Weekly UX Inspiration

I’m constantly running across awesome user experiences — but I never take the time to actually document them for future reference. So I’m starting a mini-series on my blog to share some weekly UX inspiration. I hope you enjoy these little nuggets of delight as much as I do =).

1. Some conversation-worthy copy

Over the weekend we were driving back from my parents house and my husband was bugging me yet again about trading in our car. This time, it came with a word-of-mouth recommendation from a colleague who had tried out Carvana and said the experience was amazing. They didn’t ask any questions, they just drove up, picked up his car and off they went! It sounded pretty magical so we decided to take the first step and at least see what my current car is worth. And low and behold, I ran across this nugget of amazing copy writing. Not only was the web-app experience super smooth and modern, but when it came down to perhaps the most challenging part (describing your vehicles condition), Carvana made it not only easy, but fun, to choose! I aspire to be able to write copy this true, honest, and hilarious someday!

2. A handy little promo!

So I ran across this adorable baby clothing brand called Mori last weekend while shopping local. I decided to check out their website to grab a few more items and I just fell in love with their site experience. What could you possibly want on an-commerce site more than a sale or promo or discount code? I just loved how smooth this little plug-in to save 10% off was — it was eye catching, but it didn’t degrade the brand. Like a friendly little shop helper handing out coupons at the front of the store! And how could you not be in love with their little logo who’s eyes blink at you while you’re shopping. What a great subtle animation that brings the brand and site to life!

3. And talk about social proof…

You can tell I spent my weekend shopping for baby clothes! But how can you not love it when you’re done shopping and there’s still more rewards or coupons to be had? We’ve all gotten the endless requests to share a referral code after a purchase — and we’ve all probably thought the same thing “Are my friends going to think I’m just trying to sell them crap?” Which is quite often why I don’t participate. So I just loved how Carters is trying to encourage sharing by showing how many other people are sharing in the last 30 days. That’s definitely an application of social proof I haven’t seen before. I wonder if it’s actually working for them.

Well there you have it — some UX nuggets from this past week. If you happen across any inspiration yourself, please share! Inspiration can come from anywhere =).

Grace Hopper Celebration 2018

Grace Hopper Celebration

SKETCHNOTES & TAKEAWAYS

This year, I got to attend Grace Hopper Celebration in Houston, Texas with my coworker and partner-in-crime, Joanna Sim. It was three days packed full of great experiences and opportunities to connect with women in tech from across the country. I was blown away by the sheer size of the conference — I’ve never been to a work event with 20,000 people before, let alone 20,000 women leaders, entrepreneurs, and aspiring technologists. Events and conferences are always inspirational and motivating, but seeing a flood of women crossing the streets, attending events, and walking the halls was truly magical. And the production quality was top notch! Not only were the venues massive and accommodating, but they were filled with beautiful hand-painted murals, large installations perfect for instagramming, and career fair booths unlike anything I’d ever seen.

I wrote this post to recap some of my key thoughts and learnings from the conference. Although it was heavily focused on tech and software engineering, I found several useful takeaways for designers and design thinkers.

KEYNOTE

JESSICA O. MATTHEWS, FOUNDER & CEO OF UNCHARTED POWER

All the keynotes were powerful and inspiring, but Jessica really took it to the next level. Not only does she have an energetic stage presence and a ton of passion for her work, but her storytelling was amazing. In a nutshell, Jessica grew up with her family in New York, and after trips to her parents’ native Nigeria, she built the product that would grow into a company called Uncharted Power. The Soccket is a soccer ball that stores kinetic energy while it’s being used for play and later becomes a lamp for countries where the power grid isn’t a reliable source of light.

Just because it’s not your plan, doesn’t mean it’s not your destiny!

Jessica never intended to found an energy company, but she followed her passion for The Soccket from a class project to a full-blown company. She created a second product, a jump rope for girls, and eventually leveraged the same technology to harness the energy from pedestrians walking the streets by capturing it in pads under the ground. Jessica’s story serves as great reminder to all of us makers, builders, designers, and doers that you never know where inspiration might come from and what you could turn it into with determination and hard work! So maybe we should all dust off some of those school projects and pursue our dreams =)

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More than Child’s Play: The Science and Art of Tech for Kids

SARA DEWITT

I chose this talk because I’m absolutely obsessed with understanding how we can use game design principles and game mechanics to improve the QuickBooks customer experience. So I was dying to see what I could learn from Sara’s experience working on PBS Kids Children’s games. And it didn’t disappoint. Sara started off talking about why designing for children is different from designing for adults and highlighted the fact that children have no fear or inhibitions — they will jump right in and try anything. I’m constantly challenging myself and my teams to design simpler more comprehensible user experiences, and to do so I often use the “what would we do if we had to design this for a 7-year-old?” And while I love using that method to provoke our thinking, Sara reminded me that children really do live in a magical reality that adults simply don’t.

