Transcription

SAM: Right who has got a spare seat next to them?

There is one here?

There is a few spare seats over here?

Okay, who has got a seat next to them?  Seats here.  Okay we are good?

Ready yes?

Cool, so just a couple of announcements before we get started.  The luggage room is now closed but you can pick up your luggage from 5:30 p.m., try not to pick it up in between, gets disruptive.  Your T. shirts pick those up from lunchtimes onwards, pick them up any time this afternoon and tomorrow r but not until lunch today.

The SWAG station,  — in the Graduate Centre, there is sponsors and SWAG there for you pick up.  Please don’t forget to do that.  If you are going the tweet use the #WCLDN.

Lunch is not this session, but the session after, 12:30.  Then the social tonight is in the rocket from 6:00 p.m. so now we have got Crispin, who is going to talk about object  — I can’t say this  — object-oriented user experience.  Thank you.

(APPLAUSE).

CRISPIN READ: Right.

I forgot my clicker, since I started talking about object-oriented user experience over a year ago now, I started around the time when all the designers in our industries were adding the two letters to their CV and their linked in profile, U and X, that is grand, we want to be desperately consider users in everything that we do.  But the, the part that I am slightly uncomfortable with is that it is automatically assumed as a graphical design thing whereas, it is a lot more than that, it is a designing a user experience is encompasses a lot, lot more than just the graphical design that we do.  This presentation is about the connections between what we do as developers and what we do as UX practitioners and designers and how they, they can better marry up and produce better work together.

So I am Crispin Read, a UX consultant specialising in Opensource technology and agile delivery.  I also just to chuck a little add in, I help run a national scheme for apprentices in web development whereby we recruit young people from often from disadvantaged backgrounds or underrepresented groups.  And we coach and train them through a yearlong placement in a web development team.  It is my belief that every web development team ought to have an apprentice with them, if you are interested in finding out more about that, please come and find me and hit me up on twitter or talk to me in real life.  Seeing as we are all in the meet-space as it were?  Yes, so back to the OOUX.  And, so, I have been a web developer for coming up 20 years now.  Unlike most people in UX, I come from a development background rather than a design one.  Also unlike most people in UX I have been doing it for a really long time.  We, I used to have a consultancy specialised in what we were terming user driven development.  Not undertaking work unless we could be sure whether there would be user benefit from the work we are doing.

So, yes, started building websites down in the 90’s.  You know, obviously, they were awful terrible things, table based lay outs and all my mark up in CAPS.

But when they started more professionally shall we say?  I was, a turning point for me, around the turn of the millennia I had a job for the Peabody Trust, building in extra net of 6 different buildings going up in Silver Town at the same time.  People with different plans and architects and design and build people and the contractors and everyone had to shop and share plans and whatnot.

The important thing for me at that point, that is when web design and web development stopped being about pictures of things and started being about people doing stuff, people doing tasks and trying to achieve things with the things that I was building.

This talk today is that, is kind of split into 3 parts.  The first part I am going to talk about UX is in general and then I will try and talk about UX and objects and how they connect and then for the last part, there is a practical exercise that I am going to share with you that makes the process of talking about user experience relating to objects.

I have a slide.

So UX is different things to different people.  So drawing from my personal experience of peoples opinions for UX for a designer it maybe a way that we are able to reframe their objective artistic opinion as fact to the client in order to get their way.  Or for a front end dev it maybe a way for them to spend days and days of a budget on a new animation technique they would quite like to try out.

That you know, when we talk, when we are justifying things in the user benefit, this is for UX, we want to see the measurement, this is a big thing about user focus development and you you know, UX development.  There is measurement around it.  It is not just opinion.

The, the clients as well.  Clients tend to think about UX as interaction design or really a graphical user interface design, that is what they understand as UX.  You know, lovely transitions between stages and beautiful interactions of navigation and when you resize things move about.  That is simply not true, the UX is, is a apart from that.  Whilst all those things are really important in the design of you know, in the end point design of what we are doing, you have got to, it is the icing on the cake right?  I have this analogy of like, if you have got a massive cake, and all of it is icing and there is the cake in the middle; that is a shit cake!

Reason for this slide:  There is a thing that I have seen, a, a Venn diagram of art and science and UX in the middle and this really winds me up.  Because really art has virtually no place in it at all because you know, if you, you know, there is art and design that is not what I am trying to dispute but, artistic opinion, artistic value is such as small, small part of it when we talk about design we should be thinking about design solving problems rather than achieving artistic quality.

So, what is UX then?  What do we really understand from UX?  I have got this quote.  I think this is from Mike Atherton, enhancing satisfaction, … user … pleasure provided between the interaction between them and the product.

Which is all encompassing there is no real mention of, well, it is implied that that is in design but it is much, much further than that.  Really we are talking about that users are really important.

