User Needs

Product design is the process of creating new products that people can use. It's about solving problems and making life easier or more enjoyable through goods or services. Think of anything you use in your daily life: a phone, a chair, a video game. All these items were once just an idea that a product designer brought to life. In User Experience, Product design is about creating digital things that are easy to use, work well and look good by combining user needs with business goals.

It involves making the whole journey for users from understanding what they need to making prototypes, testing, improving, and finally launching the product. It's all about figuring out what users want and finding smart ways to give it to them.

As you're designing, it's so easy just to design for the people that you know and for the culture that you know.  However, cultures differ. Now, that's true of many aspects of the interface; no[t] least, though, the visual layout of an interface and the the visual elements. Some aspects are quite easy just to realize like language, others much, much more subtle.

You might have come across, there's two... well, actually there's three terms because some of these are almost the same thing, but two terms are particularly distinguished. One is localization and globalization. And you hear them used almost interchangeably and probably also with slight differences because different authors and people will use them slightly differently. So one thing is localization or internationalization. Although the latter probably only used in that sense. So localization is about taking an interface and making it appropriate

for a particular place. So you might change the interface style slightly. You certainly might change the language for it; whereas global – being globalized – is about saying, "Can I make something that works for everybody everywhere?" The latter sounds almost bound to fail and often does. But obviously, if you're trying to create something that's used across the whole global market, you have to try and do that. And typically you're doing a bit of each in each space.

You're both trying to design as many elements as possible so that they are globally relevant. They mean the same everywhere, or at least are understood everywhere. And some elements where you do localization, you will try and change them to make them more specific for the place. There's usually elements of both. But remembering that distinction, you need to think about both of those. The most obvious thing to think about here is just changing language. I mean, that's a fairly obvious thing and there's lots of tools to make that easy.

So if you have... whether it's menu names or labels, you might find this at the design stage or in the implementation technique, there's ways of creating effectively look-up tables that says this menu item instead of being just a name in the implementation, effectively has an idea or a way of representing it. And that can be looked up so that your menus change, your text changes and everything. Now that sounds like, "Yay, that's it!"

So what it is, is that it's not the end of the story, even for text. That's not the end of the story. Visit Finland sometime. If you've never visited Finland, it's a wonderful place to go. The signs are typically in Finnish and in Swedish. Both languages are used. I think almost equal amounts of people using both languages, their first language, and most will know both. But because of this, if you look at those lines, they're in two languages.

The Finnish line is usually about twice as large as the Swedish piece of text. Because Finnish uses a lot of double letters to represent quite subtle differences in sound. Vowels get lengthened by doubling them. Consonants get separated. So I'll probably pronounce this wrong. But R-I-T-T-A, is not "Rita" which would be R-I-T-A . But "Reet-ta". Actually, I overemphasized that, but "Reetta". There's a bit of a stop.

And I said I won't be doing it right. Talk to a Finnish person, they will help put you right on this. But because of this, the text is twice as long. But of course, suddenly the text isn't going to fit in. So it's going to overlap with icons. It's going to scroll when it shouldn't scroll. So even something like the size of the field becomes something that can change. And then, of course, there's things like left-to-right order. Finnish and Swedish both are left-to-right languages. But if you were going to have, switch something say to an Arabic script from a European script,

then you would end up with things going the other way round. So it's more than just changing the names. You have to think much more deeply than that. But again, it's more than the language. There are all sorts of cultural assumptions that we build into things. The majority of interfaces are built... actually the majority are built not even in just one part of the world, but in one country, you know the dominance... I'm not sure what percentage,

but a vast proportion will be built, not just in the USA, but in the West Coast of the USA. Certainly there is a European/US/American centeredness to the way in which things are designed. It's so easy to design things caught in those cultures without realizing that there are other ways of seeing the world. That changes the assumptions, the sort of values that are built into an interaction.

