This document contains the transcript from a presentation on UX in South Africa. It discusses: 1) The current state of UX in South Africa, with some organizations not understanding user needs or how to handle complexity. 2) How companies that use design strategically grow faster, and the need for growth in South Africa. 3) How the 684 attendees can help drive positive change through understanding what UX is and what needs to change. 4) Various aspects of UX like vision, strategy, interaction design and more. It emphasizes the importance of user research, prototyping and getting products in front of users.

1. UX in SA: Any second now…
Phil Barrett • Flow Interactive • UX South Africa 2014
flickr.com/photos/djwtwo

2. UX design, research and
strategy
London & Cape Town
!
Since 1998
!

3. UX in South Africa 2014

4. That is fine with me. Nice job, guys.

5. You speak my language!

6. You speak my language!

7. I came here to pay my plumber.

8. Why indeed? Do you have the tent I want?

9. Cats love the multiple carousels.

10. Cats love the multiple carousels.

12. Move the mouse across the mega menu.
And your target item disappears.

13. I came came here to find the best price plan.

14. I came came here to find the best price plan.

15. You don’t ALWAYS win.

16. UXSA: The state of the union
Some pockets of excellence.
Lots of organisations who don’t know:
• What their target users want to do online
• How to help them do it
!
• How to handle their own size and complexity
!

17. “Companies that use design strategically grow faster and have higher margins
than their competitors.
Apple, Coca-Cola, Ford, Herman-Miller,
IBM, Intuit, Newell-Rubbermaid, Procter
& Gamble, Starbucks, Starwood,
Steelcase, Target, Walt Disney,
Whirlpool, and Nike…
Jeneanne Rae, Writing in HBR
UX design = growth

18. “Companies that use design strategically grow faster and have higher margins
than their competitors.
Apple, Coca-Cola, Ford, Herman-Miller,
IBM, Intuit, Newell-Rubbermaid, Procter
& Gamble, Starbucks, Starwood,
Steelcase, Target, Walt Disney,
Whirlpool, and Nike…
Jeneanne Rae, Writing in HBR
UX design = growth

19. And we could do with some growth

20. “Software is
eating the world.
Mark Andreessen
Founder Netscape and Andreessen Horowitz
Many large companies are
finding that they’re in the
software business. And they
don’t know much about it.
We’re ever more surrounded
by it. It had better be good.

21. 684 people who care

22. How will the 648 people
bring more positive change?
• Understanding what UX is, now and next
• Understanding what needs to change
• Becoming the people who change it

23. “UX” means…

24. UX is not UI, ok?

25. The craft

26. The craft
Hang out with people
!
Prototype and iterate to discover
breakthroughs that work for people
!
Polish to perfection
!
Maximise reach and access

27. Vision
The nature and value of your future digital product/service/
experience
Strategy
How we will use our resources to reach the vision.
Proposition
Something that lets me doing new things well, or old things better.
Concept
A compelling shape, style and vision.
Information
Conveys the information you need in a form you can take in.
Structure
Organised in a way that makes sense.
Interaction
Easy to learn and use. Efficient, quick, powerful.
Appearance
Effective, affective
Front end
Accessible, responsive, standards compliant, lightweight

28. Strategic direction
Getting the right Design
Getting the design right
Shipped product

29. Strategic direction
Getting the right Design
Shipped product
Research,
Measure,
learn,
REASSESS
Getting the design right

30. So pretty
Must be true.
Front end
Appearance
Interaction
Structure
Proposition
Concept
Information
Strategy Vision

31. “You are not a user experience designer.
David Perel
CEO of OBox
Unless…
There is such a massive difference between creating
interfaces which look beautiful, and creating interfaces
which your target market can/will actually use.
Until you have observed someone (in silence) using the
product you’ve created, you could not possibly
understand how mind altering it is to see your work
torn apart.

32. The impact on traditional product offerings
Just take our existing business online. Nope.

33. The impact on behaviour
Photo: Kalamita: flickr.com/photos/kalamita/
All this amazing digital technology will make us happier. Nope.

34. The impact on brand
Make the logo shinier? Nope. Brand experience trumps brand promise.

35. The impact on society
Wonderful, easy, cheap devices loaded with great materials can bring
education to all.

36. The impact on society
Wonderful, easy, cheap devices loaded with great materials can bring
education to all.

37. The impact on society
Wonderful, easy, cheap devices loaded with great materials can bring
education to all.

38. The impact on business models
It’s ok. Our business is far too big to be disrupted. Nope.

39. The organisation
behind the experience

40. Most CEOs have heard that UX, design and
customer centricity are important

41. Sophisticated digital organisations
are perfecting how it’s done
Steve Blank’s
Investment readiness level

42. Not so many large organisations are
demonstrating mastery yet
What’s stopping them?

43. Near Asterix’s village, the Romans have
been digging up trees in the forest

45. Most managers from non-software
businesses have never seen an oak tree grow.
software being made.

46. Most managers from non-software
businesses have never seen an oak tree grow.
software being made.
Which means they have unrealistic expectations
about how its done, or how much time and
money it takes.

48. 20 iterations, just on the home screen
“The team spent 20 iterations or
more on the home view, trying to
figure out how to fit everything in
without cluttering it.
!
venturebeat.com

49. A designer was invited into the boardroom.
You’ll never guess what they found…

50. !
Confusion
Smart people trying to wrangle too
many counter-intuitive truths.

