Follow up questions for Amanda Stockwell

If you have questions following Amanda’s session today, please ask them here!

You mentioned sharing kickoff exercises later here. What are your suggestions?

What a great session! We had some insightful and curly questions. Thanks everyone for joining in. :slight_smile:

If you missed the session, or would like to check through the lines and lines of valuable advice by Amanda, we’ll be posting the transcript up on http://uxmastery.com shortly.

In the meantime, keep the questions coming!

These articles have some useful tips for kickoff activities:

Amanda will have some good ones to share too.

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Yep, Luke has great ones! I also like:

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And here are some more general resources on kickoff meetings:

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I love that sailboat exercise! It combines my love of UX, boats and drawing. :slight_smile:

The transcript of today’s session is here.

Hi Amanda, earlier Hawk posted my question from the Slack " Are there specific tips or recommendations you’d like to share for honoring the unique aspects of each platform (say Android, iOS) while at the same time maintaining the product branding throughout, and not over designing toward one platform in the face of popularity (say putting Windows Mobile last)"

In your response you mentioned “this is totally dependent on your target users and what they need/use/do” I believe that is a nice start. Would you mind expanding, in richer detail, your thoughts on the concerns I outlined?

For example, if our audiences spans 3 platforms, I’d like to know more about holding branding needs while honoring each platform. Thanks!

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There was a question re: team members ‘interrupting’ during interviews / testing. I thought I would post our protocol here. I shared this with our team and I enforce it during the interviews. The nice thing is that our note-takers/observers now know, so if someone slips up and there is a 3rd person that person will often take care of the ‘hygiene’ while I can focus on interviewing. :

"These are some of the protocols we need to adopt when conducting user research and usability evaluation:

Please feel free to comment/ask questions.

They are not in any particular order.

Allow the participant to sit without anyone between them and the door. (this is for first time interviewees, if it’s someone who you’ve met a few times and is comfortable it’s not so important).

  • If the participant asks a question, about anything to do with [OUR PRODUCT] or the platform there are only 3 answers permitted:
  1. Can you tell me why you ask that?
  2. What do think it would be/do?
  3. We can discuss that after this interview.
  • If observers have questions please make a note and raise them at the end of the session. (This especially relates to questions about specific UI elements.)
  • The facilitator needs to allow time for questions from observers at the end of each session.
  • I know it is hard not to answer a participant’s question. We need to block our natural impulse to address their query.
  • We do not give any feedback to participants during the session if they make a comment / ask a question (i.e., like affirmations, agreements, negations, clarifications).

(Thanks to senior designers who taught me these principles, include UXM’s own @mattymcg !)

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Hi @amanda_stockwell , what are some techniques you use to make sure the team is involved during the analysis/synthesis stage? Thanks, Kristen

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Hey there! I don’t have a specific analysis technique, but one easy way to encourage team involvement is just to have a debrief meeting right after the sessions where every observer can share key observations. Typically we’ll have everyone write down their own observations on stickies and share one at a time. When possible, I’ll start grouping and categorizing findings during this debrief - it doesn’t take too much extra time than just sharing and it gets everyone thinking about connecting the dots between the insights. I usually still need some time after the fact to finish synthesis and come up with the suggested path forward, but sometimes it’s really obvious what we need to do. Make sense?

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It does. Thank you :slight_smile:

Once again and at last: I missed the session but had a look at the slack tread a bit… my question is; @amanda_stockwell , what do think of UX aligning with strategy in a company where the main strategy is not so aligned with the product but with the service and telecommunications technology? Product is only the part of service. Though because of this discrepency UX is not regarded as such until product does not help customer satisfaction of course.
by the way i design for SaaS not a commercial product 100% but a side service

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