She also talked about how games have evolved from teaching simple skills like reading, writing, and mathematics. Games like Marvelous Coaster Tea Party teach social and emotional skills like recognizing when someone’s cup is empty and offering to refill it. I found this fascinating to think about how games can be used to teach kids soft skills, and it made me wonder if they could be used more in the workplace to teach leadership and facilitative skills.

Several years ago, when I was focused on designing an iPad app, I was obsessed with this idea of making the tangible world digital and making a more meaningful digital experience by replicating the physical world beyond skeuomorphism. Sara mentioned that her team does early research by watching kids at play and observing how they learn through play and interaction with the physical world. Her team works hard to capture the physical magic in the digital space. She used the example of kids covering their eyes during a hide and seek digital game (despite the fact that they could then no longer see the screen!). Children don’t understand the boundaries between physical and digital, and I wonder how we can design experiences for adults that make the same hard lines disappear.

Perhaps the most fascinating part of this talk for me was the discussion about how learning-focused play could replace standardized testing techniques for children. Not only does the research prove that these games accurately predict test scores, but they’ve demonstrated that, based on scaffolding level, game designers could provide personalized feedback to the players and then move them up and down based on their performance. This was a particularly relevant insight for me and my team, as we seek to build personalized user experiences in our products. The underlying scaffolding becomes critical to moving users through an educational journey.

Finally, at the end of the talk, there was a thought-provoking discussion about the fact that parents are often worried about screen time and don’t encourage their children to play games. Moreover, the metrics associated with games performing well in this case is App Store ratings, which often means that games with in-app purchases produce negative incentives. PBS operates in the pursuit of education and learning, and it’s focused on those learning goals. But this is a constant conflict that arises in my world: how do we balance the business outcomes and customer outcomes when they’re in conflict? How do we incentivize user behavior that’s both good for the user and good for business?

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HOW I LEARNED TO CRY AT WORK

SoFia shepard

I’m always fascinated when companies say “bring your whole self to work.” What does that mean? And how much of my whole self can and should I really bring to my work environment? I’ve personally cried at work a few times—from the I-have-too-much-going-on-and-my-cup-is-overflowing cry to the I’m-not-sure-this-role-is-right-for-me cry. So I was super excited to hear Sofia’s story.

Like me, Sofia’s cup overflowed at work as well, and after finding herself crying at work on several occasions, she started to uncover research on the topic. She shared some interesting stats, including the fact that women have smaller tear ducts than men and that men and women are perceived differently in the workplace for the exact same behavior.

41% of women admit to crying at work.

As she dug into the topic, Sofia also uncovered the advantages of creating a psychologically safe work environment and how it can help everyone do their best work, especially when they aren’t afraid of being judged for their ideas. She talked about how being passionate about the work means that emotions will be involved and that healthy arguments among colleagues can help drive innovation.

I’ve personally seen the positive effects of creating a psychologically safe workplace and love the reminder to treat everyone as a whole person with all the emotional baggage they bring to work everyday. For a while, I experimented with my team starting our daily stand-ups with an emotional check-in—everyone would say “I feel….” and it went such a long way toward exposing our vulnerabilities and emotional states, encouraging us all the be more empathetic. It also allowed us to take bigger risks as a team knowing that we all always had each other’s back.

Sofia’s talk and the Q&A that followed was a great open discussion about vulnerability and emotion in the workplace, and it serves as a great reminder to us that not only do we need to bring our whole selves to work, we need to be accepting of and empathetic to other’s whole selves. It can have an amazing impact on the work.

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LEVELING UP HILLARY 2016 WITH GREAT GAME DESIGN

STEPHANIE CHENG

Talk number two on game design did not disappoint! Stephanie outlined the story of working on the Hillary 2016 campaign as the first product manager for the campaign. She was brought on and asked to the lead a team to develop an app for Hillary supporters that would help fuel the campaign. And she was left to her own devices to figure out what that app would include. Being a gamer herself and design enthusiast, Stephanie decided to put her game mechanics to work and build out an app that would encourage active engagement by supporters. The principles that Stephanie outlined along the way left me with some awesome takeaways for one of our current projects and I think they’re worth sharing here.

1. Low barrier to entry – The Hillary 2016 app was designed to replicate the physical experience of a campaign office in the digital world. She made it super easy to get started using the app — supporters could log in and get points (redeemable for rewards) just by watering the office plant.

