But let's be clear that UX is about sparking innovation. And how that's done is by putting users at the center. It's about user centered design. The methodology, that's what we practice as UX people. It's also about validation and metrics. You know that measuring that and understanding what that ramification is of a design decision is is important.
We use design thinking. Design thinking helps shake us from, you know, shake the fruit from the tree in the sense that it gives us empathy and that ability to innovate through very creative kind of ways and approaches. The key is to develop outside in design, right? And outside in design is a way of thinking based on data that you bring from the outside world, and you use that to inform what's inside.
You don't just make decisions inside your company and expect the world outside to buy into them. That's called crazy making, right? So a UX culture is really critical and outside in design can be a UX culture. I was really surprised back in I think it was around 24 when I saw that IBM changed the name of their group from the UK, the user centered design group to the outside in design group. And I thought, Well, that's a silly marketing thing.
Took me a year or two to realize that the language of that was really powerful because outside in is really easy to understand compared to user center design use or human centered design. You know, it doesn't make a lot of sense to people outside of the field, but outside in is like an attitude and it's like it's like saying, let's do empathy right now. For me, the important thing is that UX teams impact are ally and change,
and they do this in three ways by bringing in new ideas, by bringing in new insights, and by bringing in new directions. Right. And in under the new ideas bucket is identifying new markets, new products, new features. Very typical. We do that every time we do a field study for identifying that stuff. Now new insights or doing customer research, lowering your risk with user testing, we get insights into if we are designing the right thing by checking with users.
We do that because we're a UX consulting firm, so that's normal for us. But we're basically the best practice model of how you want your organization internally to be working, you know, which is through validation and outside in practices, new directions. So quick prototypes, culture prototyping will let you create new directions. And of course with UX UI design, you can, you know, mark stuff up with the tools. These days are incredible.
You can do pixel perfect type of designs if you want to. And of course, visual design to give you that sense of realism and to create these, you know, clickable prototypes, you can test that a lot of users think are real so you can validate new directions while you're building on these new ideas and these new insights. Now, some of the common UX techniques that you should be familiar with, it's really two buckets. It's really get design feedback and innovate or differentiate
If you're trying to get feedback, it's through usability testing or through heuristic evaluation, like an expert review. If you're trying to differentiate or innovate, you really need field studies you need and you don't get the personas from them. You really need to observe them and their culture. And of course, through rapid UI prototyping, that's kind of the bread and butter. Now, I would say most organizations you can decide where you're at, but most organizations have wire framing in their comfort
zone and maybe user testing, you know, and or maybe it's heuristic eval and wireframe is about lower quadrant there. But all four of these are normal techniques that a UX practitioner UX team should be practicing all the time. So usability testing is not a focus group, right? It's about watching, not actually asking users.
Heuristic evaluations follow standards and patterns. Right. So you're following best practices that have been established and that you know about from your own work. With users in a field study, you're exploring problem solving without your product bias. Very important. And in prototyping, it's about creating ideas quickly without business or technical biases. You know, it's about blue sky and it's not about following the technical constraints.
You because the thing about a wireframe, you can also throw it away really quickly and easily. There's no time wasted coding the daily types of things that UX people do, right? So conducting expert reviews, liaising with a business team or dev team, preparing a report or or getting ready for some user research. This is the kind of stuff that UX people do. Expert reviews give you a quick litmus test
if you are violating any best practices, any known issues and usability issues, and they are there to help you to give you direction or to quell internal debate. And they're quick and cheap and fast, except they don't have a user involved. So we'll get to that. On the more monthly activities lot like it does. Liaising with business teams is really important to keep in sync and that might be a stand up meeting as well
in agile organizations and when someone is preparing a UX report or getting ready, they're doing that because they're trying to validate a design or they're trying to get requirements validated up front through a field study or, you know, usability testing in the case of design feedback. So that's the day in the life in a monthly. You're conducting customer visits, you are liaising again
with the business team and then you're creating wireframes, right? Interaction designs and customer visits are there to help you listen, do the empathy validate. You might test prototypes so it could be user testing. So you've got a field study and a usability test. Those are two types of activities that UX team should be doing at all times. And you know, and wireframe and of course is something that everybody in the organization can do. For example, at Capital One, they introduced a culture of wire framing
so that everybody was using balsamic or, you know, the sketching program to mock up and visually communicate with colleagues. Now there's way too many people are doing UX that are are not being allowed or pushed to do user testing or user interviews. And it's really important to remember that good UX comes from user advocacy, customer contact, customer derived insights.
That's the whole spirit of outside in. And the bottom line is that UX teams are actually stronger with design thinking, with empathy, as their main process improvement approach. So design thinking and user centered design go hand in hand. They're pretty much the same thing. Design thinking just brings some very creative frame breaking ways to tackle a problem, to approach it, and to very rapidly prototype it.
It's kind of it's like user centered design for the 21st century in the sense that it helps you, you know, communicate and understand what exactly you're trying to break through and and have, you know, a design that resonates with customers.