Phase 2

I’m finally shutting down my old UX Whisperer Tumblr blog that I quite frankly had forgotten still existed. My other art blogs on Tumblr were somehow hacked over the years, and turned into porn pages, or worse yet, evangelical christian pages, lol.

Anyhoo, a few last transcribed bits…

Phase 2 is typically the mythical future world where those "things we didn't get to" in Phase 1 go to die.

"The design team is trained over time to believe that if a feature doesn't get into Phase 1, it will not get built. When transitioning from waterfall to agile development, the design team brings these preconceptions with it. But the fundamental difference between the two approaches is that agile development actually is an iterative process. Each sprint is essentially a 'phase,' and many sprints make up a project. As design teams make the transition, one of the biggest hurdles is convincing them they don't need to cram every design element and pixel-perfect rendition into the first sprint. We tell them that each sprint iterates and builds upon the previous one to incrementally improve the product based on customer usage and feedback. But they've been burned too many times, and they don't believe us. They continue to push for design perfection early in the process, causing scope creep, delays, and team conflict." — Jeff Gothelf

• blogs.hbr.org/cs/2012/05/the_biggest_lie_in_corporate_a.html

It's crunch time, and the developers are sharing their feelings.

• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HnbNcQlzV-4

Take a challenge to its inevitable conclusion.

For example, when a project manager asks for faster delivery cycles, you can ask whether the stakeholders will be able to assemble their feedback in reasonable time. In these situations, the person making the request does not usually anticipate subsequent impacts of their request.

Use when:

• Faced with a situation which puts unnecessary pressure (usually in quantity of delivery) on the project team.

What is a Product?

Another great little article from Marty Cagan:

Product = Customer x Business x Technology

“It’s absolutely critical that your company’s leaders in product management, user experience design, and engineering all have a deep understanding of this fundamental equation of product, and they need to actively coach their product managers, designers and engineers on this as well.”

• https://svpg.com/what-is-a-product/

Product vs. Feature Teams

“In an empowered product team, the product manager is explicitly responsible for ensuring value and viability; the designer is responsible for ensuring usability; and the tech lead is responsible for ensuring feasibility.  The team does this by truly collaborating in an intense, give and take, in order to discover a solution that work for all of us.”

• svpg.com/product-vs-feature-teams/

Are you more agile than a taco truck?

It was crunch time in the webmines, and some of our team took a break to grab tacos for lunch. When we got to the truck, the front end dev - who was feeling the brunt of the deadline crunch because of typical upstream changes and delays - made an observation:

“You notice how the guy at the end of the line isn’t all tired and frantic?”

Or words to that effect.

I scanned the taco truck assembly line, and yes, it was true. Choreographed to a loud backdrop of techno music, these guys really had their flow down cold.

They all knew what they needed to do at their assigned step.

They all knew what they needed from their predecessor, and what to they had to deliver to the following step.

Originally published DEC 21, 2012

They also did a great job telling you what they needed to know from the customer at each decision point along the way.

From the shouted requirements gathering questions, to the fun and helpful wayfinding signage, this was a highly functioning lunch delivery team.

A quick look at Duolingo

Prologue

I've recently started using Duolingo to learn Portuguese.

Duolingo's "manifesto" is to be universally accessible and to make learning fun.

To the first point, Duolingo is free, and is tested on devices of various sizes and connection speeds. I've used Duolingo on a laptop via their website, as well as their iPhone and iPad apps.

Let's explore that second point a bit.

How does Duolingo aim to go head to head with with online games and other competitors for our attention?

First of all, Duolingo has a fairly frictionless onboarding process. There's no need to sign up to get started. You simply pick a language to learn and go.

After you have performed some exercises, you are prompted to create an account so you can track your progress.

Anatomy of a Learning Experience

Lessons are arranged in a sequence. Two or three new skills (each containing  2-9 lessons) might be available, but skills beyond that are not accessible unless you successfully test out.

Each lesson consists of a series of exercises including word matching, translating the spoken/displayed Portuguese sentence assembling the draggable English words, and typing the Portuguese words for a spoken sentence.

Gamification

Duolingo uses a variety of methods to encourage you to continue. Experience points (XP) are awarded for every successfully completed lesson, and Duolingo allows you to choose how many XP you want to complete to meet your daily goal. It also tracks and rewards your streaks to encourage daily practice.

Duolingo also awards Lingots, a sort of virtual currency you can use to purchase extra lesson packs or items to bling up Duo, the owl avatar that guides you through the program. Note, for example, the fetching velvet jacket and monocle in the two screens above.

All of these success screens are accompanied with a triumphant flourish of trumpets.

Beyond the App

Duolingo also uses email to encourage you to practice. Those emails play upon all of the various incentives within the application: XP, streaks, goals, levels, and the notion that I might want to make an owl avatar happy.

Cute, but does it work?

You might ask, beyond the various incentives and such, how useful is Duolingo for learning a language? I would say they've definitely created a fun and engaging user experience.