2. You can’t slap a game on it later – Stephanie’s team designed the scaffolding of the app from the ground up. She didn’t take a content app (like the Obama Campaign App) and try to slap game mechanics on it. She designed the active use behaviors she hoped for into the game from the beginning.

3. Define a clear game play loop – The entire game was designed around challenges that would start simple and get harder as you go. Stephanie’s team uncovered the insight that someone who just liked a Facebook Hillary post isn’t ready to go door-to-door encouraging neighbors to vote. She used this insight to create milestones along that journey that she could use to build confidence through rewards and feedback.

4. Have a great FTU – Along with a low barrier to entry, Stephanie talked about building a guided tour FTU experience to show the user around the campaign office for the first time. She took it one step further by making each task in the tour count toward the users' challenge, inherently building confidence in the first step.

5. Love your free loader! – Any time you make an app free, you will have users that never convert to paid. But Stephanie emphasized the importance of keeping these folks happy because you never know when they might be triggered to recommend or upgrade through your app. In this case, the campaign office had a dog, and you could redeem your rewards for digital collars, treats, and toys.

6. Look for the Z factor – In game design, a Z factor is another dimension of the reward system that doesn’t follow the standard game play challenge reward loop. In Stephanie’s game, the Z factor was hidden badges that you could be awarded as you played. These badges weren’t obvious rewards in the app, but you could discover them in settings letter and be surprised by what you’d achieved.

Stephanie’s talk was an excellent case study in game design and a great inspiration to some of the work that I’m currently doing at Intuit. I can’t wait to get started putting these principles to work!

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LEVERAGE YOUR UNIQUENESS: DON’T STICK OUT, STAND OUT

PANEL TALK

I’ve written before about Design Superpowers and how leveraging the strengths of each individual to build high-performing teams not only supports a better team environment, but leads to better work. So I was super excited to attend this panel to hear the latest thinking about leveraging each individual’s unique qualities. Each panelist shared their own personal uniqueness, some of the qualities that made it great, and also how it cast a shadow. The one that really resonated with me was Mariam’s story about her strength as a Truth Fairy. She talked about how she was not afraid of authority and always spoke the truth exactly how she saw it. For a long time, it led to great outcomes and getting great work done. Eventually, though, people started to become terrified of her, and a mentor gave her feedback that people didn’t want to work with her because she was too intense. Over time, she realized that she needed to be able to still speak the truth but in a less intense way, so she began practicing new behaviors like asking permission before telling people difficult truths.

As a leader and manager, I always find it difficult to give constructive feedback because, let’s face it, no one wants to hear that something isn’t going well. And I’m always so relieved when someone on my team brings the feedback to me before I ever have to give it to them. It’s so much easier if they realize it themselves. But the reality is that people are held back from growth the most when they don’t realize that something isn’t working. And for a team and an individual to be successful, it’s critical to share that feedback early and often. Mariam’s story provided practical ways to couch tough feedback while still telling the truth and remaining authentic. As I continue to grow with and learn from my team, I’m excited to challenge myself to practice these behaviors even more!

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SUMMARY

I’ve been to a lot of conferences, and I’ve found that it’s pretty easy to be disappointed when you’re taking time away from family and work—either because the content isn’t top-notch or the design of the actual event is lackluster. But Grace Hopper delivered on both. What I loved most was that it’s just an unapologetic celebration of women in tech—what we’ve accomplished so far and inspiration for our future. That somehow took the pressure off the speakers and attendees. It allowed me to relax, open my mind, and be inspired by small moments of learning and take away little nuggets of learning. I’d highly recommend Grace Hopper for the early career tech entrepreneur. It’s a fabulous opportunity to network, learn, and drop off a few resumes at the career fair.

Sofa Prototyping

Sofa Prototyping

WHY FIDELITY MATTERS

By Kylie Tuosto

Recently I moved into a new house. We’re still unpacking and getting settled, but it’s starting to feel like home. Our next big project is furniture for the living room. Our current furniture has served us well, but it doesn’t work in the new space. If you have a spouse, you know that the process of agreeing and deciding on these things is never easy.

My husband and I both work in UX, so our first instinct was to prototype different configurations for our new living space. (Sometimes our home life feels like it’s part of an episode of Silicon Valley. All we’re missing is Jared with the post-it notes and scrum board.) We know the style and color we want, but we haven’t decided on a configuration. On that front, we still have lots of questions. Do we want a sitting room for conversation or an entertainment area for lounging and watching TV? Should we optimize for maximum seating or open space? Do we want the area to feel cozy and full or light and open? On top of that, we both feel pressure to get it right the first time. Years ago, we ordered furniture that we wound up having to return. It was a huge hassle, and neither of us wants to go through that again. With so many decisions and the pressure to get them right, we took a Sunday morning to prototype floorplans with blue painters tape.