The meanings of symbols, so ticks and crosses, mostly will get understood and I do continue to use them. However, certainly in the UK, but even not universally across Europe. But in the UK, a tick is a positive symbol, means "this is good". A cross is a "blah, that's bad". However, there are lots of parts of the world where both mean the same. They're both a check. And in fact, weirdly, if I vote in the UK,

I put a cross, not against the candidate I don't want but against the candidate I do want. So even in the UK a cross can mean the same as a tick. You know – and colors, I said I do redundantly code often my crosses with red and my ticks with green because red in my culture is negative; I mean, it's not negative; I like red (inaudible) – but it has that sense of being a red mark is a bad mark.

There are many cultures where red is the positive color. And actually it is a positive color in other ways in Western culture. But particularly that idea of the red cross that you get on your schoolwork; this is not the same everywhere. So, you really have to have quite a subtle understanding of these things. Now, the thing is, you probably won't. And so, this is where if you are taking something into a different culture, you almost certainly will need somebody who quite richly understands that culture.

So you design things so that they are possible for somebody to come in and do those adjustments because you probably may well not be in the position to be able to do that yourself.

When we hear the term 'user experience', we tend to  think in terms of screens, websites, mobile apps or other smart technology. But that's just the tip of the iceberg. The Elements of User Experience In the book *The Elements of User Experience:  User-Centered Design for the Web*, Jesse James Garrett outlines five elements of user experience: strategy, scope, structure, skeleton and surface.

Before beginning any work, product teams conduct  user research to understand who their target users are and what the users' needs are. It's important for teams to be aware of the business's goals and objectives because if the product does not return  a profit, the business will not be sustainable. The strategy helps you identify *who you are designing for and why*. The scope defines *what you will be designing*. Designers work collaboratively with all stakeholders to identify

what features and functionality will help address user needs. While the *scope defines what a solution does*, the *structure defines how the product or solution works*. You create the blueprint of how the system works behind the scenes and how people, the users, interact with it. You then create the *skeleton*, laying out the first interfaces of the solution and creating the first tangible elements of user experience.

And, finally, you flesh out the skeleton to create  the most visible element – the *surface* that your users see and interact with. Much like an iceberg, there is so much more to UX than meets the eye. And, just as in the case of an iceberg, each element of UX above and below the surface affects the other. Decisions taken at one plane can cascade up or  down the layers. For example, if you introduce a new feature, a change in the scope, it will impact all the elements above.

You might even find users interacting with your product in unexpected ways, prompting you to rethink your strategy. There will likely be unknown considerations that  emerge later, which might impact the experience. For example, if the team encounters technical  challenges or budgetary constraints during development, they might have to revisit some design  decisions. User experience design is concerned with *all* the decisions leading up to the surface,

from the most abstract to the most concrete, from the known to the unknown, and continues  to evolve throughout the life of the product.

In this five-step process to designing for mobile, I want to point out some of the aspects or steps that are so critical and tell you why they're so critical and explain a little bit about how they work. The first step, *assess*, is requirements, your internal priorities,

your business objectives. And so – that's for step one – the last step, step five, should be familiar as well, it's *sketch*. So, we'll also add sketch, review, refine and have that sort of iteration. But it's what happens in steps two, three and four that are really, really critical and make the difference in a mobile UX design that outperforms and differentiates and creates a very, very deep bond with users and in a way that what we call *user adoption*.

So, step two, *understand* user needs, and that means understand their context of use, problems they're trying to solve, their tasks, their goals, all the things that make up personas, and then make up journey maps. Once you do that very crucial user research step, it's step three where you *define* your value proposition and your emotional value. So, emotional value is what users get from the app so that you essentially support their tasks,

you support their goals, you support a social aspect of their experience. You help them by giving them features and functionality that they find useful. Maybe you surprise them pleasantly, delight them. Understand their cultural needs. Understand their safety needs. Whatever it might be, you define that value proposition,

but also emotional value, that chance to connect with a user in such a way that they feel at home with your app or mobile content. So, that's step three. Step four is where you take what you've learned from user needs and from defining your value proposition and your emotional value, and you then *create a UX strategy* that's like a blueprint for when you get to sketching in the next step.

