Tag: ux

Useful sustainability related design resources

For the last year or so I’ve been on a mission to try and reduce the environmental impact of the internet.

Here are some of the resources that I’ve compiled along the way that I’ve found useful and inspiring along with some of my own work that they have all helped shape in some way.

I hope you find them useful.

Books:

Website Carbon Calculators:

Useful articles & presentations:

Web resources:

Useful videos:

Inter(net) zero

The digital industry is responsible for higher global emissions than the aviation industry so it’s imperative that we reduce the our environmental impact.

I’ve created a free ‘Digital Sustainability Checklist’ based on W3C’s ‘Web Sustainability Guidelines’ to help you prioritise, track and report on your digital sustainability efforts.

Knowing where to start with long lists of guidelines can feel overwhelming so I’ve created this checklist to help you:

✅ Prioritise which guidelines to work on : Use the ‘Impact’ vs ‘Effort’ matrix to help you to decide where to concentrate your efforts

✅ Improve your digital sustainability : Track your progress as you design and implement your products and services in more sustainable ways

✅ Evaluate your progress : Evaluate your performance against each guideline to highlight your strengths and weaknesses

Let me know how you get on with it and I’d love to hear your ideas to improve it.

💥 Get the Digital Sustainability Checklist (Google Sheets)💥
(To make your own copy go to File > Make a copy)

Please share this with your network if you find it useful to help spread the word!

Good luck! 💪

Nature Inspired Innovation

I had the absolute pleasure of giving a talk at UXScotland last week with Stu Church on ‘Nature Inspired Innovation – Designing the Future by Using Lessons from the Past’.

The talk emerged from a pub conversation where we both realised we had been mulling over similar ideas and it was great to have a super smart collaborator to work with to bring it to life.

It’s about learning from natural systems and applying those lessons to help to answer challenging questions such as :

  • How much should you innovate?
  • How fast should you innovate?
  • Why do products look so similar?
  • Why might people not choose the most efficient designs?

I think it’s really valuable and enjoyable to look for answers to the problems we face in our work in unexpected places. This talk, if anything else, was a useful reminder that the answers are often hidden in plain sight!

Enjoy!

Short Form Brief Template

I find writing short form briefs to be really valuable, particularly when I haven’t been involved with setting up the project or winning the work.

I find the rigour of attempting to answer important questions really useful to check my understanding, keep me honest and to highlight gaps in my knowledge.

I typically write them as soon as possible after project kick off’s and share early versions with the team to check what I’ve misunderstood, get answers to fill the gaps and critically to created a shared understanding of what we’re trying to do and why we’re doing it.

They are also really useful to refer back to when projects inevitably go a bit wonky as a useful aide memoir and informal contract of sorts.

Here’s a simple template I always start with to help you on your way. Do also read Jared Spool’s brilliant article on the topic ‘The Magical Short Form Brief‘ as it’s the perfect primer.

8< – – – – – – – – – – –

[Project Name]
Short Form Brief
[Author] [Date] [Version]

Project objective 
[Why are you doing the work? What problem/s are you trying to solve? What is the value of solving the problem?] 
 
Scope 
[What is in and out of scope?] 

High level approach 
[What are you planning to do & why? Which roles will be working on it?] 

Hypotheses
[What hypotheses do stakeholders believe are true that you wish to learn more about?] 

Guiding Principles 
[What are the guiding principles that we will use that will govern the spirit of the approach that we take?] 

Assumptions 
[What assumptions have we made that have influenced our thinking and approach?] 

Key Outcomes 
[What outcomes is the project team aiming to achieve?] 

Measures of Success 
[What will you measure that will indicate whether the work has been successful or not?] 

Core design competencies

In his wonderful book ‘Imagine If‘ Ken Robinson talks about the flaws within the educational system.

He argues that what students need from their education is to become proficient in some core competencies in order to prepare them for the economic, personal, cultural and social challenges they will face in their lives.

The competencies he identifies are curiosity, creativity, communication, collaboration, compassion, composure and citizenship.

Here’s how Ken breaks them down in his book :

Curiosity – the ability to ask questions and explore how the world works

Creativity – the ability to generate new ideas and apply them in practice

Criticism – the ability to analyse information and ideas and to form reasoned arguments and judgements

Communication – the ability to express thoughts and feelings clearly and confidently in a range of media and forms

Collaboration – the ability to work constructively with others

Compassion – the ability to empathise with others and to act accordingly

Composure – the ability to connect with the inner life of feeling and develop a sense of personal harmony and balance

Citizenship – the ability to engage constructively with society and to participate in the processes that sustain it

I’ve often thought about what being a good designer actually means and I think that these competencies would be a brilliant framework to use to help work that out in practice.

When I think about the best people I’ve worked with I realised that it is these things that they’ve been really good at.

As a designer being good at the tools and methods is one thing but if you don’t have these competencies then you’ll struggle.

They aren’t just relevant to designers of course, but feel really useful to help us to recruit people, set objectives and design our own training and development.

I would wholeheartedly recommend Ken’s book, it covers many other fascinating and important subjects such as creativity, positivity, sustainability and systems thinking.

The get a feel for his work check out his TED talk on ‘Do schools kill creativity‘.

Questions are the answer

Ben Holliday’s UXBristol talk about ‘Asking Design Questions‘ really resonated with me.

As a consultant, you can often feel like you are supposed to have all of the answers.

I think it’s more about having all of the questions.

Every challenge presents a problem to solve.

You can’t understand the problem without asking good questions.

They are fundamentally important throughout the entire process.

