXERCISE

This exercise could be part of a larger end-of-year gathering, or trimmed to fit into a stand-up or two.

Each team member is asked to add to the virtual whiteboard an image of a gift that they were happy to receive. I asked the team to only use gifts that were a surprise, not something they’d asked for or added to a wish list, but the gift could be from any occasion. Due to size, my team then broke into breakout groups, to discuss their gifts and decide on one to present back to the larger gathering. The giftee told their story of why it was such a great gift to recieve and what it has meant to them.

Then as a team we discussed learnings or themes that emerged, especially ones that are relevant to user empathy and user understanding. Adding them to a visual whiteboard and grouping them helps facilitate discussion. How can we take these themes of gift-giving into our user research and our product team prioritization?

UI / UX Challenges

This time of year, many folks are online shopping. That provides even more chances to have great user experiences across the web, or unfortunately, terrible user experiences. Coming off of the Black Friday / Cyber Monday week, almost everyone can relate to a story about a webpage that wouldn’t load or crashed during checkout, and hopefully many can relate to those who had seamless experiences finding or buying the item they’ve had their eye on. Asking folks to be more mindful of their experiences can be a good learning opportunity for the team.

The breadth of experiences shared during this exercise was surprising. On the positive side: a cocktail app that was helping an amateur bartender expertly mix drinks using ingredients they already had available; a fashion website with a clever visual delineation of what colors of an item were on backorder and which were ready to ship; a banking app with clear information available and tasks easy to navigate. On the frustrating side: a clever new AI plus bird feeder that made you wait in line before even seeing the price/options; a metropolitan public school website that made both navigating data and a map of school impossible; a popular recipe website without robust search or filter options to actually find a suitable recipe; an e-commerce site with so many pop-ups it couldn’t be navigated.

Even if all team members aren’t designing or contributing to e-commerce pages, or a stand-alone shopping app, user experience principles and even features can be applied across many mediums. Perhaps a seamless experience with an address validation dropdown when inputting a billing address leads to ideas for auto-fill within an internal form. Even just the reminder of “does this work on mobile” continues to be a necessary question at every step. When my team shared their findings, one Chrome-using designer frustratingly noted that a website checkout only worked in Safari, and they only remembered to check that after the item was already sold out. A good reminder to us for our QA checks.

Occasionally, we could commiserate with some of the designers (“oof, that functionality is hard!”) but often we were already brainstorming how to apply these learnings to our products and platforms.

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STAND-UP EXERCISE

Ask the team to be on the lookout for awesome or terrible digital UX/UI experiences they run into in their personal or professional lives. Perhaps while holiday shopping, or doing research, or just going throughout their day - be mindful of times of frustration or times of ease in a digital setting. Bring those examples to stand-up, being prepared to drop links and screenshots in the chat or sharing your screen if the experience can be duplicated. Discuss what could improve, or how we could bring the best of these experiences to our own products and platforms.

Time Travel to Better Results

Time travel, of the mental variety, can help you envision future success, as well as the multiple possibilities to get there. In Jane McGonigal’s book Imaginable: How to See the Future Coming and Feel Ready for Anything―Even Things That Seem Impossible Today, she says, “Futures thinking is an incredibly useful, practical tool to prepare your mind to adapt faster to new challenges, build hope and resilience, reduce anxiety and depression, and inspire you to take actions today that set yourself up for future happiness and success.”

Futures thinking, or mental time travel, involves mentally stepping into a future time period and imagining - realistically - what could be happening. Depending how far into the future you imagine, your brain might be inventing new possibilities for the unknowns that inevitably arise. Your brain draws on past experiences, current hopes or fears, and intuitions about what might possibly change going forward. This exercise helps uncover and define risks or possibilities you might not have previously considered. It can be part of connecting who you are today with what you might actually feel and do in the future. This can be especially powerful if done as a team.

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STAND-UP EXERCISE

This exercise can take place over two weeks.

In session one, ask the team to imagine it is the end of the calendar year - what are you most proud to have accomplished in the last 3 or so months? What would you describe to your manager as your greatest achievements over the last couple months? What did you just squeak in at the last minute? What were the expected wins? The unexpected wins?

In session two, ask the team about what happened on the journey to those accomplishments? What were the biggest challenges? What were the expected roadblocks? The unexpected ones?

Next then is more individual engagement - having folks work with their managers, teams, and stakeholders to keep an eye out for those roadblocks or ways to mitigate them before they even arise.

Gaining Insights

So much of UX is about gaining insights from our users, so that we can better solve their problems. In the widely followed design thinking process from d.school, we can get to insights by following the non-linear phases of Empathize, Define, Ideate, Prototype, Test, Assess. This is a tried and true process that allows designers to solve human-centric problems.

However, there is a way to breakdown the “Ideate” section further, to create even more expansive ideas.

In Seeing What Others Don't: The Remarkable Ways We Gain Insights, Gary Klein details two parts to our “thinking” about a problem. First is an incubation phase, where we stop consciously thinking about the problem and let our unconscious mind take over. We put it on the shelf, relegate it to the back burners, not forgotten but not actively engaged with. He advises to “seek out mental relaxation and stop thinking about the problem.” Next, comes the illumination stage, “when insight bursts forth with conciseness, suddenness, and immediate certainty.” The aha moment.

If we lean into the two loops of incubation and illumination on any given design-thinking process, how can we optimize these loops to yield more and better insights? During illumination, while the conscious mind wanders, the unconscious engages in what Einstein called “combinatory play” - taking diverse ideas and inputs and finding new ways to bring them together.

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STAND-UP EXERCISE

“But insight cannot be taken back. You cannot return to the moment you were in before.” ― Hilary Mantel, Wolf Hall

How do you define insights - both as an individual and as a team?

How can you further exploit the incubation and illumination loops to reach more insights? What do you do to help incubate an idea? Are you spending enough time on this portion of ideation?

Evangelizing UX

Even organizations that have had UX practitioners for some time may find themselves in the situation of needing to defend their practice or processes. While generally speaking, everyone agrees that “we must listen to the users”, the ferocity in which UX approaches this can be off-putting to other disciplines. Folks in Marketing for example might feel that they can achieve necessary results without input from UX.

“Evangelizing UX is a never-ending process and requires perseverance. Knowing what’s good for UX is good for your organization provides a great incentive for driving the UX message home every opportunity you get.”

— Pabini Gabriel-Petit, Editor of UXMatters

UX can be a constant act in persuasion of stakeholders. But luckily, persuasion is convincing someone through reason, and it can be easy to align UX with business goals. If you can prove to stakeholders, on their terms, that usability improvements will help them meet their revenue or conversion goals, those improvements have a high chance of being implemented.

So how you get the word out is important. One way is soliciting involvement of folks across the organization. Reviewing a wireframe and asking for feedback can be done by anyone in the organization, as can usability testing. Asking stakeholders to actively get into the mindset of the user through these activities can be a valuable exercise to reframe their needs and benefits. There are other hands-on ways to involve others and evangelize detailed in this video by the Interaction Design Foundation. The most important part is making user experience an accessible and understandable concept by the entire business, and then continually using UX principles and gains to move the needle on improving both the user-focused product and the bottom line.

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STAND-UP EXERCISE

Ask the team to read or skim “Evangelizing UX Across an Entire Organization” from UXMatters and/or watch the above video from the Interaction Design Foundation. Start a discussion with how can we continue to or ramp up our current efforts with evangelizing UX within the broader organization. What are some tangible ways we can advocate for our practice area or get our message out to a wider audience? How can we better distribute our findings? Who should we be specifically targeting with this message / who should we be talking to that we aren’t?