TECH SPARK THE UX ISSUE - Luxoft
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Spring 2019
TECH
SPARK
THE UX ISSUENAVIGATION
CONTENTS NAVIGATION
EDITOR’S LET TER
3 EDITOR’S LETTER
Andre Nedelcoux, Head of Digital Consulting at Excelian,
wishes you a warm welcome to The UX Issue.
4 NEW IDEA, OLD HAT
Design thinking may be the latest trend but the underlying
[Companies] choosing to invest in [UX and UCD]
integration display a significant stock market advantage,
outperforming the S&P by an extraordinary 211%.
principles of good design were understood centuries ago.
8
The Design Management Institute, 2016
UX MATURITY Hello and welcome to this special UX edition of Tech Spark.
Design thinking is not just a slogan, it’s an essential function User experience (UX) and “design thinking” have been
C of business, sitting alongside marketing, finance and sales. buzzwords in industry for some years. And it’s no secret that,
14
in the financial services sector, we’ve had to play catch-up.
O WHY USER EXPERIENCE But the good news is that there has been a giant leap in the
quality of user interfaces in our industry in the last three years.
N IN FINANCE MATTERS A new generation of consumers have high UX expectations.
User-centred design (UCD) – the strategy for engineering and
T
Millennials will soon be the largest consumer demographic.
delivering UX – is placing these users at the fore, and designing
But if you don’t give them a good UX, they will go elsewhere.
22
around their needs.
E KNOWING YOUR USERS As the figures from the Design Management Institute illustrate,
N
there is a robust business case for integrating UCD as a core
Most common UX errors are the result of cognitive bias. Don’t function of business, as important to the bottom line as sales,
assume you know what your customers think, listen to them. marketing or finance.
T
S 28 UNDERSTANDING EXPERIENCES
Struggling with the notion of user experience? Take some
UCD requires vision and a strong will to change. It is a cultural
shift that needs new thinking throughout the organisation.
We’ve designed this issue of Tech Spark to be accessible to
anyone interested in UX, whether you want to play catch-up
time to reflect on your own daily feelings and experiences.
36
with the industry or want to take UX to the next level.
“DON’T MAKE ME THINK” I hope you enjoy the issue.
If it’s not intuitive, it doesn’t work properly. We choose some Andre Nedelcoux
key insights from Steve Krug’s user experience Bible.
46
Head of Digital Consulting
andre.nedelcoux@excelian.com
USER-CENTRED DESIGN
Off-the-shelf, re-engineered or bespoke? The answer to your
UX question depends entirely on your users’ needs.
2 | TECH SPARK | Spring 2019 TECH SPARK | Spring 2019 | 3KNOWING YOUR USERS DO YOU REALLY KNOW WHO YOUR USERS ARE?
Q: How well do you know your
Do users – do you understand what
they need, want, like or dislike?
you A: Sure.
really Q: How do you know?
know A: The latest quantitative
report shows usage figures,
how click rates and drop-off rates.
Too often
your Q: So you have data that tells you the
duration of time a user is active on your
people bury
their heads
users
service / product, if they completed a task or
not and what they clicked on … has that data
provided insight into what they like about
in the sand,
think? your product / service, or why they even
use your product / service?
avoiding
Can you afford to be A: No, but I already know or ignoring
effectively blindfolded what the next service / product
when understanding offering is and what my
users need.
evidence that
those who use your
product or service? Q: Do you have insights from doesn’t fit their
We look at the users to know the features or
importance of user services that they may like to preconceptions.
have or need?
research to gain
insight from the people
A: I have the quantitative
who really know …
reports and I am an expert in FS.
Words: Hiren Patel
I have been in this game for a very
long time and know what
the users need!
4 | TECH SPARK | Spring 2019 TECH SPARK | Spring 2019 | 5WHO ARE YOUR USERS? KNOWING YOUR USERS
Everywhere in society we find some form of bias. We don’t
consciously look to apply bias. But we all apply unconscious
bias. It isn’t driven by malice or intended to cause harm to
others, but the consequences can be unexpected. Our daily
interactions are surrounded by bias, from news articles on
social media that present the authors’ guesses as facts, to
the fact that men outnumber women in the boardroom.
The same can also be said when decisions are made about what
feature to develop or how a workflow / experience should work.
If you haven’t conducted any user research or engaged with
your end-users, you begin to develop and design products and
services through your unconscious bias. What you believe to be in
the best interests of your users may well be the opposite, leading
to limited user adoption, brand damage and costly reworking.
Looking from the outside in, and not engaging with your users, can
sometimes blind-side you, causing you to miss the most obvious
opportunities or issues that are staring you in the face. Instead,
why not actually speak to your end-users, or even put yourself in
their shoes? What you may find is that the answers you receive
lead you down an alternative path, that brings new ideas, products
or services which you may not have conceived otherwise.
You might be thinking to yourself, “OK, so if I speak to my users,
understand what they like or dislike, and what they need, how
does this help me or my business?” Listening to your users, and
understanding their needs, will benefit your business through
informed decision-making using facts not assumptions.
Investing both financially and strategically in user
research up front, before planning what is in your
product / services roadmap, will allow you to
create longer term benefits, that deliver more value
for your money than quick wins that may or may
Need some help
finding that hidden
not deliver real business and user value.
gold dust – the ideas that are
actually useful for your audience
and for building your product
road map? Please email
hiren.patel@excelian.com
6 | TECH SPARK | Spring 2019 TECH SPARK | Spring 2019 | 7Tales of the
un-UX-pected.
8 | TECH SPARK | Spring 2019
KNOWING YOUR USERS
90
“WE KNOW WHAT IS BEST FOR OUR USERS”
An investment bank had asked for a new trading platform to
be designed and delivered. This platform would be developed for
desktop computers. Access to the end-users and the trading floor
was not possible until a solution was ready for testing.
The design process was led and directed by the product owner who
was the designated expert user. By not speaking to actual end-users the
solution was being designed through the lens of the product owner and not
through any end-user insights. This inevitably led the design direction down
a narrow path. Even though the solution that was designed was with the
users’ best interests at heart, because of the product owner’s unconscious
bias and assumptions, one glaring user need had been overlooked.
When the day of testing arrived, and the solution was put in front of end-users for
the first time, it failed to meet their needs. It didn’t fail because of the aesthetics
or functionality, because it failed way before aesthetics or functionality could be
tested. It failed because of a fundamental assumption about user behaviour.
The new platform solution had been designed to work on desktop monitors
in a horizontal orientation, whereas the end-users were actually working
with their monitors in a portrait orientation.
Had user research been conducted upfront then their needs and wants would
have been identified and accounted for. No prior user research or analysis was
conducted, therefore the end result increased costs for reworking the solution
and had a negative impact on the brand and creditability of the product team.
If you do not speak to end-users or allow access to
them before potentially committing budget for new
platforms or platform upgrades, then you are designing
and developing through an unconscious bias.
Listen, learn from and work with your users.
They know what they need and want better then you do.
TECH SPARK | Spring 2019 | 9
KNOWING YOUR USERS
90Read the full issue of TechSpark: https://www.luxoft.com/techspark/issue6/
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