What’s Next for UX?

At a recent TechWeek Chicago event, I presented the major technology trends that are changing how existing UX design processes are viewed and the new approaches companies can employ to stay ahead of these trends. Both “Lean UX” and the rapid growth of mobile browsing have contributed to our radical approach to reinventing teams and processes to meet the challenges of today’s rapidly evolving digital landscape. This new approach is born out of two ideas circulating amongst the User Experience and App Development communities that moves away from traditional design processes to a more iterative and open approach and also considers developing for mobile users first as a means to focus the design.

For more detailed information on the forces driving rapid change in the UX Design field, watch the “What’s Next for UX” webinar that illustrates new approaches and presents practical methods to help design teams stay ahead of these trends. Watch the webinar now >

Arrested Development?

The standard design process used by most agencies—often referred to as the “waterfall process”— has five familiar phases: Discovery, Design, Implementation, Testing and Launch. Each phase typically consists of separate teams held together by a project manager who serves as the primary link between the phases and teams. Each phase is focused on a set of deliverables and comes to a conclusion once those deliverables (e.g., competitive analysis, creative brief, coded templates, etc.) have been completed and approved by the client. The process relies on the deliverables to ultimately provide more definition for the final product. If everything moves along smoothly, the project launches with the successful completion of the goals stated at the outset. However, while the waterfall process has been embraced thoroughly by our industry and clients, it has many shortcomings that make it ripe for failure.

The waterfall process was developed as a defensive measure to ensure a clear set of milestones and deliverables in order to keep close track of how a project is progressing. While the focus helps teams ensure the delivery of a finished product, it limits the opportunity for open exploration by not being adaptable to change. Every project proceeds with a set of assumptions that are very often upended during design exploration, thereby requiring a completely different approach. With the waterfall process, change is met with resistance because it is simply not built into the plan. Furthermore, assumptions may never be put to the test because frequent assessments of the work are not a part of the overall process.

In addition, the discrete stages inherent with the waterfall process often lead to communication challenges. For example, typically the design phase will only include the project manager and design team. As they work to provide the functional and aesthetic definition, many decisions that require input from the development team is often times left until the end of the design phase and the beginning of the implementation phase. This silo effect tends to lead to a higher potential of risk with poor technical decisions made during the design phase that require changes during implementation.

A Better Way

The approach used at ThoughtMatrix—Lean UX—seeks to fix the disjointed waterfall process by creating a unified team focused on the finished product from the get go. Business owners, project managers, developers, designers, content strategists and others work together in a small, dedicated team. The team compresses the research, design, development, testing and validation process into two- to four-week tight-looped cycles similar to Agile development. After each cycle, assumptions, design and code are validated with users, and the accepted components remain while unresolved features/functionality are reworked in the next cycle. All along, the focus is on the final product so every contribution by each team member impacts the final product, not just a single phase of the project. The result is a process that’s always focused on the final product while at the same time open to unbridled exploration and constant reflection that vastly improves the end result.

Lean UX Illustrated
Borrowing heavily from the Agile Development Process, Lean UX was first coined by entrepreneur and author Eric Reis, who in the aftermath of the Internet Bubble sought to find a way to bring ideas to end users more quickly to validate new business ideas before scarce capital was wasted. Cycles typically last between 2-4 weeks and involve all aspects of the design process from research, design, development and testing to validate each feature before moving on to the next.

Mobile First

The latest and greatest technologies and content—such as Flash and video—have turned many websites into incomprehensible digital behemoths. So many different stakeholders are involved in any digital endeavor that it’s no wonder that the voice of the customer is often lost in a sea of navigation and promotional content. That complexity is further compounded when accommodating for new avenues of information consumption—most specifically for smartphones and tablets. Forty percent of mobile consumers over 18 in the U.S. now have smartphones and that number is expected to exceed 50% by the end of 2011*. With that kind of penetration and growth, UX designers need to start thinking about mobile first.

Designing a product for Mobile First requires a great deal of focus. Constrained by limited screen real estate, distracted users, and on-the-go interaction, the mobile first approach forces teams to concentrate on what really matters to users. It’s no longer acceptable to merely place extra content in an overlay or add another item to the navigation to try to retrofit the needs of the mobile user. Mobile limits you to a very small screen space—typically 320 x 480 ppi on a smartphone compared to 1000 x 650 ppi for a typical desktop browser—which is virtually an 80% reduction in screen space. Thus, it is essential to deliver what the visitor wants immediately, or abandonment will be inevitable.

Mobile users are usually on the go, checking their friend’s Facebook status as they cross the street or ordering a latte at Starbucks, browsing sites while riding transit or in-between appointments. Focusing on how to enable mobile users to quickly and easily navigate to the content they need when they need it also helps to solve challenges that come with the wide-open spaces of the desktop browser. Sometimes less is more when it comes to helping users quickly and easily find content they care about.

Focus
Walgreens.com has more than four choices to get to the pharmacy adding a lot of clutter to a confusing homepage design with many competing elements. The iPhone app presents nine easy to scan options even providing users the ability to customize the apps home screen with the choices they use most.

Big Forces Driving Change

Embracing the tenants of Lean UX and encouraging a Mobile First design approach even when mobile development is not part of the project have a significant impact on the quality of the work being done at ThoughtMatrix.