In the Choosing the relevant product metrics (Part 1), we reviewed product metrics classification to distinguish performance and user experience as well as a fundamental approach building a metrics map which is aligned with business and team.

More growth and more experiments result in more metrics to follow. It is crucial to prioritize metrics and stay focused on the most important things especially when our creativity goes wild.

Priority 1 metrics

These are the highest priority metrics. Priority 1 metrics are the product growth main indicators. Though, with the pace of growth influencing key metrics is getting more difficult. When a product is new, such indicators can grow rapidly. It is essential to keep an eye on the highest priority metrics, but it makes no sense to expect their constant growth.

Priority 2 metrics

These are critical metrics but mainly reflect user experience. Priority 2 metrics not directly relate to product KPIs, but can have a substantial impact. Influencing priority 2 metrics is easier than the highest priority, but still challenging.

Priority 3 metrics

Priority 3 and below metrics can be classified as “micro metrics”. These metrics also describe user experience and behavior, but the product shouldn’t be too sensitive to the metrics fluctuations. These metrics are especially helpful in validating A/B tests which didn’t affect priority 1 and 2 metrics. The more micro metrics, the better. Though, every micro metric should be directly or indirectly, related to priority 2 metrics.

In conclusion, I’d like to say that metrics map is a versioned document. Product changes and experimentations is an ongoing process, and the metrics must evolve together with the product. As you can see there is no magic trick behind the metric prioritization, but rather simple logic. Although metric prioritization helps us to stay focused while being creatively pushing the product limits.

Source: awsmd.com

Author: Stan Nevedomsky

The new entrant into UX in an established business often has a tough time of things. People understand what UX stands for (some of the time at least), they may even have an idea of why it is important but they often have no real understanding of what is required to achieve a good UX.

This lack of understanding and particularly from management; leads to conflict with the UX team. This can be avoided, or at least made less painful, if all managers were to understand these 7 critical UX ideas.

User Research is Not Optional

Product managers, customer service managers, marketing managers, development managers, etc. can all feel somewhat threatened when the new UX guy on the block starts talking about talking to their users. This results in defensive displays in meetings where they will argue that they talk to the users and customers all the time and thus – you don’t need to.

Perhaps the easiest way to overcome this issue is to explain the purpose of user research and one of the outputs – user personas. Show how existing research cannot build these pictures accurately and that the benefit of user research is better understanding of users so that the whole business can align on user objectives. Show how existing research can complement this picture and you should slowly starting winning people round to your way of thinking.

Is Not a Single Process

Big business, in particular, has become very process focused over the last few years. The introduction of quality management like Lean, Six Sigma and TQM has driven that. This often leads to senior figures demanding UX processes from their UX team. They want a nice consistent approach that they can then measure on each and every project to track some awesome numbers for their spreadsheets.

You need to show that UX is flexible. That each project is unique and that you may need to develop a unique process for each project to reflect that. Part of your process is selecting the right tools for the job, an iteration of a project may follow a very different UX path from the one chose for a brand new product.

UI Is a Part Of UX But Not the Whole of It

There is often an assumption that UX design is solely concerned with screen flow, buttons and other inputs. Yet, as any good UX designer can tell you, that’s only part of the job. That doesn’t mean that UI is not important (far from it) but it does mean that UX is going to be involved with other areas too.

Talk about the internet of things and how in a few years there may be no screens associated with a product at all. Talk about how UX can help with business process and product process development (things for which there are no screens in the here and now). Talk about the UX of content and why it matters. In essence, show the range of UX and show why it matters.

Usability Tests Matter

In business people tend to have faith in expertise. It’s good because that’s what got you your job – you were seen as an expert in UX. Unfortunately, that faith can be expressed in a resistance to your conducting user testing.

After all, if you’re the expert and you did the design work, surely that’s enough? If you do know what you’re doing – there’s no need to test is there?

This is really about explaining checks and balances. Yes, you are the expert but experts make mistakes too. If Coca-Cola had taken a few steps back to conduct in depth checks on their customers – they’d have realized that New Coke was maybe not such a good idea. It is the results of usability testing that enable you to decide whether investing in product development is worth the effort.

Usability Is Also a Part Of UX But Not the Whole of It

Another area where it’s easy to find UX pigeon-holed is as the “usability people”. Yes, usability is a vital part of what we do but once again, it’s not the whole of what we do.

It can be best to show examples of where usability, think the Sinclair C5 or the Betamax video, didn’t make a jot’s worth of difference to the final success of the product. Just because something is easy to use – it doesn’t mean that there’s a market for that product. It’s the overall experience of that product in context that matters.

Takes Time and Is Iterative

How can it take that long? What do you mean the product won’t be perfect at this release? The investment in UX from a business perspective is a good thing but there’s a tendency to assume 100% immediate returns on investment. The UX professional knows this isn’t likely but the management team doesn’t.