It is, yes, justifying the work that we are doing as I was saying, used to be the user development focus, justifying the work we are doing by provable benefits to users.

Goes further than usability, usability is can I achieve what I want to achieve, tick, yes, you can do that but UX is more, did I like that I did that?  Would I do it again?  How do I feel about it?

It encompasses so much more than the design of, of the procedural design of a, of a process or a product.  Because you know, so, like thinking about a website you know, the UX, the tone of the voice of the whole thing is super, superimportant.  You know, there is going to be more benefit from sorting out the automatic e-mails that go out and making sure they are all correct and all come from the same tone of voice and that is a great user experience because you are, you are known for your jard out of, that is way on top.  There is no graphical design in there.

Then the big win for it all is, is behavioural economics.  You know, almost all like modern sales strategies you know, are founded in these ideals around behavioural economics and the way that we make decisions and prospect theory and so on, that we, we as people are so much more likely to buy down load subscribe, do the things that customers want us to do based on how we are able to make them feel rather than the things that you might expect them to make decisions on like the price or the value or the demonstrable value of your product or service.

I wonder if I am supposed to be on that one?  , no.

So, UX for me, to go on about it even more about planning measuring, testing, than it is about designing.

There is a quote from Jim Barksdale who used to run net scape where, his quote is.  If we have data let’s go with data, if all we have got is opinion, let’s go with mine!

(LAUGHTER).

You know, management people they love that quote.  Powerful CEO but, when you look at that, the other way around, if you don’t have any data all you have is opinion and, and it is actually that quote is a classic example of and anyone heard of the term the hippo?  The highest paid loud person in the room! It is your client that just doesn’t stop talking.  When they have an idea because it is their idea it is the most important thing.

One of the thing that is UX can give us when we have a measurement framework around what you are doing, is that you get to say thanks for your input.  Here is our measurement framework, this is what we are measuring and you are thinking?  No, gives us no benefit! Which is empowering you know, when you do run into the hippos.

So jumped on to this slide earlier.  So, what is the problem you know?

Talking of the benefits of working in this.  So what is the problem?  Why aren’t we just all working in this way of you know, everyone is has had UX on their CV for 18 months, why?  Why isn’t every dev team working in this measured iterative way?

I think one of the problems is that it is kind of, kind of accidentally monopolised by the creative teams or the design teams whereby, their, well you okay, you the UX now and then maybe the developers are sidelined or siloed out of that process whereas it for me at least it is you know, it is much more of a team thing and if you know, if the design team are also doing the UX coming up with a hypothesis for testing and they are doing the testing you would hope but, because that is all one team.  Testing your own work, as a developers you know, you test your own work for your own piece of work, but if you are testing work, you are testing someone else’s.

This is how it should work with UX because UX needs testing you can’t, you can’t have an improved user experience unless you are testing it otherwise you know, we are back to just opinion.

Yet it is quite difficult we they are, I talked about you know, the, this is what UX is and we should be doing it.  But you know, it is difficult to break down those silos and stop ways that you are working whereby someone is designing something and then parsing it to developers to develop.

Lots of people, whilst you know, movement towards more agile practice and more team driven stuff is you know, is prevalent, we are still kind of a bit off of that being the absolute norm.

But yes, I think my point about the problem is, you know, it is difficult but it is not unachievable.  It is, to push ourselves in that way is going to, the s going to bring about some great results.

Things are difficult at the beginning, riding a bike and swimming they are difficult at the beginning.  Once you can do them it is not, it is the change that is difficult rather than the actual thing.

And just to talk about clients as well.  Because I feel like you know, I do try and rein this in because it is not a poke at designers.  The clients also massively to blame for everything!

You know, the things that clients like that are a bit from you know, that are much less useful than the, they are just not useful, they are like site maps.  The thing that they have decided that they want and you can’t shake them out of it.

What UX research and testing and adopting a pattern of this, of incorporating all the development and everything into a you know, a user focused approach, gives us like I said, the tools to move clients away from things like site maps that they have dreamt up and then given you.  You get to test the things that they want and tell them what the benefits would be and you know, the further down the project you get, you can put monetary value on them.

I think you know, so talking about it as a a way to stitch up clients; it is not but it give us a better relationship with our clients, if we are moving towards the same business goals everyone is happier, kind of necessitates a more agile form of working.  I think there is a myth that clients hate agile but clients don’t hate agile.  Clients fear uncertainty and if your process isn’t agile enough to convince them or isn’t stable enough to convince them of benefit that is is what they are scared of.  It is not that agile itself will cost them money.

They will have to relinquish control.

So moving on to the next bit now and talking more about objects and practically how this works.