Different questions require different types of prototypes. And that’s why it’s so important not to let the fidelity of your prototype get ahead of your question. We thought we knew that we wanted a large sofa or sectional, so the question we were asking was, “What size do we want for this space?” With that certainty, we jumped right into a high-fidelity, higher-cost method of prototyping (peeling blue painters tape off the floor does take time). But we quickly realized that the question was actually “What configuration makes the most sense for this space?” From our sticky note sketches, we decided that two of the ten options balanced our requirements. And we were able to quickly prototype those two options—not with painters tape, but with elements of the furniture we already had.

So when you’re feeling stuck or disagreeing—check yourself. Are you asking the right questions? Is your prototyping fidelity too high or too low to answer those questions? With the right questions and the right prototype to test them, you’ll uncover all the answers you need.

Here's what we chose in case you're curious. York sofa by Room & Board.

Getting tactical felt great. As is typical with most design solutions, we jumped straight to our favorite one (a standard sofa with a chaise) and started outlining it on the floor. My husband looked up the measurements while I started taping it out on the floor. That option turned out to be way too small and hardly filled up the space. So we tried another option (a sectional), and that led to a whole new set of questions. Should it be up right against the wall? Would it extend too far into the dining area? Will the corner of the room have enough light? This is where we got stuck. We spent an hour arguing and getting frustrated, pulling up tape and then moving it.

Then I pulled out a pen and some sticky notes. From a bird’s-eye view, I started sketching the options we’d discussed. That turned the conversation from argument to options. What else could we do? How else could we configure it? What if it wasn’t a sectional? What if we had two side chairs or a love seat and a sofa? What started as an argument turned into a brainstorm. Before we knew it, we had 10 options instead of just two.

Trying out two different sizes and a make-shift chaise lounge.

From those 10, we realized there were more important questions we needed to answer than whether we wanted 93” or 105”? The conversation went back to “What’s the focal point of the room?” and “How much seating do we really want?” To our surprise, we agreed on those two points. So we chose two options, took them to the next round of prototyping, and quickly narrowed to one we both felt good about.

Later that afternoon, it struck me that disagreement on minute details can sometimes eclipse agreement on most everything else. As designers, we all know how important it is to make things tangible. And when we find ourselves in difficult conversations, we know the best way to unblock ourselves and our teams is to start making it real. But this example illustrates a more nuanced point than just that. It’s not just that prototyping is good. It’s that the aim of prototyping is to answer unanswered questions. And sometimes our questions are big and sometimes they’re small. Sometimes our questions are “What are customers trying to do?” and sometimes they’re “Will customers understand the options if we present them in a dropdown?”

The aim of prototyping is to answer unanswered questions. And different questions require different types of prototypes.

Ten different configurations and an annoyed puppy in the background.

Different questions require different types of prototypes. And that’s why it’s so important not to let the fidelity of your prototype get ahead of your question. We thought we knew that we wanted a large sofa or sectional, so the question we were asking was, “What size do we want for this space?” With that certainty, we jumped right into a high-fidelity, higher-cost method of prototyping (peeling blue painters tape off the floor does take time). But we quickly realized that the question was actually “What configuration makes the most sense for this space?” From our sticky note sketches, we decided that two of the ten options balanced our requirements. And we were able to quickly prototype those two options—not with painters tape, but with elements of the furniture we already had.

So when you’re feeling stuck or disagreeing—check yourself. Are you asking the right questions? Is your prototyping fidelity too high or too low to answer those questions? With the right questions and the right prototype to test them, you’ll uncover all the answers you need.

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UX Strat

Highlights & Sketchnotes from UX Strat

by Kylie Tuosto

This year, I was lucky enough to both attend and present a workshop at UX Strat in Providence, Rhode Island. UX Strat focuses on experience design strategy and it showed in the seasoned attendees and design leaders presenting on stage. If you're curious, check out my workshop, 3 Frameworks for Designing Onboarding Experiences. After three eventful days, here are my key takeaways:

AIMING FOR EXCELLENCE

One of my favorite parts of attending conferences is that it's an opportunity to peer outside of my day-to-day bubble and see the design world with fresh eyes. At Intuit, we're laser focused on solving big customer problems. It's literally the air we breathe. So I found myself surprised and delighted by Beverly May's talk about UX Awards and how they measure success and crown the award winners.

Beverly outlined in quite extensive detail the criteria that judges use to award winners. And not surprisingly, winning submissions have many things in common like: being intuitive and being simple. But the one that stood out to me most was that winners intentionally aimed to do award-winning work. It probably doesn't sound mind-blowing when you think about it. But coming from a culture of problem solving, it's very rare that we intentionally aim to deliver award-winning design. We don't explicitly set project goals like "win an award" or "file a patent". 

