It’s cold and gloomy and snowy here in New York, and I always feel like I need an extra boost this time of year. Here are a few videos I’ve collected (and love) for a short course on inspiration.

Where Good Ideas Come From

This video reminds me that some ideas take a long time to incubate and motivates me to go back and try to evolve old ideas (and never throw out notebooks!)

 
Steal Like an Artist

When I’m feeling uninspired, I like to try to “remix” my ideas – to take them and combine them with someone else’s ideas and see what happens. “Expose yourself to the best things that humans have done and see what you can take in” is fantastic advice. As is “be boring – it’s the only way to get work done.”

Without Doing the Dreaming is Useless

The reason all your other ideas seem better than the one you’re working on? Because you’re not working on them. Instead of focusing on the self-doubt that occurs while working on an idea, focus on just working through the idea and following it to the finish. Finishing feels great – better than procrastinating. Bonus: Rilla is charming and enthralling, so you’ll want to jump off the couch after and get cracking on your ideas.

“How wonderful! They’ve stolen my idea! It’s become their idea!”

In Made to Stick, Chip and Dan Heath use this quote to illustrate the successful outcome of a sticky idea. This quote struck me as a great distillation of my goal as a user experience designer – to craft and sell a user experience strategy in such a way that it’s internalized by stakeholders and teams as their very own idea.

User experience designers need to communicate an experience vision to diverse audiences in a way that the audiences can use it to make guiding decisions about a product. This means that both executives and people on the front lines are using the same language of user experience in their day-to-day conversations. What does this look like? Here’s a story they tell about a game manufacturer:

Whit Alexander, the co-founder of Cranium, recalls a time he called a Chinese manufacturing partner to describe a concept for a new game piece. The piece would be purple and made of multiple parts that would need to be glued together. His partner balked. ‘It’s not CHIFF,’ he said. Alexander was astonished. His supplier, halfway across the globe, had just corrected him using Cranium’s own strategic language. And the supplier was absolutely right.

CHIFF stands for “Clever, High-quality, Innovative, Friendly, Fun”  and guides all product decisions at the company. It’s an excellent example of a sticky strategy. As designers, we need to communicate our vision in a way that doesn’t make stakeholders eyes glaze over – a way that gets it out of our heads or in conversations between two people, and into the tangible space.

Communicate your vision in a way that sticks

Chip and Dan Heath describe how to make any idea sticky using the framework of Simple, Unexpected, Concrete, Credible, Emotional, and Stories. I’ve pulled out some of their key points below and discuss them in relation to how you might make your user experience strategies more sticky in your organization.

Simple
The key to being simple is to limit yourself to expressing one core idea. If you try to communicate all your ideas and all your thinking at once, you’ll be communicating nothing in the end.

• Start with your elevator pitch – who is it for, what does it do, and why it’s different and better for the users.
• Use generative metaphor to connect the idea to something your audience is already familiar with – “it’s like pinterest on a feature phone for foreign relief workers.”
• Use plain language. Trader Joe’s sticky “unemployed college professor” target customer could be the more complex ”Upscale but budget-conscious customer.”

Unexpected
Communicate what isn’t obvious about your strategy. Express what you are leaving out or placing less importance on, so that the strategy can be used in actual day-to-day decision-making.

• Use surprise to get their attention.
• Describe how someone would apply the strategy in an extreme way. The newspaper editor who requested “names, names, names” even if it meant he had to spend more money adding pages to the newspaper (names are more important than cost) or Nordstrom employees who take customer service to extremes by gift-wrapping products bought elsewhere or starting customer’s cars in the winter.

Concrete
As experts, we suffer from what the authors call the “Curse of Knowledge.” We know too much, so we think and communicate in abstractions. However, your audience needs to hear things for the first time in a way they can picture. It’s the difference between donating money to help a particular child, or donating money to relieve hunger in a foreign country. Focusing on a particular child is the more successful tactic.

• Use visual artifacts to give life to the conceptual frameworks your strategy is based on.
• Create clear and meaningful design or product principles to guide decisions about what’s in and what’s out.
• Define what is a clear win for your project (“we’ll know we’re successful when…”).

Credible, emotional stories
As user experience designers, this is probably where we feel the most comfortable. Stories engage your audience and create buy-in by framing your ideas in terms of inclusive problem-solving rather than a battle of opinions.

