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Grow The Understanding of Your Users’ Experience With These 3 UX Tools

Jared M. Spool
by Jared M. Spool

Your UX team must always fight the insulation that builds up between folks who are making critical design decisions and the experience of your users. They need to be always surfacing a deep awareness of what it’s like to use your product or service.

Our go-to strategy for busting through the insulation and building deep awareness involves combining 3 straightforward UX tactics. We start with a solid discovery process, to generate the research that will form the basis of everyone’s awareness of the users. We then use journey maps to capture and understand what that research tells us. And finally, we show why this information is important, by generating a vision of what an improved user experience could be. By combining these together, we see a powerful and long-lasting change in how the organization makes important decisions.

Combining these tactics doesn’t come easily for even seasoned UX project leaders. Almost always, they’re suffering from a lack of expertise (and sometimes the confidence) to effectively frame the problems and lead their teams through the process.

That’s why we asked three UX experts, Dan Brown, Jim Kalbach, and Christine Perfetti, to walk us through exactly how to get the most out of each of these tactics. We’ve captured their advice in three online seminars, which you can easily share with your team.

Here’s what your team needs to know:

First, everyone needs to work together to understand the problem you’re trying to solve.

Dan Brown
Your team leaders have plenty of tools to choose from that articulate the challenges they’re facing. In Discovery: The First Step of the Design Process, Dan Brown takes your folks beyond the tools, explaining that the conversations between your team and influential stakeholders are far more important. They’ll talk through the work ahead and come up with that essential understanding of the problem.

Next, you’ll share what you’ve learned and infuse your organization’s culture with the user’s experience

Jim Kalbach
Jim Kalbach picks up where Dan leaves off, by using the creation of a journey map to catalyze the team’s understanding of your users. In Building Consensus by Mapping Experiences, you’ll see that there’s a magic that happens when you get the right people in the room, turning the discovery research into a narrative user journey. Suddenly, everyone is on the same page about what makes using your products or services frustrating, and what makes users delighted.

Then you’ll want to align cross-functional teams and stakeholders to a singular vision for your product

Christine Perfetti
The journey map tells us what it’s like to use the product today. But what could it look like tomorrow? Christine Perfetti walks through the steps to achieving team alignment on where to drive the future products and services in A User-centered Approach to Product Planning and Visioning. Your UX leaders will transform the design’s existing user experience into a compelling (and competitive) long-term vision.

Your team gets immediate access to Dan Brown, Jim Kalbach, and Christine Perfetti’s expertise when you subscribe to UIE’s All You Can Learn Library. For just $29 per month, you can start sharing these seminars (and the 363 others in the library) right away. (It’s easy to sign up, you can cancel without penalty, and it’s 100% guaranteed, so there’s no risk.)

Bust through the insulation. Develop a deep understanding of your users. Build a vision for well-designed products and services.

What are you waiting for? Start today. Subscribe to All You Can Learn.
Published here on September 19, 2019.

About the Author

Jared M. Spool

Jared M. Spool is a co-founder of Center Centre and the founder of UIE. In 2016, with Dr. Leslie Jensen-Inman, he opened Center Centre, a new design school in Chattanooga, TN to create the next generation of industry-ready UX Designers. They created a revolutionary approach to vocational training, infusing Jared’s decades of UX experience with Leslie’s mastery of experience-based learning methodologies.

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