If you want to do great work, you have to explicitly aim to do great work.

But for a company that cares so deeply about innovation, it really hit me that we need to set the bar higher for our design innovation. When was the last time we raised the bar for what great looks like as an industry standard? When did we last contribute to the collective design community a new great pattern or UI component or animation technique? I'm excited to bring this mindset back to my team and see if we can't set our sights a bit higher moving forward.

JOBS TO BE DONE & MARKET DEFINITION

My last two years or so at Intuit have been focused on defining jobs-to-be-done for small businesses and helping our organization align around them in order to provide best-in-class innovation to our customers. Jim Kalbach's talk, User Experience as the New Strategic Advantage, was a great reminder of how powerful jobs-to-be-done are in redefining where we sit in the market. One example he gave was about CVS and their rebrand strategy around health. When they decided to focus on health, they had to stop selling cigarettes even though it's a quite lucrative business. What would it mean for QuickBooks, a digital checkbook (so to speak), to stop selling printable check stock? How will our latest innovations foreshadow where we should stop investing as a business?

His second example really hit home. At Intuit, we internally struggle with defining ourselves as an accounting solution vs. a run-your-business solution. There are, of course, pros and cons to both approaches. Jim's example was the railroad industry. Several companies saw themselves as railroad companies and continued to be in the railroad business even though technology was shifting towards cars. Successful companies saw themselves in the transportation business and were able to reinvent themselves as time and technology went on. Jim's talk reminded me how important it is not to let our current definitions constrain how we define our space. And by outlining durable customer-focused jobs-to-be-done, we can ensure that our businesses innovate beyond our existing market definition.

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Sketching 101 Workshop

Sketching 101

PM TRAINING WORKSHOP SEPTEMBER 15, 2016

By Kylie Tuosto

As a new crew of product managers joined the QuickBooks team, I was asked to give a workshop on sketching. It reminded me how important and powerful the skill of sketching is and how uncomfortable many still feel about it. I crafted this workshop to demystify sketching, provide some lightweight practice, and give some practical examples of different types of UX sketching.

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WHY SKETCHING

Sketching is the most primitive form of prototyping. With a sketch, we can communicate ideas as quickly as we can think of them. We can also use sketching to demonstrate the fidelity of an idea. When an idea or vision is nascent, communicating it with a sketch leaves lots of open room for interpretation and for other ideas to pile on. And finally, sketching allows us to communicate emotion that just doesn't come through with words alone. Human brains are wired to see faces in everything we look at and a sketch of an angry, happy, sad, or frustrated face can convey human emotion in a meaningful and visceral way.

PRACTICAL USES

Lots of UX designers use sketching to communicate concepts, storyboards, or rough wireframes. But sketching can be a tool in everyone's tool-belt and used strategically throughout key phases of the design process. When we're in early idea generation mode, sketching icons can be a great way to bring brainstorms to life and help ideas stand out. As we begin to understand how our solutions might fit into the daily lives of our customers, we can use illustrative sketching to tell a story. Storyboarding is a great way to bring emotion to life and can be used to outline both the current state of the world and the users' pain and the future state where our solution is making the world a magical place. With the customer's context in mind, vision sketching can help us bring our solution to life and align stakeholders to the rough scope of what we'd like to build. It's important at this phase to bring to life key moments of delight, and not to get caught up in the details of the interface itself. Once teams and stakeholders are bought into the vision, we can then begin to hone our solution with UI sketching. Sketching different layouts, interactions, navigation patterns and more can help us quickly explore a variety of possibilities without investing time in wire-framing.

SKETCHING PRACTICE

Sketching can feel intimidating at first. But, like anything else, it comes with practice. I pulled together several of my favorite sketching practice activities for folks who are just getting started. Practice drawing basic shapes, straight lines, and quick illustrations. Then move on to simple people, emotions, and facial expressions. With a few quick activities, you'll have all of the skills you need to sketch like a pro!

UX Strat

3 Frameworks for Designing Onboarding Experiences

UX STRAT WORKSHOP SEPTEMBER 15, 2016

By Kylie Tuosto & Stephen Gay

This year, we took our workshop to UX Strat in Providence Rhode Island where we got the opportunity to share our journey with talented designers, strategists, and leaders from across the country. 

