Presented at Product Camp Dublin 2018. Presentation on picking the right thing to design, right. The Jobs To Be Done framework trumps UX profiles and personas. Keeping it simple, wire-framing best practices, and Lean Startup methodologies included!

1. “It’s Better To Have a
Permanent Income
Than To Be Fascinating”
(Oscar Wilde, The Model Millionaire)
Designing a Killer Feature Set Based on Jobs To Be Done
Ultan O’Broin (@ultan)
Product Camp Dublin 2018

2. About Ultan O’Broin (@ultan)
• Startup, NGO Community Engagement
• Director Oracle SaaS UX
• Microsoft PM Visual Studio, Windows
• Outbound partner and sales UX enablement
• UX design patterns, innovations, UI
accelerator kits, design platform
• MultilLingual Magazine Editorial Board
• Design Management
• Writer, Blogger, Chatbots Magazine,
Planeta Chatbot, MultiLingual
• I am NOT a Designer. Far too cool for that: Storyteller.
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3. Design Simply to Use Simply: 80/20 Model
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Don’t over engineer or be dazzled by tech: MVP and JTBD

4. 4

5. We can ALL do User Research: Guerilla UX Closer to User.
5
Observe behavior with tasks, ask, record: then design and test
“Tell Me More About That”

6. Design Discovery: Research in the Wild
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7. How do I know if I am building the right thing?
• Talk to your customers: Focus on behaviors vs.
What they say or think they want
• Lean UX: Product as Experiment: Measure,
faster to eliminate uncertainty
• Deep Listening: Jobs-to-be-done
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The minimum viable product is that version
of a new product which allows a team to
collect the maximum amount of validated
learning about customers with the least
effort. – Eric Ries

8. What job is your app being hired to perform?
• Why do people hire milkshakes? – People and
Organizations do not buy things because of they
fit a demographic; that relationship is correlative
vs. causal
• Jobs-to-be-Done offers a framework to evaluate
product purpose - what job people hire a product
for and what factors are important in influencing
purchasing, switching etc.
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Source: Intercom blog: The Dribblisation of Design

9. More Innovative, Action-driven Job-to-be-Done Approach
Job-to-be-Done: Capture new opportunity details using any device in-
hand so I can submit it to SaaS for later work.
• Role: Sales rep on the road
• Need: Perform these core tasks quickly:
– No special device needed to enter new
opportunity name and win probability.
– Capture location details.
– Include any document files (business card
images, whiteboard sketches, and so on).
– Reminder to update opportunity in SaaS later
• Outcome: Meet a performance goal of 10 seconds or
less per capture.
“A problem
well put is
half-solved.”
− John Dewey

10. Template - Your Job Description Message (Story)
• Job to be Done: .
• User roles:
•
• Job description:
•
• Performance goals:
• *TBD
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Effective Story Formula
• Simplicity
• Unexpectedness
• Concreteness
• Credibility
• Emotion
• Story
Put a man on the
moon and return him
safely to the earth
(by the end of the
decade)

11. 11
Using JTBD framework to Evaluate Design
“Competition is between products that
do the same job, not products that are
in the same category”
“If you focus purely on the job, and not
the industry, you realise airlines selling
business class seats are competing with
Skype for customers, as they address the
same job: the need to have clear
communication with colleagues.”
- The end of apps as we know them – Intercom blog

12. Build the Right Thing, Build It Right
Building the right thing
1. #JTBD - What job is your application being
hired to do?
Build the thing right
2. Basic principles of UX, emotional, functional
3. Clear primary use-case & functional goals
4. The importance of sketching and wireframing
5. Ideas to wireframe your solution before
visualization evolution (Dribbilisation)
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13. Keep it Simple: That’s Hard
• Start from beginner mindset
• Focus on the footprint (Excel 80/20)
• Strive for Simplicity
– Basic heuristics go a long way
– Less UI = more adoption, performance
– And now… No UI, natural conversational
– Hide
– Reduce
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14. 14
An Agile Design Requires a Human-Centered Design Process
• Phase 1: Think – STFU and Listen, clarify JTBD
• Phase 2: Plan – Review cases and sketches
• Phase 3: Execute – wireframe and code
• Test? Hell, yeah. Heuristics but nothing beats
real people, doing real jobs, in real places
• Test
• Test
• Test

15. Principles of a Simplified Design Process
• Ask “why?” A lot.
• No “what if?”
• Let go of your ego
• Abstract away from the visual
• Stay focused on stakeholders
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16. Design Communication: Use Words to Guide Visuals
• Use cases/functional requirements
describe how the system will address the
business requirements (JTBD)
• Writing them down will allow them to
guide and evaluate your subsequent
design efforts, wireframes etc.
• A bulleted list of behaviors is just fine
– Update this list when changes are agreed
upon
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Any problem
correctly stated
is mostly solved

17. Drawing as Communication: Collaboration, Agreement
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• Planning and design communication for
product managers, designers, and customers useful
for:
• Working out the details of the interaction, i.e., avoiding
surprises down the line
• Shortening the innovation cycle
• Managing open issues and changes
• Developing POCs for stakeholder/customer review and user
testing
• Avoiding wasted time, effort, coffee… No Surprises!
• Input: User requirements, use cases, context of use,
and user job
• Output: Lightweight (low-fidelity) drawing without
visual design

18. Design Communication: Scaffolding
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• Leonardo da Vinci (1452–1519)

19. Sketching Flow Best Practices
• Start with sketches then,
• Match template flows to any design
patterns and templates in a wire
framing tool
• Use accelerator kits if available
• Document the interaction and flow
through the UI- animate and annotate
• Document changes, questions and open
tech or interaction issues
• Copywriting is Interface Design: No
Lorem Ipsum, use real text
• Review against your JTBD and functional
goals
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20. Now, YOU try it!
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21. Contact Information and Resources
• Twitter: @ultan
• Blog: http://usabilityrocks.tumblr.com/
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ultanobroin/
• Chatbots Magazine: https://chatbotsmagazine.com/
• Intercom Blog: https://blog.intercom.com/
• Don’t miss: ConverCon (Dublin, September 2018: www.convercon.ie
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Acknowledgement
• Images and screens are used in this presentation for illustrative purposes
only and remain the copyright of owners, where applicable.