What I’ve learned in UX in the first half of 2016 – Schneide Blog Skip to content Schneide Blog public business secrets What I’ve learned in UX in the first half of 2016 The first part of my journey to better software Since the beginning of the year we as a team of developers started meeting 1-2 times a month talking about UX design. Urged with a motivation to create better software for our clients and serve them better I started the conversation inside our company. Years ago I read classics like Alan Cooper’s The Inmates and Don Norman’s The Psychology of Everyday Things. They left me with a craving to create something more fitting for users but I had no place where to start. At the turn of the year I focused on learning as much as I can about UX, product design and design in general. Here’s my list of insights I gained in these 6 months (in no particular order): doing UX means changing the culture and mindset of the whole company from technology to people nothing beats exposure to real users in their contexts (source) contextual observation and interviews are key and the most profitable and motivating method to find out more about your users analytics and data can tell you more about what user do, interviews why are they doing it in the enterprise context where we are it is sometimes difficult if not impossible to gain access to users some methods from UX feel a bit squishy and the value of doing them not apparent traditional (UX) designers have a hard time talking about the value of UX for the business the definition of UX is all including at best and inconsistent at worst, but it doesn’t really matter to me as I want to improve the software we write regardless of what it is called or which responsibility it is in order to craft a better user experience our development process has to change drastically the creative method (observe, reflect, make) is a way to order my concepts about UX users behave differently in different situations, the better way to capture that is jobs to be done not persona the UI layer is where experiments are made, therefore it should be changed more easily than other parts assumptions are very dangerous, trying to validate or falsify them you have to live with assumptions, know their risk conversations are the way to spread knowledge, not documentation and not presentations let users or stakeholders talk, do not complete thoughts for them, get comfortable with silence the user has a whole different view of your UI than you I have to learn to suspend judgement ask why but not endlessly the struggling moments of your users are the best points to start for a better solution understand the problem, the context and the user’s motivations better requirements are liars use whiteboards more, they help me to think spatially if you cannot argue for a design, the client overruns you with his taste think in systems, systems of people and design systems small usability improvements are easy and therefore we often tend to flock to them conversations with people are hard therefore we tend to avoid asking the hard and important questions In future posts I will write in more detail about each of the points. Share this: Print Related Author jenslukowskiPosted on May 23, 2016 June 1, 2016 Categories 2016, Author: Jens Lukowski, Continuous Learning, UXTags enterprise ux, learning, UX Leave a Reply Cancel reply Enter your comment here... Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in: Email (Address never made public) Name Website You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. ( Log Out / Change ) You are commenting using your Twitter account. ( Log Out / Change ) You are commenting using your Facebook account. ( Log Out / Change ) Cancel Connecting to %s Notify me of new comments via email. Notify me of new posts via email. Δ This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed. Post navigation Previous Previous post: Every time you write a getter, a function dies Next Next post: Getting Shibboleth SSO attributes securely to your application Schneide Blog This weblog contains public wisdom of our company Softwareschneiderei GmbH in Karlsruhe, Germany. 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