Iain Heath

Awesome quote "#Companies are #people, people are #culture" @DavidHughMartin @F_i sounds like they have it right.

Agile, behavioural economics, designing for everyone, design thinking to service design, are all collaborative approaches needing a number of people or teams to come together to develop understanding over time. Facilitation is a key tool for UX designers to do this.

The most valuable part of user testing is all about trying to find out about how we might have got things wrong about the problem or solution. Rather than validating what's right. After all prototyping is relatively cheap and throw away before starting to build a solution.

Product development always involves dealing with a certain amount of unknowns. Either as a team or individual. Something can be new for everyone, or maybe only some. A great way of thinking about unknowns and uncertainty is the Cynefin framework.

If you understand your company and it’s business goal you can understand and track you and your team’s impact on delivering value. From the business goal you can break it down into what metrics will represent the goal. Which will allow the team to focus on ‘Data-driven design’.

Value focusses on a desired outcome. Talk has started about being outcome based and organisations are starting to gravitate around OKRs (Objectives & Key Results). Design value comes when discovering how an initiative supports an organisation's outcome or OKR.

While working on your craft and sharing this with teams to improve an organisation’s design maturity, it’s also important to incorporate ethical design practises, to ensure that the result of your efforts is ethically beneficial.

Design frameworks such as Double Diamond, Lean UX and Design Sprints etc. help us to define, experiment, build, test and learn. To create certainty, define user stories and iterate quickly. Applying the learnings from them all and using the right one at the right time is key.

One of the biggest things I've learned about accessible and inclusive design is that you need to design for everyone no matter how they interact with your product and to be aware of permanent, temporary and situational needs.

Designing using insights allows problem solvers to know how people are behaving when interacting with a product. Analytics, used in the wider spectrum of moderated and unmoderated quantitate and qualitative research can start to build this picture.

UX involves Behavioural Economics, which combines insights from psychology, judgment, and decision making, and economics to generate a more accurate understanding of human behaviour, to support how we think and feel about making choices and decisions.

Ultimately UX involves more than just working in design software. It also involves meetings and conversations surrounding the designs. It often involves sharing knowledge and allowing the team and stakeholders to gain a shared understanding.

Product Owners maybe the glue that hold the team together and allow the wider business engage with the product. Designers can often help this happen by bringing ideas to life. This puts the designer at the centre of the product, which is why designers often feel ownership.

A lot of the work that UX involves is developing a deeper knowledge and shared understanding. allowing teams and stakeholders to understand the problem we're facing and providing certainty throughout the teams involved, to facilitate the growth of ideas.

Creating meaningful design requires us to understand people, how they are different, why they are different. But also understand what they will want to do and anticipate exactly when they want to do it, to provide them with a tool that makes their lives easier.

Design research inspires imaginative solutions and informs intuitive patterns underlying the rich reality of people’s behaviours and experiences.

The use of validation tools and techniques to review designs to be data driven to make design choices is critical. Often the mix of user testing and understanding how people feel about a design kills off endless debates and design revisions based on personal opinions or biases.

Research takes opinions, assumptions and stereotypes to find golden nuggets of truth. Sharing insights to make the right decisions, comfortably, at any level. Making them common sense, due to the insight delivered, the empathy it provides and the problems it unearths.

Combining insights from psychology, judgment, and decision making and economics through Behavioural Economics generate a more accurate understanding of human behaviour to provide a better user experience.

Service Design like Experience Design has tools and techniques to facilitate conversations with stakeholders and customers alike about an experience. However they are more focussed on conversations about the entire service being offered to customers.

Digital transformation is a response to technology, cultural and human changes. Transforming organisations with new digital skills and services is just a response to new opportunities to do things and people's willingness to want to do things in new ways.