WHAT WE LEARNED

We started our workshop by saying "No matter what you call it -- user on-boarding, first-time use, the out-of-box experience...." but it turns out that what we call it and how we frame it actually matters a lot. The UX Strat-ers have struggled with communicating the true power and impact first use can have if it's thought of more broadly as a learning journey. Jill even coined the new term "Through-boarding" as a way of emphasizing the fact that first use truly is a journey. Others even suggested that it's really more of a design approach that champions simplicity for the novice above all else.

We also learned that lots of designers are struggling with creating personalized onboarding experiences for different types of users or personas. I'm excited that we're experimenting with this topic now and will hopefully have great learnings to share for the next workshop!

RESOURCES

• Workshop: 3FrameworksForOnboarding_Workshop.pdf
• LinkedInGroup: https://www.linkedin.com/groups/7059078

San Francisco Design Week

Focus on First Use

SFDW DESIGN WORKSHOP June 3, 2016

By Kylie Tuosto & Stephen Gay

This year, for SF Design Week, we hosted a workshop focused on crafting delightful first use experiences. Our workshop included design principles for first use, core frameworks for thinking about delivering customer benefit, and several design patterns and exercises.

Overview

No matter what you call it -- user on-boarding, first-time use, the out-of-box experience -- a user's first experience with your product is critical. Designers need to ensure that people get up and running quickly and understand the benefits the product delivers. But what's the best way to do that? Come join a network of design leaders for a discussion of the fundamentals and best practices of delivering a memorable, engaging first-use experience.

Resources

• Worksheets: FocusOnFirstUse_Worksheets.pdf
• Slides: FocusOnFirstUse_Presentation.pdf
• LinkedInGroup: https://www.linkedin.com/groups/7059078

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Design Superpowers

Design Superpowers

HOW INDIVIDUAL STRENGTHS MAKE the whole team better

Illustrations by Shawna Kirby

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Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about superpowers. Not the comic book kind, but the kind that make designers brilliant at what they do. A few weeks ago, I read Liz Wiseman’s Multipliers, and now I’m taking her 30-day leadership challenge. It starts with “genius watching”—looking for people’s superpowers and identifying projects where they’ll thrive.

As I’ve been genius watching, I’ve realized that every designer has a superpower. More than a strength, your superpower is the combination of your design skills and the way you naturally approach problem solving. Take some top-notch customer empathy and presentation skills, combine them with a knack for analyzing detailed data, and you’ve got a superpower for storytelling.

Great things happen when you pair complementary superpowers and match them with the right kind of project. When I think of my UX team at Intuit, I can see why sometimes we click on a project and other times we don’t. Here are our superpowers:

These designers can’t help but have new ideas. The more, the better. Every meeting is a chance to bring new ones to the table and see what sticks. They thrive when it’s time to brainstorm because they see potential in every concept. And they excel at pushing boundaries to make sure that the team is innovating.

Actualizers are makers. Once they have an idea, they need to sketch, wireframe, or prototype it as fast as possible. Turning a concept into a usable product is what keeps them fulfilled. They care a lot about the details of an interface, but only as it relates to functionality. They don’t get hung up on stuff like beauty. They’re obsessed with making things that work, watching people test their prototypes, and fixing what’s broken.

Refiners can spot from across the room when something is one pixel off. They question every detail, making sure that designs are pixel-perfect and that nothing is purely for design's sake. They’re at home in the details, but that doesn’t mean they’re blind to the big picture. In fact, they shine when it’s time to evaluate all aspects of an interface and see if you’re telling a beautiful story or inspiring the right emotions.

Analyzers are thinkers. They pore through user research, craft experiments, and weigh design options. They’re excellent at evaluating designs and explaining rationale behind decisions. That usually makes them great at building pattern libraries and managing large UI ecosystems.

Connectors like to create frameworks and principles that enable others to design great interfaces. They see connections that others don’t, and they help teams turn those opportunities into meaningful design and business outcomes. They’re always thinking of the big picture, and they know how to bridge gaps in large organizations or complex systems.

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If you’re a designer, recognizing your superpower will help you spot projects where you’re likely to thrive and be fulfilled. An Analyzer, for instance, will probably enjoy projects that involve a lot of up-front research, competitive analysis, information architecture, or pattern library work. A Connector will love ambiguous business problems that require influencing others and building consensus with frameworks and design principles. Knowing your superpower doesn’t mean that you should avoid projects that take you outside your comfort zone. But it will help you anticipate the kinds of projects that will energize or challenge you.

If you’re a manager, understanding your team’s superpowers will help you see why some designers complement each other perfectly, while others seem to butt heads. Imagine, for example, that you pair a Generator and Analyzer to design a new feature. After some initial concepts, the Analyzer is ready to narrow. But the Generator naturally wants to keep going broad, suggesting new ideas and other possibilities. In situations like this, tug-of-war often ensues, slowing down the team and delaying timelines.