This is a diagram from a blog post by Sophia, Voychehovksi, wrote a point a couple of years back act object-oriented user experience, she was doing the CNN mobile app for the 2012 presidential election, you can’t see that at all can you?

She was brought in late to the project as a UX person and the dev team ready to start work and start their sprint.  The boss says, all you need, give the one template to get them started.  Got a couple of days.  She couldn’t design in her head just one part of her machine without conceptualising the whole thing that was going on.  She came up with this diagram of connected objects and how they might relate to each other.  Okay, 10 minutes  — okay, speed it up!

Then what comes out of this is object-oriented UX being able to talk about what we are building as related and connected objects rather than a procedural thing, a process.  It is about putting object design over action design so there is another quote from Mike Atherton, thinking about a system through the lens of the real world objects in a users mental model.  So things like products, tutorials, locations, not digital world actions like search and filter, compare, check out.

Bonus right, because this is, if you start to design in this way, to think about design in this way, this is how we want to work as developers we want to know about the objects and how they relate more than how this will look at the end.

It’s much better for us to be involved in the design of a thing rather than make this picture happen.

As I’m going to slightly speed up so this is an example of a recipe site with everything stripped out, head of footer, signage all gone, what we’re looking at is objects.  So there is an ingredient, recipe and a chef.  And the bits inside the objects you can see.  So for an ingredient you’ve got this recipe or that recipe then this recipe goes into here and the chef may have a favourite recipe or their recipes.  What you can see immediately is you don’t need any additional navigation, you’ve got infinite contextual navigation between objects, which is grand for search and for the user experience and being able to understand how people are using things when you are tracking what’s happening on a site, you can then make more decisions, better decisions, about what further to develop in the future.

And it’s not a new thing.  This book is like from 1993, or something, and the people who designed the user interfaces in the olden days were the people that designed the things themselves which arguably is why they were shit {laughter}.  Yes, moving on …

Prioritisation you know is another key thing to mixing up between design or the creative team and the doers the builders, the developers.  When we’d got things that are in priority that are extracted from a project, you can make better decisions together about how to go about them and which ones to do in which order.

So, back to Sophia Voychehovski.  This is what I’m going to share with my imminent 5 minute warning.

So the first step is you brief your project as briefly as you can like a sentence or 2 to describe what it is you are going to do and then your 5 main point your features, the things it is going to do.

Then you go over that as a group.  So, designers, developers, product owners, people in – everyone involved in the project – and you highlight all the verbs, sorry, highlight all the nouns and then from those you can start to abstract the objects.  So a solution a challenge – that’s sounds like a thing, there is a challenge that we’re going to do and then comments.  We can see comment a lot so that’s going to be a big deal and DIYers so DIYers that’s a user type obviously so there is another object.

So that’s you extracted these objects.

You define the content in them so we have a DIYer, a brand, a challenge, a solution, a product.  Then adding in.  Then we’re starting to pull out the fields or objects within the main objects.  And this again is a great thing.  It’s not final, you are not committing to anything massively at this point.  If there was a disagreement about whether or not a DIYer had a profile pic you put a question mark – it goes down – post it on a table, however, you can do it in Trello, however.

The different colours by the way is just the blue ones, things that we’re saying are meterish – things we might perform actions with like filters or searches or something.  Because at this stage because we’ve got designers and clients in the room, got people who are particularly au fait with that it doesn’t really matter to them but we want them to understand what the objects are.

Then the next part is we get all of our main objects so now we’re talking about the relationships between them so still in this single column and so how do brands relate to a DIYer? Well, a DIYer loves particular brands, or something.

And another thing here, see I’ve grouped these ones because that’s a step so that’s part of a thing that is stepped so you are expecting more of them to occur inside.

And the next step is you run a prioritisation exercise with everyone.  So now we can see – and this isn’t from a design point of view which order these are going to appear on a mobile. This is what’s most important.  Because now once you’ve got all this ranking, now you can make really good decisions about the development and you can involve people who don’t understand development because they’re not confused because they understand that these are objects that are more or less important to users.  And because this is a group decision, you are coming to a consensus immediately rather than having something you would or could argue about later.

You can return to this.  It’s not the end of it, something that is finalised, signed off, this is how we’re building it, it’s a thing to keep talking about so if you do stray from it you can say hold on you’ve just said this particular – the products loved thing is now super important whereas when we all sat down before we said it was right at the bottom of the list, why has it jumped up?  It enables you to have that conversation without friction because you’re talking about a decision you all made together and the impact of straying from that decision, rather than the hippo wants it.

So, this is object orientated user experience.  It’s not a silver bullet, but it does kind of edge us, force us even, into what I believe are better practices for working.  You know it makes us develop earlier, it makes us communicate better, it makes us involve customers, clients in the development that we’re doing.