So, a differentiated UX strategy is something that makes your app special and connects with your users in a special way. You can't just generate this internally. A lot of product folks have pressure in their jobs, product managers, to differentiate, and they typically rely on market research, focus groups, surveys, that kind of thing. That's market research. And so, what we're talking about is if you get into the behavior of your users,

if you really dig into their contextual experience and what surrounds it and what they do as they go through their day and their lives and how they live it – if you get into that, then you can understand their needs, define their value proposition and their emotional value in a way that helps you differentiate. So, it might be how you approach the design, what features you drop

or that you add. In other words, the priorities and the good decision-making is what all of UX is about. It's about good design decision-making, And this five-step process is based on a very powerful and proven approach that I've taken in my work over the years, and this is basically the way to do it.

Personas are one of these things that gets used  in very, very many ways during design. A persona is a rich description or description of a user. It's similar in some sense, to an example user, somebody that you're going to talk about. But it usually is not a particular person. And that's for sometimes reasons of confidentiality.

Sometimes it's you want to capture about something slightly more generic than the actual user you talked to, that in some ways represents the group, but is still particular enough  that you can think about it. Typically, not one persona, you usually have  several personas. We'll come back to that.   You use this persona description, it's  a description of the example user,   in many ways during design. You can ask  questions like "What would Betty think?"

You've got a persona called / about Betty, "what would  Betty think" or "how would Betty feel about using this aspect of the system? Would Betty understand this? Would Betty be able to do this?"   So we can ask questions by letting those personas  seed our understanding, seed our imagination.   Crucially, the details matter here. You want to make the persona real. So what we want to do is take this  persona, an image of this example user,   and to be able to ask those questions: will  this user..., what will this user feel about  

this feature? How will this user use this system  in order to be able to answer those questions?  It needs to seed your imagination well enough.  It has to feel realistic enough to be able to   do that. Just like when you read that book  and you think, no, that person would never   do that. You've understood them well enough that  certain things they do feel out of character. You need to understand the character of your  persona.

For different purposes actually, different levels of detail are useful. So I'm going to sort of start off with   the least and go to the ones which I think are  actually seeding that rich understanding.  So at one level, you can just look at your  demographics. You're going to design for warehouse   managers, maybe. For a new system that goes into  warehouses. So you look at the demographics, you might have looked at their age. It might be that on the whole that they're   older. Because they're managers, the older end. So  there's only a small number under 35. The majority  

are over 35, about 50:50 between those who are in  the sort of slightly more in the older group.  So that's about 40 percent of them in  the 35 to 50 age group, and about half   of them are older than 50. So on the whole  list, sort of towards the older end group.   About two thirds are male, a third are female.  Education wise, the vast majority have not got   any sort of further education beyond school. About 57 percent we've got here are school.  

We've got a certain number that have done basic  college level education and a small percentage   of warehouse managers have had a university  education. That's some sense of things.   These are invented, by the way, I should say, not  real demographics. Did have children at home. The people, you might have got this from some big  survey or from existing knowledge of the world,   or by asking the employer that you're  dealing with to give you the statistics.   So perhaps about a third of them have got children  at home, but two thirds of them haven't. 

And what about disability? About three  quarters of them have no disability whatsoever.   About one quarter do. Actually, in society  it's surprising. You might... if you think   of disability in terms of major disability,  perhaps having a missing limb or being   completely blind or completely deaf. Then you start relatively small numbers.   But if you include a wider range of disabilities,  typically it gets bigger. And in fact can become  

very, very large. If you include, for  instance, using corrective vision with   glasses, then actually these numbers  will start to look quite small.  Within this, in whatever definition they've  used, they've got up to about 17 percent with   the minor disability and about eight percent  with a major disability. So far, so good. So now, can you design for a  warehouse manager given this? Well,  

