Software complexity and user expectations of technology have never been higher. Meanwhile our ability to guarantee we are building the right product features and deliver them on time has never been more uncertain. How do you decide what the user really wants? How do you design that experience and make sure it actually meets their expectations. How do you tell the difference between the minimal-viable-product, and the minimal-desirable-product? In this session I will give you the tools to bootstrap your own UX design process within your team, and help remove uncertainty from your product design decisions. This session will be useful to anyone who wants to learn how to approach improving the usability of their products through simple exercises and processes. By the end of the session you will have the tools you need for your products to survive our ever changing technological landscape.

1. the
UX Survival Guide
Tools & techniques for creating a better
user experience and reducing uncertainty

2. Nicholas McClay
Usability Team Lead @ Forever
Hi, I’m…
@nickmcclay

3. My job in a
nutshell:
Determine what our users really want
Find out why we haven’t given them that
Do what is needed to change that

4. Shaolin Kung-Fu

5. Krav Maga

6. Certified Bad Asses

7. We need the Krav
Maga of UX…

8. Building a survival kit

9. Building a UX survival kit

10. Triangle of Uncertainty
Not
Certain
Very
Certain
Some
Certainty

11. Let’s start here
Not
Certain
Very
Certain
Some
Certainty

12. Starts with People
Most uncertainty

13. List of things that
aren’t people
Technology or infrastructure
Business concerns or ideology
Features or products

14. Need Validation

15. People have problems

16. Examples of problems
I want to make more money.
I want to be less stressed.
I want to save time.
Terrible Examples of problems, too generic

17. Real examples of
problems
I never graduated high school and
can’t find steady employment.
I haven’t taken a vacation in 2 years
and my marriage is falling apart.
I can’t do the things I used to love
because raising my child is
absorbing all my time.

18. –Tim Ferris
“Creating demand is hard. Filling demand
is easier. Don't create a product, then seek
someone to sell it to. Find a market -
define your customers - then find or
develop a product for them.”

19. Need Validation Storyboard

23. Your Problem Our Solution Your Result
Name of Concept
Storyboard Template

24. Goals of Need Validation
Storyboards
• Do they recognize the problem?
• Do they have boundaries/concerns around
your solution?
• Is there urgency or interest in the solution?

25. Market Research

26. Like…
business
stuff?

27. Social Proof Bias
When undecided, we tend to follow the patterns
of others

28. 2 Types of Market
Research
Market
Reports
Competitive
Research

29. What to look for in
market reports:
Size of the target market
Demographics of the target market
Emerging patterns and trends
Major competitors and influencers

30. Where to find market
reports?
Consumer Reports
Marketing Intelligence Agencies
Qualified thought leader blogs/articles

34. Competitive
Research

35. Feature Gap Analysis
What products do relative to the competition

36. Market Space Analysis
Where products are positioned in the market
relative to each other

37. Heuristic Product Analysis
Where products are positioned in the market
relative to each other
• Focused on curating the best blog content
into standalone e-books
• re-inventing the self-publishing space
• Buy a book - gift 4 free copies to your
friends (because you will anyways)
Low HighHeuristic
Uniqueness
Complexity
Duration

39. Competitive Research
Club

40. Design Workshop

44. –Johnny Appleseed
“Creativity is a stepwise process in which
idea A spurs a new but closely related
thought, which prompts another
incremental step, and the chain of little
mental advances sometimes eventually
ends with an innovative idea in a group
setting.”

45. Topic
Brainstorming

46. Topic
Workshopping

47. The humble sharpie &
post-it

48. Radar Diagram

49. Radar Diagram

50. Abstraction Ladder

51. Abstraction Ladder
Statement
Why?
Why?
How?
How?

53. Personas

54. An archetypical customer
profile used for:
•Evaluating feature
requirements
•Prioritizing product
requirements
•Alignment about user
needs within business
What is a Persona?

55. Customer Interviews

56. Ethnographic Photography

57. Relationship Map

59. Family of Personas

60. Prototypes

61. The Role of Prototypes
Quickly validate concept direction
Simulates general user experience
and flow between tasks
Identify parts of experience are
working poorly

62. Prototype fidelity
time
realism
Paper
Prototypes
Application
Prototypes
Interactive
Prototypes

63. Paper Prototypes

64. Paper
Prototypes

65. Paper
Prototypes

66. Paper
Prototypes

67. Paper
Prototypes

68. Paper
Prototypes

69. Paper
Prototypes

70. Advantages of Paper
Prototyping
Fast (like less than 30 minutes)
Really high level concept testing
Totally obviously informal and
simple
Paper
Prototypes

71. Interactive Prototypes

72. Interactive
Prototypes

73. Interactive
Prototypes

74. Lots of Interactive
Prototyping tools
Indigo Studio
UX Pin
Invision App
Interactive
Prototypes
Justinmind
Proto.io
Axure

75. Application Prototypes

76. Questions you should
ask yourself:
Do we clearly understand our user’s
requirements & workflow?
Do we need fidelity to get a realistic
response? (projection issues)
Is there anything else we can test
faster than building real code?
Application
Prototypes

77. Next Level of Certainty
Not
Certain
Very
Certain
Some
Certainty

78. Shared Understanding
build certainty with a

80. Design Radiators

81. Whiteboards

82. Wikis are where
designs docs go to die…

83. Chat rooms

84. Mockups

85. –Erik D. Kennedy
“I majored in engineering — it’s
almost a badge of pride to build
something that looks awful.”
https://medium.com/@erikdkennedy/7-rules-for-creating-gorgeous-ui-part-1-559d4e805cda

86. Aesthetic-Usability Effect
We perceive things that look nicer as easier to use

89. Krav Maga of
Visual Design:
• https://medium.com/@erikdkennedy/7-rules-for-
creating-gorgeous-ui-part-1-559d4e805cda
(Great inspiration for this presentation)

90. Design Review

92. Focused
presentation

93. Embrace Curiosity

94. –Jared Spool
“Good design, when it’s
done well, becomes invisible.
It’s only when it’s done
poorly that we notice it.”

95. When in doubt
Revisit Principles

96. User Stories

97. Agile != UX

98. Minimal Viable Product

99. Minimal Viable Product
Desirable

100. “As a _____________
I want to _____________
so that I can ______________”
Not Optional
Also Not-Optional

101. ― Douglas Crockford
JavaScript: The Good Parts
“We see a lot of feature-driven product
design in which the cost of features is
not properly accounted. Features can
have a negative value to customers
because they make the products more
difficult to understand and use.”

102. Final Stretch!
Not
Certain
Very
Certain
Some
Certainty

103. Style Guides

105. Styleguide Benefits
Take guess work out of visual design
Easy reuse of existing design work
Can vastly improve front-end
development speed

106. Usability Research

107. ― Erika Hall,
Just Enough Research
“As a designer or a developer, you
either care about usability, or you’re a
jerk.”

109. Usability Tweaks
Direct interaction with application
Moderator is NOT the designer/
developer
Single moderator in the room, others
remote viewing only

111. Tasks over keywords

112. - User
“I’ve read all your buttons!?”

113. Question the questions

114. Qualitative Research

115. User Metrics

116. Quantitative Research

118. Data driven design
Large scale usage patterns
Testing user assertions against
behaviors
A/B testing

119. Triangle of Uncertainty
Not
Certain
Very
Certain
Some
Certainty

120. Forbidden Secret
Technique!

121. Synthesis

122. @nickmcclay
Thanks!
UX is about making sure your
software solves real problems