Aggressive inclusivitya truly team approach to empathetic design
Kevin Fitzsimons - October 2014
Icebreaker
Adversarial relations…
“Fight your corner…
never let up or they’ll
crush you”“Stand your ground…”
“Daily struggle… keep on the front foot…”
“Make sure you keep arguing the UX
case… don’t let them browbeat you…”
“They might get it eventually…”
What did we want the team to be like?
• All about:
– Avoiding assumed consensus
– Gelling the team from Day One
– Rapidly moving in the right direction
– Establishing empathy with users
• It’s NOT about:
– Specs
– Requirements docs
– Detailed plans
– Detailed designs
– Documentation is risk, not risk management
Bad old days
• PM Spoke to ‘the customer’
• This meant the person who signed the cheques
• Resulted in us building a major new feature
• How many users actually used this feature when it was
delivered?
Empathy with users…
• Don’t just ‘study’ or ‘understand’ customers
– Need to really EMPATHISE
– Real user input NOT ‘user proxies’ or buyers or personas
– Engineers talk DIRECTLY to the users
– Engineers ALWAYS attend field visits
Engineer – Product Manager – Account Manager – Buyer – Supervisor – User
Personas…
Use their key touchpoints
Definition of done…
The WHOLE team goes into the field
• Working with the real users on real jobs
And we do mean the WHOLE team…
• Left to right:
– Graphic Designer
– Software Dev Lead
– User
– Technical Architect
• …on a freezing morning
in Chatham, England
Some context
• What is Confirm?
– Highways asset maintenance management
– Manages over $1bn of infrastructure assets globally
– Over 20 years old
• Existing Confirm Mobile
– Field based extension of Confirm desktop
• What we were doing
– Replacing Confirm Mobile
– Being first to market with a smartphone and tablet offering
– Expanding the customer base
Existing Confirm Mobile
• Some deeply horrible UX
issues
• Runs only on specialised
devices
Field research - in
Field research - out
Up close and personal…
TRULY understand the task…
Field context - empathies
Empathy in action: once I see it…
The empathy thing writ large
Gathering artefacts
Empathy-driven development
• …the team’s workspace lived and breathed the
customer… photos of real users (not personas), their
artefacts… their desks…
Making it real
• JEDUF©
– Just Enough Design Up Front to make a start
• Prototyping was key
• Prototype had several roles:
– UX validation
– User research
– Demos
– Sales briefings
– Communication shared understanding of vision
– ‘Spec’ – supports on-going discussion with Product Manager
Full-team design
Lo-fi prototyping
24
…and we iterated from there
The secret sauce
• We empathise with users
• And we trust each other
• And we make decisions together
• And all this allows us to be truly lean (as in eliminating
waste, for example, personas and throwaway
prototypes)
• And that’s it, really
Final result…
• Standing start to market leader in 9 months
• 18 months ahead of the competition
• Users of competitors’ products requesting demos
• Significant pull-through sales of desktop solution
• Confirm business grew 25%+ in 2013
Side benefits…
• Huge PR side benefits
• Customers see the process happening
• Industry perception of activity and progression
– Clients see progress rather than early announcement followed
by radio silence for 18 months
• See responsiveness
• Engenders trust
• Feel valued
• They spread the word
• Happier to take the product earlier
• Discussions about features fade away
Inclusivity learning points
• Understand the culture
• Speak the language
• Be subversive; bottom up not top down
• Find the hot buttons
• Don’t try to change development practice
• Evangelise by doing
• Be visible
• Make allies
• Be inclusive
• Share ownership of artefacts
• Explain & accommodate… don’t dictate
• They want to learn
• Have ground rules
Developer quote
• “This has really opened my eyes… I can’t believe I’ve
been developing for seven years without doing this…
this is the first time I’ve really understood why I’m
coding something… previously if I hit a problem and
needed guidance, I’d ask the product owner and he’d
tell me how to solve it but I still wouldn’t understand
why it had to be done like that… now I’ve been part of
this I can’t imagine how we ever managed to build
anything useful before…”
Take a bow… the team
• John Castle
• Kevin Fitzsimons
• John Gomersall
• David Haynes
• Keith Manning
• Liz McKenzie
• Paul Miller
• Rob Savage
• Vaughn Stanworth
• Adam Taroni