This is really about explaining the process in more detail. That initial insights require time to be refined to produce the best User Experience and that requires prototypes, wireframes, testing, etc. In the longer term it’s about understanding that nearly every experience can be improved, even if the experience is excellent at the time of release. Most businesses live by that mantra anyway so it shouldn’t be too tough a sell.

UX Requires Many Hats

The instinct to save on the staff bill should never be under-estimated. When recruiting for a UX team there’s a tendency for other managers to expect one person to be an ethnographer, a UX researcher, a UX designer, a usability engineer, etc.

You need to be able to show that while multi-skilled professionals do exist that they are rare. You also need to be able to show that even if you could find these wondrous people – there’s a limit to how much work one person can do anyway. UX is not normally a one man job even if it would be cheaper that way.

Summary

These 7 ideas should help managers better understand what can and can’t be achieved through the UX team. It’s not that they’re not already on your side (you already have a job don’t you?) but it’s just that they don’t really know much about UX yet – it’s your job to help educate them.

Source: www.interaction-design.org

Now that we’ve seen some grids at work in the Rule of Thirds article, let’s examine them a little more deeply. As a concept that deals so fundamentally with the fabric and background of our work as designers, it’s easy to overlook the power of grids and think more about the elements we want to create. Many traditional artists still paint their masterpieces over a feint series of intersecting lines. To help us make the most of our work surfaces and create with precision, we designers have a tool that echoes this. We call it the Grid System.

The Story of the Grid

One of the easiest ways to achieve an organized design is to apply a grid system. It’s a tried and tested technique that first found favor in print layout. Low-tech and cheap, this is a great resource for you as a designer – consider it a top-ten tool in your office. Grids in interactive design can also help provide a consistent experience across multiple devices with different screen sizes. Users are happy when they see familiar features laid out as they would expect to find them.

The grid system helps align page elements based on sequenced columns and rows. We use this column-based structure to place text, images, and functions in a consistent way throughout the design. Every element has its place that we can see instantly and reproduce elsewhere. Consider the grids we find in maps. Islands, towns, lakes will appear on an exact part of a map, on a set of North-South/East-West coordinates. They will always appear in the same place on other maps. A GPS accesses these coordinates to help guide us; imagine the chaos if there were no grid system for it to latch on to and keep us right on the road!

The grid system was first used to arrange handwriting on paper and then in publishing to organize the layout of printed pages. Given that the printed page and the virtual page have much in common,it should come as no surprise that we also use it in web and app design. Creating a grid system for the virtual page is a little more complex than for the physical page – browsers handle information differently, and screens vary in size.Happily, however, the principle remains the same.

That’s not to say that there’s no resistance to using the grid system. Some designers feel that the grid limits creativity. While this may be true, it’s important to recognize that many designers employ the grid system regularly because it is so effective at organizing information.

The best layout is one which provides no distraction from the content. Thanks to its mathematical precision, the grid system is a great example of this kind of layout.

Grid as a Design Principle

Villard De Honnecourt, a 13th-century French artist, merged the grid system with the golden ratio to produce printed page layouts with margins based on fixed ratios. That methodology continues to the present day, as the majority of printed books and magazines prove. Publishers, editors and designers place so much effort on keeping the tradition, not only because it’s known to be the best way but for another large reason. The readers (i.e., the users) expect to find everything in its proper place. Remember, the human eye is drawn to elements; it is also easily upset if it is confused or made to work out a problem it was not expecting to encounter.

Let’s try a quick experiment to see just how effective a grid can be. If you have two blank sheets of paper handy, draw about four or five shapes at random on one of them. Don’t worry about neatness and geometry – it’s just a simple illustration. When you’re finished, try to copy them as they appear on the second blank page (please don’t “cheat” by putting the second page under the first and drawing over the shapes again to trace them). Even if you have a very sharp eye and sure hand, you’ll notice that it’s practically impossible to replicate the first design, with everything appearing in the same place.

The second part of this experiment is optional, but it will help to drive home the point. If you have squared or graph paper lying around, take two pages and repeat the procedure. Do you notice how copying your original is so much easier when you can guide your hand? The grid made by the intersecting lines of this special paper gives us the gift of making truly accurate copies. By training our eye on the number of columns across and rows down, we can duplicate in free hand almost as perfectly as a photocopier.

The image at the top of our article illustrates the components of the printed page: a header, footer, as well as right and left margins. Inside the margins, a designer has created equal-sized columns with a space between them, known as a gutter. Knowing that the page can include one or more columns, the designer can place elements such as images and text within these columns to provide alignment with the rest of the content. The image and paragraph areas may overlap in one or more columns.