Now imagine what happens if you pair a Refiner and Actualizer on the same project. They brainstorm some concepts, and the Actualizer quickly builds them to see how they’d work. He shares them with the Refiner, who evaluates them with an eye on the details and the story they’re trying to tell. Her feedback helps the Actualizer narrow and improve, and they keep at it and deliver awesome results. When designers with complementary superpowers tackle the right kind of project, magical stuff happens. They’ll help each other excel and deliver exceptional results—whether it’s a research deck, new product feature, or lean experiment.

When designers with complementary superpowers tackle the right kind of project, magical stuff happens.

It’s important for managers to recognize the team’s superpowers and talk about them openly. That creates an environment where each designer feels valued for what they bring to the team. Even better, it establishes a way of communicating that prevents assumptions and defuses tension or conflict. When the Actualizer has a hard time generating new ideas, the team will know that it’s because she’s probably itching to build something, not because she lacks creativity. Superpowers can become a great shorthand when people give each other feedback.

The next time your team is hiring, think about how you might identify a candidate’s superpower and what kind you’re looking for. As an industry, we tend to focus on disciplines, skill sets, and general cultural fit when we hire. Those are important ways to screen candidates, for sure. But they don’t help us understand whether a candidate will thrive on a project or complement the rest of the team. By looking for superpowers, you’ll find the designer who will do both.

UX Week 2015

3 Things I Learned at UXWeek

by Kylie Tuosto

This year, my conference of choice was UX Week by Adaptive Path in San Francisco. Of all of the conferences I've been to so far, this one was definitely the best. Everything was well-designed, and the talks and workshops were great. After an eventful and exhausting few days, I went home with a few key takeaways. Here's what I learned:

EMOTION IS A JOURNEY, NOT A MOMENT

In her talk, “Dynamic Emotion,” Erin Hoffman gave an overview of how game designers think about designing for emotion. She outlined Eckman's 7 Basic Emotions, discussed Ralph Koster's Theory of Fun, and demonstrated how storytelling can bring a user (in her case, a gamer) through an emotional journey. Erin's talk reminded me of something important: instead of trying to design for a specific moment in time, we should think about designing for emotion as a journey through time. To create an emotional connection with users, we can't rely on one screen with a pithy statement or cute cat photo. These elements may give our application personality, but they don’t create an enduring emotional connection. Erin gave an example when she defined fun. As she defines it, fun is turning fear into happiness through surprise, and it’s important to amplify the negative emotions (pain or risk) in order to help the user value the positive ones. She definitely inspired me to rethink some of my current work!

USER EFFORT CAN ACTUALLY BE MEASURED?!

In his workshop, “From Insight to Interaction,” Giles Colborne gave an overview of the anatomy of a design opportunity and how to bring it to a measurable design outcome. Several of the activities were interesting, but one stood out for me. Giles walked us through Keystroke-Level Modeling, which helps you measure the real effort a user puts in to a specific interaction. His example: a type-ahead address field and zip code combo versus a series of dropdown menus. For each micro-interaction, we can measure the user's time spent mentally preparing (1.35 sec), keying (0.2 sec), homing (0.4 sec), pointing (1.1 sec), and waiting for a response (variable 0.1 sec – 10 sec). List each action, add the totals, and you’ve got a clear picture of the time it takes a user to accomplish a task with your interface. I've never evaluated a design this way, but I'll have this method in my back pocket the next time someone questions the efficiency of a certain UI element.

GREAT STORY TELLING IS IN THE DETAILS

In her workshop, “The Power of Story,” Christina Wodtke explained the arc of a story and how to use storytelling as a tool of influence in our day-to-day work. From motivation to incident, crisis to climax, and falling action to denouement, Christina's story arc was a good reminder that there are many elements to a good story. Most important, at least for me, was a concept that she called “transportation.” It’s the storyteller’s ability to engage the listener with vivid details and description. Introducing a character with details like a limp and eye-patch, for instance, gives him a backstory but without a long drawn out explanation. As designers, it's our job to bring customer insights to our teams and influence our organization’s leaders to prioritize their biggest problems. But in preparing  our work for sharing, we often leave out the details that make our customers most human—the old PC surrounded by clutter in the kitchen, for instance, which reminds us that there’s no such thing as work-life balance for a small business owner. This workshop was a great reminder of how essential those details are when you want to make your audience feel the emotions you felt listening to the customer.

Throughout the talks and workshops, I noted some great reference material that I'd recommend checking out if you're curious.