You need to question your brief in order to understand it properly such as…

  • Why are you doing this?
  • Why are you doing this now?
  • What do you think are the reasons behind the problem you are seeing?
  • What is the cost of the problem to the organisation today?

Successful early meetings are grounded on asking questions such as…

  • What problem are you really trying to solve?
  • How will we know if we have succeeded?
  • Who should we involve?
  • What should we know at the end that we do not know today?

Questions, questions, questions.

Our research starts with identifying the big questions that are on our clients minds such as…

  • Why has our conversion rate dropped?
  • Do people understand and value our proposition?
  • What are the most challenging aspects of choosing a university course?
  • Why do people choose our competitors over us?

We explore the business context of our work by interviewing senior stakeholders and asking questions such as…

  • What are you trying to achieve as an organisation?
  • How does this piece of work contribute towards your vision?
  • What is the impact of this problem?
  • What do you want to get from this project?

Questions, questions, questions.

We explore these within our research with people by asking them questions such as…

  • When did you book your last holiday?
  • What are you looking for in a new car?
  • How do you go about choosing a new savings account?
  • How do you find out about planned changes to your local area?

Once we’ve completed our research we’re still asking questions such as…

  • What have we learned?
  • How can we communicate our learnings in the most effective way to the people who need to hear them the most?
  • How can we apply what we have learnt to improve what we are working on?
  • Which problems should we tackle first?

Questions, questions, questions.

When our work comes to an end we’re still asking questions such as…

  • What went well?
  • What would we do differently next time?
  • What have we learned?
  • Which of our initial assumptions and hypotheses proved to be true?

But it’s not just the project team who are asking questions.

Our customers are full of questions that they need answers to before they can complete their everyday tasks such as…

  • Is it good quality?
  • Do I like the look of it?
  • Do I trust them?
  • Can I return it if I don’t like it?

The best products and services second guess (and then answer) the questions of the people who use them.

What’s the most important question you need to answer to improve your own project, career, product or service?

Questions are the answer.

UXBristol talks are now online

We had a fantastic day of short talks at UXBristol this year.

Hopefully we managed to capture the essence of the event despite the online format – fingers crossed that we can get back to a face to face event next year.

Thanks again to all of our wonderful sponsors (Kaluza, cxpartners, Hargreaves Lansdown, ADLIB, Mace & Menter & Smaply) who made the day possible.

If you missed the event, you can catch up by watching the recording of the entire livestream or jump straight into specific talks as below.

Chui Chui Tan – Offering a better, localised experience for your global customers

This talk is about the steps you can take to make sure you can offer the best, localised experience to your customers in different markets. It covers why it is important to have a clear holistic understanding of your global audiences and their context. Practical tips will be provided to guide you through this process not only to inform your design, but also your marketing or other business strategies.


Ben Holliday – Asking design questions 

Design questions can be the real practical superpower of impactful UX and design work in all parts of an organisation.

In this talk, Ben Holliday will explore how anyone can start to ask design questions in the places and situations that they work in.


Flow Bohl – How to present design work to non-designers

A good presentation could get your design approved, or quickly dismissed if you don’t present it right.

In this talk, Flow will outline six useful steps to successfully present design work to non-designers.


Kat Husbands – Imposter syndrome in User Centred Design

Imposter syndrome: an insidious, inner critic. At best it sucks the joy out of a job well done, and at worst it can cripple your career.

Kat surveyed 100 user centred designers about their experiences of imposter syndrome and is here to share what she learned about where it comes from, who it affects the most, and of course how to beat it.

Tom Ridley – Beyond the Beeps: Designing with Sound

Tom demystifies the field of Product Sound (think: Alexa, your Microwave, that person on the train with their keyboard clicks turned on), and provide some fundamental principles, ideas and techniques, such that any design practitioner, without a shred of musical ability, could begin to explore product sound and put it to test.


Abby Covert – How to diagram

This talk aims to help rid the world of bad diagrams by teaching the purpose, process and craft of diagramming. Because your diagrams might suck, but they don’t have to.

Learn about the UX of Photography from optimisation legend Craig Sullivan

As a keen photographer I’ve always been keen to work out how I can crowbar my hobby into my day job.

An ideal opportunity arose many years ago when I noticed major usability issues resulting from the choice of photography on all of my design projects.

I realised just how hugely important photos were to how people made buying decisions and how they responded emotionally to what they were seeing and how that then influenced what they thought and how they behaved.

It felt like photos were the unsung heroes of experience design.

At this point I realised I was onto something and set about trying to improve the effectiveness of online photography and ‘photo UX’ was born.

This mission resulted in many articles, talks and even a book to provide help and guidance to improve the situation given that there was a surprising lack of information on the topic available online.

One person who has always done some really pioneering work in this area is optimisation guru Craig Sullivan.

I loved reading his work on measuring the impact that using different photos had on conversion rates and it was a joy to see someone else (who actually had some data!) was also highlighting the impact that photos can have.

I was delighted to see recently that Craig has shared one of his excellent talks on optimising photography during which he shares some great advice from years of experience and what he’s learned from having run over 20 million tests!

@optimiseordie insights from split testing with different images of people

In his talk you’ll learn more about :

  • What the “Rule of 3” for images is
  • Why stock photography performs badly
  • How to shoot photos of people
  • Why you should experiment with photography
  • How to challenge bad thinking or photos
  • How to make your own photography guidelines
  • About the only book on this topic
  • Why iconography generally doesn’t work

Craig’s talk on the UX of Photography is available on YouTube