Similar to the way in which vertical grid lines create these useful columns, horizontal grid lines guide the height of elements in the design. These portions of the grid are known as rows. As designers, we want to make the height of each row as a proportion of the width of the columns. For example, the ratio of column width to row height is 3:2, 4:3, etc.

Notice how we arrange the rows equally within the page layout, and how we insert gutter space between each row. We can then place elements of the page content in one or more rows, as shown in the figure at the top.

Grids in Interactive Design

In the digital world, the grid system acts similarly to the print layout in organizing the elements on the page. Additionally, it provides a guide for designers to create multiple layouts that support responsive themes for different screen sizes.

We divide the web page layout into columns that we separate with margins, using whitespace, between them. The width of the columns and the margins are equal, and we can place content in one or more columns based on the layout of the design.

The application of a grid means that the design can be divided into multiple columns that can help designers organize content. For example,we can have one, two, three, six, twelve, or more columns. Today’s screen resolutions reach very large sizes compared with what was available in the early days of computers. Even so, using a 960-pixel width can ensure that the design is properly displayed on many computer screens. It can also help designers modify the layout for mobile devices.

The examples above show grid systems that are based on the 960-pixel resolution from http://960.gs, which provides a useful guide for building your own grid-based web layouts.

There are other helpful tools for building grid layouts available online, too:

• http://1200px.com/1200px: This website helps you build a grid system for much wider website designs than the 960-pixel style.
• Golden Grid System: This website can help you build a grid system and optimize it for mobile-responsive display.

If you want to explore further grid systems for different purposes, you can find some at the following websites:

• Csswizardry-grids
• Responsive Grid System
• Semantic Grid System
• RWDGrid (responsive grid system)
• CSS Smart Grid

The Take Away

The Grid System has been helping artists of all types (including writers) for a long time. First utilized by a 13^th-Century artist, who merged it with the golden ratio, the grid system has been a tried, tested, and trusted methodology for centuries. It firstly empowered writers to position their handwriting neatly on paper; later on, it became a universal standard in the publishing industry. Publishing houses everywhere retain strict observance of the grid system in producing copy that users find both pleasing to the eye and in line with what they would expect to see.

Regarding setting out elements, grids afford superb precision. We can see this principle most prominently in maps, noting how locations are pinpointed with grid lines that represent coordinates. The pursuit of accurate cartography would enable navigators to discover new places in the great unknown parts of the world. Now, with the grid lines that mark both longitude and latitude, GPS devices allow us to get wherever we wish to go.

However, cartographer’s maps represent fixed “designs” that change only imperceptibly over many years. Cartography might be a science, but grids, with their mathematical precision, are brilliant and much-needed tools of artists, too. Throughout history, artists have been making use of grid lines to plan and paint images of their own, which capture the best, most pleasing proportions.

Easy to create and practically free of charge, grids also give us web and app designers the ability to lay out our work in an organized and precise manner. By enabling us to insert elements in boxes created by their intersecting lines, grids enable us to make a consistent user experience across multiple devices. For example, the dimensions and layouts of our computer and smartphone screens differ. Planning our work so that it can adjust to appear on different platforms keeps our designs intact, in proportion and in the places where our user expects to find them.

Designers use columns and rows, shaped according to set column width and row height proportions (such as 3:2 or 4:3), and gutters (the spaces between these “boxes”) to present elements of our designs in the best way.

Although we have the luxury of very high screen resolutions that allow us to show ever-more impressive and realistic designs, by using a grid based on a width of 960 pixels, we can make sure that our designs will translate properly to be displayed on many computer screens and mobile devices such as cell phones. However, we have a wealth of resources at our disposal to help us fine-tune our choice of grid system to match the design we want.

However you use the grid system to build your design, you should keep in mind other principles, such as the Golden Ratio. Aiming to create a consistent user experience also involves creating a pleasing user experience that will be consistent across many devices. If you keep in mind that your choices will be working in concert with the known tendencies of the user’s eye, you will be able to create eye-catching designs that are better organized, as seen by your users on computer, tablet, or cell phone screens.

Source: www.interaction-design.org

Author: Mads Soegaard

What is a Design Sprint?

A Design Sprint is a unique five day process for validating ideas and solving big challenges through prototyping and testing ideas with customers. The book “How To Solve Big Problems and Test New Ideas in Just Five Days” (by Jake Knapp) refers to it as:

“The ‘greatest hits’ of business strategy, innovation, behavioural science, and more — packaged into a step-by-step process that any team can use.”

In five days, the Design Sprint will help you to:

1. Understand. Map out the problem and pick an important area to focus.
2. Ideate. Sketch out competing solutions on paper.
3. Decide. Make decisions and turn your ideas into a testable hypothesis.
4. Prototype. Hack together a realistic prototype.
5. Test. Get feedback from real live users.