Making Your Design Vision A RealityHow to improve your UX design and implementation process to ensure the end product retains the beauty and integrity of your original concept

What are we here for?Does your end product ever look

much less awesome than the beautiful designs you made?

Does your product have obvious design flaws, but no one seems to be fixing them?

Let’s learn how to prevent this

Director of Products, GrabCAD

previously rendering software engineer at Gemvara

Who is this guy?

Grant Thomas-Leporegrant.thomas.lepore@gmail.com

GrabCAD

Workbench

Overview Typical product process

Part 1: User stories help everyone

Part 2: Test mockups and iterate before

development

Part 3: Bringing designs to life

Q & A

User stories help everyone

Typical Product Process

User’s

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ow

User s

torie

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Prod

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requ

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Rank by

user pain

Rank mostfrequent actions

UI ske

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s

UI des

ign

User testing

Who is your user?

What are they trying to do? Take the user stories and rank the

actions they are trying to perform:

Grandma:1. Upload 2-3 photos2. Make one desktop

background3. Write message4. Send to daughter

Teenager:1. Upload 100 photos2. Delete some.3. Organize best ones

into album.4. Write message5. Send to 10 friends

Consolidate into frequency list 1. Upload photos 2X2. Write message 2X3. Send to friends 2X4. Etc.

This list will help you figure out what buttons to make big:

And smaller:

Upload

Organize

Qualaroo

What next? Share this list with Product Managers,

with Engineering, with Operations, etc…

They make decisions every day that affect performance, you want them to know what are primary customer actions.

GrabCAD – 3 funnels

UploadConvertInvite

Test mockups and iterate before

development

User testing is easy Testing just 5 users is enough to be

significant (Jakob Nielsen, 2000) Better to test more frequently with

fewer users, than vice versa.

PROFIT!!

Many good ways to user testFor first page impressions (button copy, A/B testing mockups for page purpose).

For user flows and more complex interactions, even 2 videos is definitely worth it.

For almost anything, in-person reactions are free and invaluable.

For testing complexity: the Mom test!

It’s about the questions Don’t: lead test subjects to know what

a button/function does:“Is ‘New’ or ‘New project’ clearer to you for the red button?”

Do: Ask open-ended questions that get at the actions a real user may want to do:

“How would you start a new project?”

Example

“How do you view more results?”5/5 5/5

“Does this site have interesting content?”1/5 4/5

View more View more

A B

Share these results

Variation B will be harder to build.

Engineers working on this feature actually do care to know why Variation B is better than Variation A.

Bringing designs to life

Get engineers involved early

Make it easy to get right

Screen record user flows Simple screen capture tools such as

http://www.screenr.com/ can save you countless minutes writing explanations of user flows.

But even better - It can save engineers hours figuring out what you were trying to describe and how you want it work.

Thank you to Braden Kowitz for the idea, http://www.designstaff.org/articles/story-centered-design-2012-03-22.html

Fixing problems Don’t wait until it’s on a staging server, or

worse, production!

Be proactive – find out who is working on it and reach out directly to them.

Get screenshots from the engineer’s local build, or sit down next to them to go through what’s been done so far.

Write a list of issues, prioritized by what you think is most critical/obvious.

Designs are a blueprint

Summary Send out the user frequency list,

so everyone knows the key actions of your product early on.

Iterate mockups and share why more difficult Variation B is better than Variation A.

Encourage feedback on designs from entire organization!

1. Upload photos 2. Write

message 3. Send to

friends

Q&AGo crazy