1.g Orcasound UX Best Practices
Although user stories are conventionally written to assign design to devs, getting familiar with how to write user stories by writing and assigning them for UX work is highly encouraged on the UX Team. They may not be appropriate for every task assignment for UX volunteers, but when they are please write them and assign to the appropriate UX volunteer in the appropriate Project in the Product repo. You can access the user story template (please copy the content within, don’t edit the file)- there is also an example of a user story in the template file.
This is also a great intro to the double diamond in the UX process- What is the double diamond design process, and how can you use it?
I could go on and on about how important the double diamond UX process is- just know that it’s critical to the work that we do on the UX Team. Design should always follow user research- see “The U of UX” best practice below.
Please familiarize yourself with the double diamond process- there are many resources online, (some good, some bad- you’ll learn how to distinguish between the two).
As you do UX work, please always ask yourself these questions:
- Where are we in the double diamond workflow?
- Have we skipped a step in the double diamond?
- What do we need to do to make sure we are designing based on user feedback rather than assumptions of myself and other Orcasound UX volunteers?
As we grow and mature as a UX organization, we are moving away from a waterfall approach to design and development. Instead of researching and designing new versions (Version 1, Version 2, etc.), we will be researching and designing feature updates and additions. This will allow the burden on tech resources to be light, and projects will not take months to complete.
This does not include new web apps that are researched and designed from scratch, which will require creating a complete product with multiple features.
This NN/g article is a good place to start learning how to implement the Agile process in UX.
In my opinion, Product oversees UX, and helps shepherd a product from conception to development. This is why user stories are so important- they help project manage a product, allowing handoff to the next appropriate team member.
The Rosenfeld Media book, Product Management for UX People, is an excellent resource. I’m using it to understand how to run UX from a Product Management perspective at Orcasound.
These NN/g videos are an OK place to start when learning about Product and UX:
It is required at Orcasound to safeguard research participant personal data. There are many industry standards for ensuring research participant data privacy. Please review this NN/g article- Maintaining the Privacy and Security of Research Participants’ Data to start learning practices we follow here at Orcasound.
At a minimum, you must:
- Never put participant names, emails, or personal identifying information that can be directly attributed to an individual in research decks and reports.
- When you recruit and track participants for a study, please use a spreadsheet and restrict who has access to only team members who are working on the study with you- password protecting the document is highly encouraged
- Assign participants a study number- for example P01, P02, etc. a. You can include alpha-numeric designations that help you identify which study they are a part of- for example “PDS-P01” for “Persona Development Study Participant 1”
- Blur any participant names and faces in videos or screen grabs, and remove spoken names in videos- you can do this with video editing software (I have a subscription to Adobe Creative Cloud and use Premiere)
You must have research participants sign a consent form before running a session with them. Send it to them ahead of time during your research participant recruitment flow or have them sign it first thing when the session starts.
You can access our Google Form consent form here- MAKE A COPY: Consent Form
Please make a copy and edit to fit your study and save in your project folder.
As you onboard to the Orcasound UX Team, you will undoubtedly have questions and not know what to do. It’s understandable that you want to be told what to do when. However, due to the scale of the UX Team and the turnover of volunteers, including leaders, it is difficult to provide a customized experience for all volunteers.
Just as when you will be working as UX professionals in the tech industry, those who take initiative will be the most successful. Ask questions for sure, but also introduce yourself in our Slack workgroup in appropriate channels. Attend project meetings. Get to know your fellow UX Team members. Get to know Orcasound volunteer devs. Explore the resources listed in this Product wiki. If you are waiting for someone to tell you what to do, you may never be told.
We are looking for UX volunteers who can exhibit a high level of leadership, collaborative decision making, and have a bias for action. We don’t want you to make huge research and design decisions alone, but we do want you to make forward progress and share what you’re doing with others at Orcasound. Be an active, engaged, and helpful volunteer.
At Orcasound, you have the level of authority that you give yourself- go ahead and take full advantage of being a part of an open-source community working together on an exciting website that uses cutting-edge tech to allow access to hydrophone streams and AI to identify marine acoustics.
In past UX Research contracts I’ve worked, I’ve run across Project Managers who didn’t care about UX Research, and just wanted to send a design to production as soon as possible because their goal was to provide impact (a live product) for the business. While I agree with the importance of sending design to production, in the long run it saves time and money if UX Research is conducted.
Even at Orcasound, I’ve seen UX Designers do design work without discovery research. At Orcasound, we encourage a bias for action, but we want a bias for the right action, not just any action.
The U of UX stands for User (I know, a well-known fact I assume you are aware of). However, in practice (even at times at Orcasound), it seems that volunteers behave as if the U stands for You (the Orcasound volunteer). It in fact does not.
Understanding stakeholder requirements is critical. Running discovery research is critical. Running usability studies is critical. Understanding the user mental model of information architecture like site maps and where content is expected to be placed is critical.
This is a bit of a soapbox I’m preaching from, but I strongly believe that to create lasting value, both for users and the business, UX Research is required. If you are a UX Designer and you “just want to design”, I understand that drive. However, you must design based on insights derived from UX Research. It’s what UX is all about, and what we do here on the Orcasound UX Team.
As a UX volunteer at Orcasound, I know you may be driven to get to work. You may have recently finished a bootcamp, university degree, or are self-taught. You are highly motivated to get a job, and to do so you want to do work that you can put in your portfolio as a case study and list in your resume as well as in your LinkedIn profile.
Me too.
However, UX is a new field compared to others that have been around for the past 100 years or longer. There are experts who are always writing articles online (Does Medium sound familiar to you?), books, and giving informative talks.
One thing you need to learn how to do is pair professional work with professional development. At the same time, you must manage your time between doing UX work and studying. You may have graduated from college, but your studying skills are still needed!
Linked throughout this Product wiki are articles and videos I’ve found that I think are valuable for UX professional development. I buy too many UX books and have a pile I’m reading through (Right now I’m reading Handbook of Usability Testing: How to Plan, Design, and Conduct Effective Tests, 2nd Edition and it’s amazing- I highly recommend it! Next up is The Inmates Are Running the Asylum: Why High-Tech Products Drive Us Crazy and How to Restore the Sanity. There are so many other UX books I wish I could read right now!).
Read articles and books. Watch videos. Use NN/g as a resource (articles and videos are hit and miss- some are great, some are not).
Focus on UX Theory and Practice at the same time. You will find success when you do.
You’ve spent weeks (hopefully not months) on a UX project. You’ve presented your deck and next steps to team members, UX leadership, and others at Orcasound. Then, nothing happens.
This story is unfortunately all too common in the tech industry. How can all your hard work have an impact? How can you see your recommendations turn into reality?
On the Orcasound UX Team, we use the Product repo in our GitHub account as our project management platform.
If you have actionable next steps based on the UX work you’ve done, please do the following:
- Go to the Projects section of the Product repo
- Open the appropriate project- they are labeled by project team
- Create an issue and write a user story or instructions for implementing your recommended next steps
- If you know who to assign next steps, assign the issue to them
- If you don’t know who to assign next steps, assign to a member of UX leadership