you might start to fill in examples for  yourself. So you might sort of almost like   start to create the next stage. But it's hard. So let's look at a particular user profile. Again,   this could be a real user, but let's imagine  this as a typical user in a way. So here's Betty Wilcox. So she's here as a typical user.  And in fact, actually, if you look at her, she's   on the younger end. She's not necessarily the  only one, you usually have several of these.  And she's female as well. Notice only up to  a third of our warehouse ones are female. So  

she's not necessarily the center one. We'll come  back to this in a moment, but she is an example user. One example user. This might have been  based on somebody you've talked to, and then you're sort of abstracting in a way. So, Betty Wilcox. Thirty-seven, female, college education. She's got children at home, one's  seven, one's 15. And she does have a minor disability, which is in her left hand. And  it's there's slight problem in her left hand.  

Can you design, can you ask, what would Betty  think? You're probably doing a bit better at   this now. You start to picture her a bit. And you've probably got almost like an image   in your head as we talk about  Betty. So it's getting better.   So now let's go to a different one. You know, this  is now Betty. Betty is 37 years old. She's been a   warehouse manager for five years and worked for  Simpkins Brothers Engineering for 12 years. She didn't go to university, but has studied  in her evenings for a business diploma.

That was her college education. She has two children  aged 15 and seven and does not like to work late.   Presumably because we put it  here, because of the children.   But she did part of an introductory  in-house computer course some years ago.   But it was interrupted when she was promoted,  and she can no longer afford to take the time.   Her vision is perfect, but a left hand movement,  remember from the description a moment ago,   is slightly restricted because of an  industrial accident three years ago. 

She's enthusiastic about her work and  is happy to delegate responsibility   and to take suggestions from the staff. Actually,  we're seeing somebody who is confident in her   overall abilities, otherwise she wouldn't  be somebody happy to take suggestions.   If you're not competent, you don't. We sort of see that, we start to see a   picture of her. However, she does feel threatened  – simply, she is confident in general – but she   does feel threatened by the introduction of  yet another computer system. The third since she's been working at Simpkins Brothers. So now, when we think about that, do you have a better vision of Betty?

Do you feel you might be in a position to start talking about..."Yeah, if I design this sort of feature, is this something that's going to work with Betty? Or not"? By having a rich  description, she becomes a person. Not just a set of demographics. But then you  can start to think about the person, design for the person and use that rich human understanding you have in order to create a better design.

So it's an example of a user, as I said not  necessarily a real one. You're going to use this as a surrogate and these details really, really matter. You want Betty to be real to   you as a designer, real to your clients as you  talk to them. Real to your fellow designers  as you talk to them. To the developers around  you, to different people. Crucially, though, I've already said this, there's not just one. You usually want several different personas because the users you deal with are all different.

You know, we're all different. And the user group – it's warehouse managers – it's quite a relatively narrow and constrained set of users, will all be different. Now, you can't have one persona for every user,   but you can try and spread. You can look at the range of users.   So now that demographics picture I gave,  we actually said, what's their level of education? That's one way to look at that range. You can think of it as a broad range of users.

The obvious thing to do is to have the absolute  average user. So you almost look for them:   "What's the typical thing? Yes, okay." In my  original demographics the majority have no college   education, they were school educated only. We said that was your education one,   two thirds of them male – I'd have gone for  somebody else who was male. Go down the list, bang   in the centre. Now it's useful to have that center  one, but if that's the only person you deal with,   you're not thinking about the range. But certainly you want people who in some sense  

cover the range, that give you a sense  of the different kinds of people.   And hopefully also by having several, reminds  you constantly that they are a range and have   a different set of characteristics, that there  are different people, not just a generic user.

I wanted to just spend a little bit of time on the *user journey*. So, we can see how important user research is to creating really compelling value propositions and creating value for organizations that are trying to use service design to innovate, improve, streamline and smooth out. Well, there's nothing better to tackle that with than the user journey.

I wanted to just spend a little bit of time on this technique in case you didn't have that much experience with it or maybe you were doing journeys in a way that was different to the way I'm going to present to you. At least, I just wanted to share a template with you that can give you better access to what you're looking for. For me, now, a journey is something that you *build on*. So, first off it's your *customer journey*.