• Center stories on individuals with compelling detail; don’t use statistics (save those for another time).
• Create a whole picture from problem space to ideal experience (even if you can’t describe the interface of the solution, describe the desired emotional experience).
• Use storyboards to lend a visual component.
• Talk to your audience about what you have in common, and tie your message to what they care about.
• Draw a connection to where a similar strategy has been successfully used in the past.

All that time spent crafting an amazing experience for your users could be wasted if you can’t make the strategy stick in the minds of your stakeholders and team. Small adjustments in the way you communicate can have a huge impact.

Yesterday, I stumbled across this older but information-packed video of Janice Frasier speaking in Los Angeles. Check it out, I watched it twice. (Not only because of the giant bunny.)

Kill your darlings: User experience and lean startup

Some teaser tidbits from the video:

Do a wireframe check with your developers on a regular basis.
Once you have your sketch, take it to your developer and ask these same 4 questions every time:

1. Is this an accurate reflection of the system?
2. What here is hard?
3. What are the alternatives?
4. Is this worth it?

Extra design inventory is waste.
Design one page and test it to figure out you’re on the right track before you design a whole system.

Put stuff on the walls.
Nothing gets a conversation started better. In fact – don’t have meetings, have working sessions.

When I read The Shape of Design, it was hard at first, and then lovely, and then I realized this wasn’t so much a book as advice on living. Design isn’t separate from your life. Be a better person who wants to make the world a better place and you’ll be a better designer.

I’m not much of a “touchy-feely” person, so I was surprised to find that this resonated with me. A successful design is one that elegantly moves forward business goals and satisfies user needs, but can everyday design make people’s lives better? Not just happy to use our product, or delighted, but actually push in the direction of making the world a better place?  (more…)

Earlier this year, I attended the AgileUX NYC conference. It was a great one-day conference with 14 presentations on how to do design in an Agile environment, with a focus on Lean UX. Looking back through my notes on the experience, I was inspired all over again to try new approaches, and I wanted to share them here.

So, what is The Lean Startup?

The Lean Startup is a software development approach outlined by Eric Ries: “Because startups often accidentally build something nobody wants, it doesn’t matter much if they do it on time and on budget. The goal of a startup is to figure out the right thing to build – the thing the customers want and will pay for – as quickly as possible.” The key method is constant adjustments to strategy via the Build-Measure-Learn feedback loop. The focus is not on shipping working software. The focus is on achieving validated learning on what customers value in your product. This means features aren’t “done” until you have proven with an experiment that what you built solves your customers’ problem. (more…)

I keep a running list of books to read, and, as a fast reader, go through these lists quickly. And while I internalize a lot of the lovely bits of the things I read, sometimes with an especially wonderful book, I find myself wanting more – more engagement, or something tangible left behind. This was the case with The Creative Habit. I don’t quite remember how this book made it on to my list (note to future self, keep track of that from now on), but I ended up buying an electronic copy for my Kindle and nearly devouring it before I realized I absolutely needed a physical copy of this book. I got one, started reading it over, and now it’s covered in highlights. My point? Go out. Get this book. Do it now. I can’t imagine a person in any profession that wouldn’t find inspiration in this book.

As a user experience designer, I sometimes wonder where creativity fits into my design practice. I don’t often get to choose my projects. I don’t usually get to propose wild, crazy, way-out-there-flying-toaster solutions. As others have noted before, design creativity is frequently the quieter kind that comes from navigating many constraints. Even then, that’s a creativity that needs to be exercised to stay sharp. Here are some things I took from The Creative Habit that I’m going to bring to my practice as a professional designer. It’s New Year’s Eve in August, and these are my resolutions: (more…)

I’ve had the intention to start writing for a long time now. It’s pretty rare to see a user experience designer without a blog, making it a standard item on the professional checklist. Problem was, I just couldn’t get started. It felt insincere. I thought perhaps everything had already been said. I didn’t want to seem pretentious. I’d procrastinate for weeks designing WordPress templates, then drop the whole project.

Recently, I’ve had a change of heart. I found myself reading more, learning more, and scribbling little half-formed ideas in corners of my sketchbooks. I’d save articles in Evernote and jot notes about process or application of methods. I wasn’t really sharing these with my colleagues, because, although I have the benefit of a large (and awesome) UX team to work with, I work remotely from home. I can’t just turn to one of them and say, “Hey, I was thinking…” anymore.  (more…)