For years I’ve attended conferences, read articles and seen presentations about the unquestionable importance of research led user experience design. Assumptions and imagination were downgraded as unworthy practises. We hear how research saves time in the long run, provides focus and yields hidden gems; it helps gain buy-in from teams and creates strong foundations for the decisions made so development can go ahead with less challenges. And yes, it does.
But as a sole approach, this is bullshit. In my pretty long career experience hypothesis and subject matter driven design is as much a contributor to success as research. The trick is not to rely on just one mode of operating. How much you do of each fluctuates depending on the work and the domain.
Its ok to make up stuff and see if it flies. I suspect everyone does it.
I’ve worked quite successfully using this methodology and I’ve been studying and experimenting with it specifically for the four years I’ve been at NICTA. I think I have a nice model emerging that explains how and when to combine domain/hypothesis driven design and insights led user centred design as related frameworks but with their own specific cadences. The model accommodates vision, research experiments, business requirements, customer inclusion (participatory), agile solution design and testing and validation.
The current explanation of the methodology comes as the result of a long term design project in itself, reviewing and analysing the 50+ projects over 4 years that have had ux and design contributions.
Initially I was attempting to categorise projects into what looked like the a taxonomy to assist with setting design requirements and team expectations but found too many differences. There were too many cross overs of activities and this weird need by humans to have a neat progression of design work and deliverable stages as a project matured into a product which simply didn’t exist.
What I took as project level design failures were actually fine. There were simultaneous activities happening. It was messy but there was a pattern. Our time to market is quite long so my impatience was getting the way. It all just needed reframing to make it measurable, understandable and then communicable.
The way forward was not “science fiction” design or UCD, not a middle ground nor an evolution from one to the other but both simultaneously and most importantly understanding their own cadences and benefits. The way forward was not the focus on outcomes but the activities that delivers them and therein the pattern emerged.
We have a dual pathway that helps us map and explain our activities towards designing for future audiences.
Domain Driven / Hypothesis Led Design
This is about exploring a future state technology using hypothetical design and team subject matter (domain) expertise.
This provides a project benefit of tangible testing and validation artefacts early, as well as maintenance of project momentum as teams, sponsors and customers get bored (or scared) when they aren’t seeing ideas manifesting via design i.e. there is evidence of delivery to customer stakeholders and/or project sponsor.
Another benefit is that technical innovation opportunities are unencumbered by current problems or conventional technical limitations. If you are designing for a 5 year future state, we can assume technology might have improved or become more affordable.
Also part of this is sale pitch type work where a concept is used to engage customers so there is a clear business engagement benefit.
Typical design activities include:
- User interface
- Information architecture
- Interaction design
- Co-design with customer and team
- Deep thinking (quiet time), assumptions about needs for proposed audiences (yep, pretend to be that person),
- Sales pitch concept designs
- Infographic or other conceptual communication artefacts
Learnings:
- Make no apologies for solutions being half baked or incomplete.
- Continually communicate context and the design decisions because everyone imagines wrong stuff if you leave gaps.
- Shut down any design by committee activities, relying instead on small bursts of subject matter expertise and vision leadership from the project sponsor. Two chiefs are a nightmare just as unstructured group brainstorms are.
- Keep vigilant about eager business development folks selling an early delivery of work that is technically not feasible, has no real data (i.e. only sample data) or unfinished academic research (algorithms are immature). This is especially problematic when dealing with government who expect what they were pitched to the pixel and because it looks real, think it’s not far off from being built.
Insight Driven Design
This is about solution design using user research.
The project benefits are that the insights inform solution design and assists with maintenance of project focus (reduction of biases and subject matter noise)
If you are working on short term solutions for a customer while journeying to a blue sky future state, then this work assists in delivering on those milestones.
When there is user inclusion it helps with change management (less resistance to changes within current workflows). It provides evidence of delivery to customer stakeholders and/or project sponsor and short term deliverables can assist in securing income and/or continued funding
Typical design activities include:
- Discovery workshops
- Contextual inquiriy interviews
- Establishing user beta panels
- Usability and concept testing
- Surveys
- Usability testing
- Metrics analysis
Learnings
- Analysis paralysis is a killer. User research can be called into question once customers/teams tweak to the fact they don’t know anything about users and will expect large amounts of research to back decisions, thereby inflaming the issue with more information but not getting any more useful insights.
- Unclear objectives from user research provide unclear outcomes
- Poor recruitment leads to poor outcomes (expectations the designer(s) can just “call a few friends” for interviewing and/or testing).
Cadences
The cadences mentioned in the third paragraph refer to the time frames in which Hypothesis and Insight driven design operate.
- They are in parallel but not entirely in step.
- They cross inform as time goes on, typical of divergent/convergent thinking. New opportunities or pivots will create a divergence, results of interviews and testing will initiate a convergence.
- Hypothetical cadences are short and may or may not map to development sprints.
- Insight driven are longer, and may span several hypothetical cadences.
- Ethnographic/behavioural science research projects are of a longer cadence still, and ideally would feed in/take insights from both the previous two. I’ve not covered this here as it’s not my area of expertise.
The graphic below illustrates this.
This final outcome is the result of revisions of 4 years of projects with the current NICTA UX Design team using discovery and design thinking activities.
NICTA UX is: Hilary Cinis, Meena Tharmarajah, Cameron Grant, Phil Grimmett, Georgina Ibarra, Mitch Harris and Liz Gilleran.