51. Handle
Head
Bristles
Giuseppe Colarusso
We‘ve ticked all the boxes.
Why isn’t it working?

52. Questions like…
• How did my competitors get so far
ahead so fast?
• Why can’t we organise and focus our
business on doing the right thing in
digital?
• Why is my digital presence so stale, and
permanently in need of a re-design?
• Why do we keep shipping things that
our customers ignore or dislike?

53. How did my competitors get
so far ahead so fast?
Because they started work two years ago.
So our team needs to work with customers to
start discovering now what will matter in two
years time. Then build enough belief to ship it.

54. Why can’t we organise and focus our
business on doing the right thing in digital?
Your website and apps are key to the customer
experience. The whole organisation is riding on
them. Manage them as carefully as your core
product.
!
Get a digital product manager.
!

56. UX + product management
• Understanding user needs + market opportunities and strategy
• Envisioning how the software could be + building consensus
• Working with developers to create deliverable + planning how
• Evaluating outcomes + and choosing next steps

57. Why is my website
permanently in need of a re-design?
Because you view digital in terms of projects. They
ship and then you leave them to go stale.
!
Understand that software projects never have
an end. Your product manager needs a
continuous budget.

58. Digital products are soap operas not movies
• Keep releasing new versions, listen to audience feedback and enhance.
• The first episode is the beginning of the project, not the end.

59. Why do we keep shipping things
that have no impact?
No-one (especially managers) can really predict
whether a digital design will be successful.
!
Accelerate trial and error with prototypes and rapid
software releases.
Managers should define desired outcomes, not list of
features.

60. “Prototyping is a cheaper way to learn
Instead of using one prototyper for a few weeks, almost every
company uses the full engineering team to build the software
that is then deployed.
That is why it takes so many companies one to two years to
get something usable and useful. They are using the
engineering organisation to build a very, very expensive
prototype, and they use their live customers as unwitting test
subjects.
Marty Cagan,
Partner SVPG and author of “Inspired”

61. Seek out opportunities to observe
No opinion Tentative opinion Strong opinion
Evangelist/Beta group
User
Casual user
Trying out
Not using

62. Seek out opportunities to observe
Feedback
Silence
No opinion Tentative opinion Strong opinion
Evangelist/Beta group
User
Casual user
Trying out
Not using

63. DESIGN AND
RESEARCH DELIVER
CONCEPT
Traditional UCD:
Innovate before launch
MEASURE
TEST CUSTOMER
RESPONSES USING PROTOYPES

64. The most important thing you can’t find out in a usability test
Would you use this?

65. DESIGN AND
RESEARCH DELIVER
CONCEPT
MEASURE
TEST CUSTOMER
RESPONSES USING PROTOYPES
OBSERVE AND MEAUSRE
CUSTOMERS IN THE MARKET
Agile:
Innovate in the market

66. Change requirements into
assumptions and hypotheses
We believe that
building this feature
for these people
will achieve this outcome.
!
We will know this is true when we
see this quantitative measure
AND this qualitative response.

67. Control risk with small experiments
Risk

68. Control risk with small experiments
Risk

69. Control risk with small experiments
Risk

70. A unified product management model
Optimise and extend
Learn
Design
Plan
Build
Discover Ship first release
Establish product market fit Release a small but valuable product Build and learn towards a great product
• Establish product market fit with research and iterative testing.
• Get into the market with a small, but useful feature set.
• Re-prioritise the backlog as the business and the product moves and learns.
• Keep the releases coming.

71. You

72. Enormous
organisation
One little designer

73. “And will you succeed? Yes! You will, indeed!
(Ninety eight and three quarters percent guaranteed).
Dr Seuss
Oh! the places you’ll go!

74. Time to master this lot, then?

75. Become a design unicorn

76. T S H P E
A D
E
O
P
L
E

77. To become a design unicorn
Step one: Train yourself
Step two: Practice your new skills
Step three: Deconstruct as many designs as you can
Step four: Seek out feedback (and listen to it)
Step five: Teach others
Jared Spool
Founder, UIE

78. 5 things good UX designers do
• Storytelling
• Sketching
• Presenting
• Critique
• Facilitating
Jared Spool
Founder, UIE

79. “A prototype is worth a
thousand meetings.
Todd Wilkens
Design Principal at IBM Design

80. Knowledge Navigator (1987) Apple Computer
Tell stories

81. Ask “stupid” questions
“
What is a stupid question? It is one which
questions the obvious to redefine existing
solutions, approaches, and beliefs.
This is where breakthroughs come from.
Donald Norman
Donald Norman

83. What the organisation
thought users should do.
What users
wanted to do.

84. Work your way to the far side of complexity
“Any idiot can simplify by ignoring the complications.
But it takes real genius to simplify by including the
complications.

85. Ride the curve past complexity
Time
Complexity
Release here “before it
gets any worse?”
Not a good idea.
Keep going and find a
new way to reach
simplicity

86. And it all comes from working with users
“There is a direct correlation between the number
of hours each team member is exposed
directly to real users and the improvements we
see in the designs.
!
It's the closest thing we've found to a silver bullet.
Jared Spool
UIE

87. CEOs want design thinking.
UX designers have got heaps of experience.
• Empathy: Hang out with target users and see
the world through their eyes
• Creativity: Synthesise new ideas from what you
learn and the ideas you see and hear around
you
• Rationality: Measure your results, and use that
to drive the changes your organisation needs
Tim Brown
CEO of IDEO

88. “You're off to Great Places!
Today is your day!
Your mountain is waiting,
So... get on your way!”

89. Flickr: Lars ploughman
Thanks!
Phil Barrett • phil@userexperience.co.za • @philbuktoo
flickr.com/photos/lestaylorphoto