• Jeff Raskin - Humane Interface
• Nico Frijda - The Laws of Emotion
• Brinkman - Dealing with Difficult People
• Raph Koster - A Theory of Fun for Game Design

UX Night

Unlocking Emotion

by Kylie Tuosto

In July, I gave a talk at UX Night, an event put on by Cascade SF and hosted by Intuit. UX designers and enthusiasts from the bay area came to the Intuit campus for coaching sessions and two UX talks. It was a great opportunity to network with and learn from other designers.

In my talk, Unlocking Emotion, I add to Aaron Walter's work on Designing for Emotion, by providing examples of how we've applied emotional design to our process at Intuit. Through three examples of design projects and experiments, I show how thinking about our relationship with customers in a more human way lead to measurable business outcomes. And ultimately, I distill our learnings down into four key takeaways for incorporating designing for emotion into your own design process.

1. Simple isn't always better.

The age-old UX rule of simple being better doesn't necessarily apply when you're trying to build a relationship with your user. In fact, it can often take more steps to tell a good story, build a relationship, or demonstrate your app's personality.

2. Constraints are your friend.

Designers typically relish the opportunity to design without constraints. But when designing to build an emotional connection, it's important to find a common experience that can bridge the gap between you and your user. Consider leveraging time of day, an upcoming holiday season, or another theme as a constraint for your next brainstorm to get the creative juices flowing.

3. Language is key.

Language is our primary means of communication and without it, it's impossible to build a relationship with our users. Content design can make the difference between boring copy and a meaningful connection with the user. So it's important to go the extra mile when it comes to design iterations for content.

4. Timing is critical.

Human's have the unique ability to take inputs like time, emotions, and context into consideration when reacting to realtime conversation. When it comes to a user interface, however, we have to work extra hard up front to make sure that our interface doesn't violate these rules of interaction. Keeping timing in mind can save your app from feeling robotic!

In Designing for Emotion, Aaron Walter helps teams and companies think about building their application's personality as a way of connecting with their users on an emotional level. But building a personality at a big company isn't always easy. Individual work teams should feel empowered to experiment with personality in small experiences, measure the results, and scale success across the organization.

Here are links to the resources that inspired this talk:

• Aaron Walter - Designing for Emotion
• Stephen Anderson - Seductive Interaction Design
• Don Norman - Emotional Design
• Dan Saffer - Microinteractions

XCode Mobile Prototyping

XCode Mobile Prototyping

by Kylie Tuosto

In 2013, Apple introduced a new feature in Xcode called Storyboarding. At first, I had no idea what this meant or why it was even important, but my development team started getting their hands dirty right away. Being fairly new mobile design, I hadn't already established a prototyping tool of choice, so I wondered if working directly in Xcode for clickable prototypes would even be possible.

Once I got over the hump of downloading the tool and learning my way around the interface, I got comfortable enough to build a click-through or two and run them in the iPhone simulator. It was like magic! Seeing my prototypes come to life inside a realistic looking device was going to be huge for testing with remote participants.

But as I worked with the tool over time, I found hidden benefits around every corner: 

1. It gave my developers the opportunity to teach me what they work in every day.

2. I got to see where our code and assets were stored and how I could update them myself.

3. It changed the way I spec'd things like color values because I could see the input options that my dev team had to work with.

4. We were able to work closely to build hybrid (half-fake, half-real) prototypes to do proof of concept testing on important micro-interactions.

After using the tool myself and seeing how it brought our team closer together, I created this workshop to share what I learned across the company and to encourage other mobile designers to try out prototyping with Xcode.

Fireworks for Agile Teams

Fireworks for Agile Teams

by Kylie Tuosto

Now that interaction design is a widely recognized discipline, we have a plethora of tools and applications to choose from to manage our daily work. From Sketch, to Photoshop, to Fireworks, to Axure you can pretty much knock out a design in no time if you know what you're doing. At Intuit we need a system that not only works for interaction designers, but allows our fellow XD partners (like writers and researchers) and our product manager and developer partners to work as seamlessly as possible.

Since the interaction and visual design team uses Fireworks for all work-in-progress mocks and final assets, I crafted this workshop as a crash course for our cross-functional partners to learn how to use the tool. For writers, it eliminated the back-and-forth of storing final copy in text documents. For product managers, it eliminated unnecessary exports of assets/layers. For developers, it created instantaneous access to assets. And it empowered researchers to jump into the prototyping process and create click-throughs from existing mockups.

No matter what tools you use as a designer, it's important to bring your cross-functional teammates up to speed. They don't need to know how to do everything you do, but they do need a basic working knowledge of the tool so that they aren't alienated from the process or overly-reliant on you for things they could do themselves. Ultimately this workshop helped our entire team be more agile by blurring role boundaries and allowing everyone to get work done fast!