It’s not an end to end process either.  The object mapping thing is an additional exercise to maybe incorporate into some projects but I believe a really useful one and have used it a number of times with really good success.

And what it does, above all, for me, there are extra things to understand from that the object mapping exercise, but it’s about clarity in the communication of what we are building and how we talk about it between the people who are doing the building and the people who are doing the buying.  As far as I’m concerned it’s a framework for better communication.

The end.

{Applause}.

SAM: Right, do we have any questions? Thank you so much.  A couple here.

FROM THE FLOOR: It sounds very similar to some things that I’ve heard about from the domain driven design.  Have you come across that?  Do you offer any comparison?

CRISPIN READ: Works in conjunction, I guess.  There is a lot to be said for domain driven design.  You would incorporate both, I think.  And talking about things in ways that your client can understand is absolutely paramount to them being involved in the process and when we’re trying to do more iterative development and trying to involve clients as much as possible, anything that goes towards making them more comfortable in attending a stand up or a review is brilliant, in my opinion.  And yes domain driven design perfect for that.

FROM THE FLOOR: Cool; thank you.

SAM: Any more questions?  Yes over here.

FROM THE FLOOR: Very trivial: what was the post it tool you used because I saw there was a share?

CRISPIN READ: Can’t remember, I did it in a rush.  Give me a poke on Twitter and I’ll find out and send it to you.  That was just to demonstrate with a bit more clarity on a screen, I would use normal post its to actually do the exercise.  That was more for the presentation.  Or Trello.  Trello is another good one.

FROM THE FLOOR: I saw this talk a few months ago and asked the same question but I can’t remember what it was so we can tweet about it, yes.

SAM: Question here.

FROM THE FLOOR: The client and their opinions, it’s a common problem and interesting if you have a guide how you shake them of their bad ideas or try to convince that your ideas is good, you know measurement tools you use?

CRISPIN READ: Well, for measurement tools, yes, I think as early as possible getting your client to agree to their business objectives with you over demands of features.  So, once you have their business objectives then you can start to build up from that so your business objective – and you need to push them push them push them until they’re going as high level as you can.  Business objective is we want more visitors to the site, we want more – why?  How?  What are you doing?  You know the whole thing is completely included.  So, your plan going forward with your client is about ultimately making them more money and the way you make them more money is by making their customers buy more or increasing the number of customers.  So, the things that go towards that as a measurement framework, you have objectives and then what do you measure, what are we going to measure together to achieve that.  That’s kind of different for every client because they will have differences but if you just type in measurement frameworks for – yeah – you could Google it and find a few.  There is no main real framework that I tend to use over others.  See what comes out of the conversations.

SAM: Any more questions?  Yes, at the back.

FROM THE FLOOR: So we brought a similar exercise to a customer and they completely blocked the whole process just saying that we as a company should prepare everything for them and just present it instead of working together with them on an exercise status.  How do you handle that?

CRISPIN READ: Well, some people don’t want to be saved, right? {laughter} And really when you have a relationship with a client, you know there are 2 groups of people in that relationship, so if they are adamant that they don’t want to make that relationship work better, then fire the client.  If they’re not prepared to work with you, or you know – but if they pay you enough money and you can tolerate it it’s a business decision I guess.  But some people just don’t, they won’t.  As I was saying to the gentleman over here, if you are getting an agreement with people that you are following business objectives, you are working with them to achieve stuff, then you can start to say, well I’m afraid you need to do this, or you need to appoint someone to work with us on this, because if we just do this by ourselves the results will be less for you, you will make less money.  I think once you frame things into you’ll make more money if you do it this way, they tend to be a bit more understanding, a bit more open to making more money than they are to doing more work.

SAM: Any more questions?  Yes, go on.

FROM THE FLOOR: I want to ask do you have any case studies on-line about how you’ve worked with clients about this?

CRISPIN READ: No, I don’t, but if you look up OOUX Sophia Voychehovski does and I kind of glanced over like her post, she’s got a couple of posts specifically about developing that, the object mapping technique that are really useful.

FROM THE FLOOR: Thank you.

SAM: You were having trouble saying that, the people writing it are.  Any more questions?  Are we all good?  Excellent thank you Crispin.  {Applause} Okay, I do have a schedule announcement.  The lightning talks in track B this afternoon unfortunately 2 out of the 3 lightning speakers couldn’t make it so the organisers are currently trying to figure out a replacement for that.  If you’ve got a lightning talk you want to do please get in touch but I’ll be updating you later on with that what that will be replaced with.

So, now we have a room change 20 minutes so you can probably grab a tea or coffee as well.  In here we have Alain Schlesser and he will be talking about modern PHP architecture around a legacy WordPress site and that is at 10 to 12 so you’ve got 20 minutes.  Thank you.