And on that is your service blueprint. And remember that the journey is going to reveal those cross-channel like, say, *breakpoints*, *pain points*, *disconnects* that you can map in the different *swim lane diagrams* – is the official term for a journey map. So, it comes from that – these swim lanes. And so, you'll have like maybe your channels here – you know – you'll have your user tasks here, pains and gains, or you can just have positive (+) or negative (-).

And I tend to change my user journeys, try and improve them, try and improve them. One of the problems that I find with journey maps – and they became very popular, I think around 2010, maybe, was the heyday of user journeys – 2010 / 2012, maybe. It was all about this beautiful big visualization. Let's be clear: A customer journey map is *not* about impressing your team

with really cool, big swim diagram visualizations with tons of little icons. It's a document like all deliverables in a human-centered design perspective. It should work for the internal teams that are using it as a decision-making document *as well*. The thing about the journey map that's particularly of value to the service designer is that it's happening across time

or across stages or across goals. So, the stages of, say, the life cycle – you know – you might have Research, Compare, Purchase, then the Return shopping. In other words, it's not just the purchase. A lot of conversion optimization and approaches to selling online just focus on this part here: the compare and purchase, or the funnel – if you will – the purchase funnel. And I think it's important to have the acquisition as much as the retention.

This is the conversion here. So, these two steps are the conversion steps. It's important to have *all* those steps represented. *Happy / sad moments* – you can have a little smiley face; *disconnects and breaks* – you know – so that you're like: "Ah! This is a break right here. They're on their phone, and they're researching, but the site's not responsive or it's *partially* responsive. And then, compare – when they go to compare, it only allows three items. So, it's like "Ohh!" – and then we have a quote from the user going:

"Why does this only allow (imitated mumbling)?!" – you know – something communicating the pain point. The other thing it's going to have is your reflections from your ethnography, from your personas. It's going to have those real-world contexts, basically. Instead of basically making it up and doing it internally, you're going to base it on user data. You'll also want to have *recommendations*. So, down here at the bottom you can have a list of recommendations

as well. This is an example of a journey map we created. And you can see the touch points we've added along the way. So, we have these different stages. We've got this – as the user walks through. So, we have Pre-apply, Apply, Post-apply. This is an online application journey. And we have the various channels that are occurring there. We've got the pain points represented. And the steps are:

Discover, Research, Apply, Manage and Dream. Discover was important because a lot of people didn't know that the offers were there. This is for getting an account. And basically the value proposition is you're going to have these offers – targeted offers – sent to you. So, the key is to find out how people are currently applying and at what stage makes sense to offer them these upsells, basically. And that's the value add that's being offered here.

User stories are the actual tasks that are written on the cards or sticky notes in your Kanban board. In Agile methodologies, these are often small  enough that they can be done in a matter of hours or sometimes a day or two. Many teams write them from the perspective of the user. So, you may end up seeing things in the form of: 'As a _____ I would like to _____ so that I can _____.' To fill in those blanks just a little bit,

'As a *user type* I would like *some goal or action*, so that *outcome*.' And an actually useful example would be something like: 'As a *job applicant* I would like to save my *resume information*, so *I don't have to re-enter  it every time I apply for a new job*. The idea here is that the engineer who is implementing this user story knows not just what the *description of the feature* is but *what the outcome is  and why the user would want that outcome*. Sometimes the user stories are accompanied  by various types of design deliverables.

Also, some teams don't phrase the user stories in exactly this way. You're going to have to adopt the patterns of your team or work with them to come up with something that works better for you.

Do you know this feeling? You have a plane to catch. You arrive at the airport. Well in advance. But you still get stressed. Why is that? Designed with empathy. Bad design versus good design. Let's look into an example of bad design. We can learn from one small screen.