The lessons seem to build fairly logically as you progress. New words and concepts are introduced in themed skills, and old words and concepts are periodically brought back up to keep them fresh in the mind.

I've been practicing almost daily, and I do feel that I'm actually learning.

Yes, but...

Duolingo - at least my experience of it learning Portuguese - does have some weaknesses in its teaching methods.

Sometimes when new words are introduced, they are presented like the image at right.

While graphically pleasing, I answered the question "Which is 'the chair'?" by seeing and selecting the chair illustration. This doesn't really teach me that much.

Exercises that involve matching Portuguese words and their English counterparts seem to be much more useful.

Another chief complaint is the large number of fairly useless sentences that are used in the lessons. I suppose one might theoretically need to utter the sentence shown below some day.

And perhaps in Brazil there is a more urgent need to be able to say "The snake is in the boot" than there is in Brooklyn. But generally speaking, I think Duolingo would be more useful if it focused more on more practical phrases and conversational scenarios.

That said, sometimes they do ask the important questions.

Further Reading

Originally published Sep 5, 2017.

• Gamified Design Review: A In-depth Analysis Of Duolingo - Gamification Co

• Gamified Design Review: A Follow-up Analysis Of Duolingo (part 2) - Gamification Co

• How Duolingo Designs with Psychology in Mind

• Duolingo made language learning fun. Can it do the same for language testing?

• Duolingo Product Analysis

• How Duolingo Onboards New Users
  

One size fits none

“Who doesn’t love to talk about process? Every week, it seems, someone has discovered ‘the new way to work that everyone should be doing.’ While I love a healthy process debate, I find discussions that promote a one-size-fits-all design approach problematic.” - Yesenia Perez-Cruz

• cognition.happycog.com/article/one-size-fits-none

Designers — an untapped pool of agile leadership

“Given Agile’s software engineering roots, it is most common to see developers at the helm of these teams. However, there’s another pool of talent that’s gone largely untapped for these team leadership roles — designers.”

• jeffgothelf.com/blog/designers-an-untapped-pool-of-agile-leadership

Making sense of MVP

In product development, one of the first things you should do (after describing what problem you are trying to solve for whom) is to identify your skateboard-equivalent. Think of the skateboard as a metaphor for the smallest thing you can put in the hands of real users, and get real feedback.

• blog.crisp.se/2016/01/25/henrikkniberg/making-sense-of-mvp

How to write a research plan that facilitates team alignment

Image courtesy of Margie Mateo Villanueva

Arguably the most important milestone, which sets up the next two milestones for success, the Project Kickoff often gets skipped, as teams work under the misconception that being comfortable with ambiguity means being comfortable with designing solutions without a clearly defined strategy. And so they go straight into the ideation phase without fully understanding the problem space.

• uxdesign.cc/how-to-write-a-research-plan-that-facilitates-team-alignment-2f75396884ca

Five things every __________ should do well

Five things every UX designer should do well

“Let ‘I need a button’ go uncontested and you’ll soon be trapped in a room with a dozen other people arguing over what shade of blue to use.”

• dswillis.com/uxcrank/2014/5/five-things-every-ux-designer-should-do-well

And since we’re here…

Five things every product owner should do well

In addition to strong leadership skills, the product owner must also own and evolve product strategy, develop intimate knowledge of target users and actively participate in solving issues as they arise.

• dswillis.com/uxcrank/2014/5/five-things-every-product-owner-should-do-well

The time traveling designer...

Rules of time travel

The job of the time travelling designer is to travel into the future of the product (or one of many possible futures) and then to come back to tell the team in the present what it looks like there.

1. You must know (and tell the team) how far in the future you have been.

2. There can be different possible versions of the future.

3. The further into the future you go the fuzzier your vision is (something to do with degradation of Tachyon particles). Therefore things in the near future should be crisp and in high-definition, things in the far future are abstract and in low-definition.

4. If visions of the far future are in crisp high-definition then it was probably a dream, NOT time-travel.

5. The further into the future you go the less time you can spend there.

6. You cannot go back in time but you can go back to the future.

Read more

• madebymany.com/stories/the-time-travelling-designer-and-other-stories-of-agile-design

• medium.com/the-many/the-time-traveling-designer-2a4d42ca207a

Why your team needs a war room…

“In the last two years at Google Ventures, I’ve done design sprints with over 80 startups. One of the simplest tricks I’ve learned is that a dedicated work space with walls — a war room — always helps us do better work. The walls of a war room can extend a team’s memory, provide a canvas for shared note-taking, and act as long-term storage for works in progress.” - Jake Knapp

• gv.com/lib/why-your-team-needs-a-war-room-and-how-to-set-one-up

Lead by design

“Designers don’t need a defined role to lead. In fact, designers should look at this opportunity to lead through influence. Progressive design has taught us that design leadership doesn’t require a title or even heavy management experience, only a strong desire to learn people skills and shape outcomes in an organization with design.”

• http://zurb.com/article/1368/lead-by-design

Tumblin' Tumblr weeds

Thought I’d port over my long neglected blog over at Tumblr so I can continue to neglect it here over at Squarespace.