Richard Sheridan (Cofounder and CEO, Menlo Innovations) wrote Joy Inc to share insight into all XP practices that worked for his Org. Here is a peek into how design sprints that lead to better UX are done at Menlo.
The Power of Observation
Discovery is seeing what everyone else has seen, and thinking what no one else has thought.Albert Szent-Gyorgyi.
We want to delight the people whose lives are impacted by the software we design and build. In order to systematically pursue joy in the name of offering delight to your customers, you must learn to look at the world through the lends that sees problems as opportunities.
The Missing Link
If our joyful goal was to delight end users, then we had to invent a new process that kept this end user ever present.
What’s missing? Anthropology is the link. We need to study people in their native environment to figure out how to bring them utility and joy. Anthropologists need to understand history in order to better understand the present. They want to understand people and their stories through a true and unbiased lens, to the extent that is possible.
The Persona
Our Anthropologists start with understanding the people who are going to use the software we are creating. We have to find these people in their native environment, because design is contextual. Focus groups wont work! You need keen and patient observation.
Once they distill their findings, they can begin to write stories in order to create an artifact called a “persona,” which identifies the main user of the system. These personas represent the keys to the kingdom of joy for a software product. Exactly put, one of these personas hold the key to the land of joy. The question is, which one?
At all costs, we must avoid letting our clients fall into the trap of not picking a persona. Objections — We want this software to work for everyone, We want to dominate the market etc.
On a board, have three concentric rings drawn in form of archery range. We then ask the client to make a tough decision by identifying who the primary persona will be for our efforts. They need to pick the main person for whom we will design the planned system or product. And two secondary personas for the middle ring of the target and three personas for the outside ring.
This persona map becomes the central artifact of our design efforts for that project. Any screens, any buttons, any reports, any features are all evaluated through the lens of the primary persona.
This kind of attention to our end user’s persona makes our work personal, not abstract. We care deeply about how our primary persona (give her a name!) will interact with our product and how it will help her life.
Hand-Drawn Mock-Ups
Our anthropologists work in pairs to create simple, low-fidelity, hand-drawn screen mock-ups for the products they’re working on. These paper-based, hand-drawn, user experience design prototypes are then tested against real-world users.
Design for Living
Whatever you do for a living, design plays a role. To succeed in design, a company must define its target audience and be very specific.
In order to meet your persona’s goals, you need to iterate your designs: make a small, simple design, test it with real users, refine, and repeat. You don’t need to have design intuition to win with design. You simply need to be a keen observer of human behaviour, stay humble when your brilliant designs don’t work, and be willing to adjust your designs as often as needed to get to a joyful user experience.
Scouting a Anthropologist?
Must possess a wide range of talents including:
- Great observation skills
- The ability to sit quietly at times
- A “make mistakes faster” attitude
- User interface design skills
- Ability to draw with crayons and markers
- Ability to use Post-it notes
- Expertise in Photoshop
- Empathy
- Ability to deal with ambiguity and abstraction
- Ability to create with specificity and exactness
Knowing how to code is not a requirement.
There’s no way to test for these skills, so we use our best discernment during Extreme Interviewing, pair them with our best teachers while doing real work, and see if they have what it takes. No one is training Anthropologists. We have to develop our own. You can too.
altLearners 