Yes, it's easy to get an overview of one screen, but look close. The screen only shows one out of three schools. That means that the passengers have to wait for up to 4 minutes to find out where to check in. The airport has many small screenings, but they all show the same small bits of information. This is all because of a lack of empathy. Now, let's empathize with all users airport passengers,

their overall need to reach their destination. Their goal? Catch their plane in time. Do they have lots of time when they have a plane to catch? Can they get a quick overview of their flights? Do they feel calm and relaxed while waiting for the information which is relevant to them? And by the way, do they all speak Italian? You guessed it, No. Okay. This may sound hilarious to you, but some designers

actually designed it. Galileo Galilei, because it is the main airport in Tuscany, Italy. They designed an airport where it's difficult to achieve the goal to catch your planes. And it's a stressful experience, isn't it? By default. Stressful to board a plane? No. As a designer, you can empathize with your users needs and the context they're in.

Empathize to understand which goals they want to achieve. Help them achieve them in the best way by using the insights you've gained through empathy. That means that you can help your users airport passengers fulfill their need to travel to their desired destination, obtain their goal to catch their plane on time. They have a lot of steps to go through in order to catch that plane. Design the experience so each step is as quick and smooth as possible

so the passengers stay all become calm and relaxed. The well, the designers did their job in Dubai International Airport, despite being the world's busiest airport. The passenger experience here is miles better than in Galileo Galilei. One big screen gives the passengers instant access to the information they need. Passengers can continue to check in right away. This process is fast and creates a calm experience,

well-organized queues help passengers stay calm and once. Let's see how poorly they designed queues. It's. Dubai airport is efficient and stress free. But can you, as a designer, make it fun and relaxing as well? Yes.

In cheerful airport in Amsterdam, the designers turned parts of the airport into a relaxing living room with sofas and big piano chairs. The designers help passengers attain a calm and happy feeling by adding elements from nature. They give kids the opportunity to play. Adults can get some revitalizing massage. You can go outside to enjoy a bit of real nature.

You can help create green energy while you walk out the door. Charge your mobile, buy your own human power while getting some exercise. Use empathy in your design process to see the world through other people's eyes. To see what they see, feel what they feel and experience things as they do. This is not only about airport design. You can use these insights when you design

apps, websites, services, household machines, or whatever you're designing. Interaction Design Foundation.

Cross-functional teams, unlike silos, have all the people necessary to build a specific thing together. Let's look at an example. Imagine you're on a team that is supposed to build the onboarding flow for a new app that helps connect job applicants with jobs. You can't build the whole thing with just designers. Or with just engineers, for that matter. I mean, you probably could do it with just engineers, but it's a terrible idea.

A cross-functional team for this onboarding work might include a few engineers, perhaps some for the front end and some for the back end. Might include a designer, a researcher, a product owner or manager, maybe a content writer or a marketing person. In an ideal world, all of these folks would only work on this particular team. In the real world, where we actually live, sometimes folks are on a couple of different teams and some specialists may be brought in to consult. For example, if the team needed help from the legal department to explain some of the ramifications of a specific decision,

a cross-functional team would have a dedicated legal expert they could go to. But that legal expert might also work with lots of other teams. In agile environments, the cross-functional team generally sits together or if remote, has some sort of shared workspace. They all go to the required team meetings. They understand the goal of the team and the users. They're experts, or they soon become experts, on that onboarding flow. Contrast this to how it might be done in a siloed environment. In that case, you might have different people assigned to the team depending on need, which can seem really flexible.

Until you realize that you end up with five different designers working on the project all at different times and they all have to be brought up to speed and they don't really understand why the other designers made the decisions that they did. Same with the engineers. And do not get me started on legal. Silo teams tend to rely more on documentation that gets handed between groups. And this can lead to a waterfall project where project managers or product managers work on something for a while to create requirements, which they then hand off to designers who work on designs for a while

and then they pass the deliverables on to engineering, who immediately insists that none of this will work and demands to know why they weren't brought in earlier for consultation. You get it. By working in cross-functional teams instead, the people embedded on the project get comfortable with each other. They know how the team works and can make improvements to it. They come to deeply understand their particular users and their metrics. They actually bring engineering and even design and research into the decision making process early to avoid the scenario I described above.