You want people to spend more time engaging with your content and less time struggling to find it. A great information architecture (IA) tells a story, creates flow, and aids discovery for the people using your products or services.

What do your users say about finding your content?

Here are some things I’ve repeatedly heard (or close variations of) in usability testing sessions.

“I can’t buy a product I can’t find on the site … it feels like to find anything I have to get my treasure map out.”

This is the moment the product team observing the session hit their heads on the desk or scream. A poor information architecture leads to a drop in sales.

“I’m not sure how I got here. I’m just going round in circles. I can’t find what I want to find. Perhaps it doesn’t exist.”

You’ve put effort into creating the content, but if it can’t be found, however well-written and designed it is, that effort is all in vain. Publishing content is not the measure of success; a user who consumes and acts on it is.

And from stakeholder interviews …

“When I need to find something on our website, I just use Google. I have no idea how our consumers find anything.”

How can you expect users to navigate your website when your colleagues who know the content exists find it an impossible task?

If you’re hearing similar things from your users and colleagues, then it’s time to take a hard, critical look at your information architecture.

Over the years of helping organisations improve the findability of their content, I’ve whittled down long checklists and many thoughts on information architecture to six key principles. They act as my guide for critiquing and creating a successful site structure.

Principles to shape your information architecture

1. The names and sequence of global navigation terms will determine the proposition, personality and story you are communicating.

What’s the story your primary navigation tells about your website? What’s your invitation and offer to the site visitor? What journeys into the site are you surfacing as the most useful for visitors?

2. Organise content around the key tasks of the intended audience and the way they think about and structure the information.

Why do users visit your website? What are their goals and tasks? What makes for a successful visit? Are the answers to these questions reflected in your navigation?

3. Restrict the number of choices in the primary navigation to create small, confident guided steps; a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention.

How many choices are you showing? How hard are the edges between the labels used? What can you prune to stop overwhelming users with a paradox of choice?

4. Having content found and consumed is more important than being represented in the global navigation.

What pages in the site structure are given prominence because they’re someone’s pet project? Which pages break the website’s organisational logic? What looks like it doesn’t belong where it sits?

5. Labels should be short, meaningful and consistent; use terms the audience understand, expressed in the way they speak.

When you listen to users, what words do they use? What labels do you have that use internal product names and organisational jargon? Where do you go to regularly listen to your users’ language?

Online forums, your call centre and service desks, shadowing your frontline and customer-facing staff, are all great places to discover the language your audience uses. A colleague of mine, Ellen de Vries, refers to this as ‘content harvesting’.

6. Create flow into, around and across a website by establishing and reusing organisational metaphors in a consistent manner.

What are the entities you use (e.g. a person, a place, an object, a thing) across your website? How do you connect them together? Where’s the list of entities saved, and how’s it shared across your organisation?

Taking a first step toward an improved information architecture

Your information architecture should be treated as a product rather than a project. It requires ongoing review to keep it optimised.

Take a look at my three-point check-up to spot the tell-tale signs that your information architecture needs attention before it becomes really broken.

We ask for two precious and finite things from site visitors: their time and their attention. Your information architecture should be designed and refined to help users spend more time at the destination and less time on the journey.

This article was originally published on the Clearleft website:

https://clearleft.com/thinking/yippee-ia-six-principles-for-creating-a-successful-information-architecture

Yippee IA: Six principles for creating a successful information architecture was originally published in UX Collective on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

MAGNUM

Having run this activity in workshops and training courses over the years, I’m confident there’ll be some mental images of chocolate-smothered ice cream, a few Clint Eastwoods in Dirty Harry, maybe the legendary photo agency, a Tom Selleck or two, or an oversized bottle of champagne. There are lots of ways to interpret and visualise this single word.

It’s a good demonstration of what happens in most meetings. Everyone nods and agrees and leaves happy, thinking their Magnum is the one everyone sees and agrees with. Disappointment and disagreement are postponed for another day.

Somewhat perversely, many people host meetings so they don’t have to make a firm decision. They encourage people to talk in the abstract without anyone having to commit.

As designers, our skill is in taking the abstract and making it real. It’s good to create something everyone can look at and have a shared conversation around. Being able to go from 0 to 1 at speed is a form of alchemy (and we can repeat this trick when what we show needs changing).

We turn our thinking into sketches, scamps, wireframes, prototypes, and high-fidelity designs. We lower risk, save money and speed up project delivery by communicating ideas that facilitate more meaningful discussions. As a designer, don’t go to a meeting without one or two visuals to focus the conversation around.

Be selective. Not everything in every fidelity.

In design projects, I’ve noticed a tendency for folk to fall into the trap of stepping through the fidelity of the designs in a linear fashion. Some rounds of 6-ups then become sketches for pages before being tidied up into wireframes and passed into Figma. But you don’t always need every step for every page.

A colleague of mine has a phrase I really like: “We’re designing websites for users, not pictures of websites for users”. It’s a useful reminder that the digital design process has an end goal, and our efforts should be targeted at getting useful solutions into the hands of the user as soon as possible. In the wise words of designer Brenda Laurel: “Design isn’t finished until someone’s using it”.

The following three questions are helpful when working out what to create and what’s the right fidelity at the right time.

1. What’s the quickest, cheapest thing I can create to help make the next design decision?

Your visual output should be steered by the problem you’re trying to solve and the people you need input from. The work you create should help you explore the challenge at hand. At the early stages of a project, I generally find exploring concepts more important than the execution of the artefact. Even more so when I can show and talk through the ideas.

I’m always looking to do less where I can. The time I save can then be invested where it’ll have the most impact or where the design challenge is the trickiest.

I sketch on paper when I need to think freely, flesh out unusual ideas, or generate a wide range of possibilities. When I need to add finesse, polish and personality, I tend to work in high fidelity. But not always. If a developer can work from a sketch on a napkin or an ordered pile of post-it® notes then this is as far as I’ll take my design work.

Low fidelity doesn’t mean shallow thinking. In fact, the opposite. The best way to arrive at the concepts, metaphors, and models that will drive any design work is to do it early in a project and through many iterations and critical reviews.

You’re answering different questions with different mediums. In one complex project working with a travel company, a whiteboard was the perfect canvas to start investigating ideas. Working in a team in a shared space helped unblock inertia. The whiteboard forced conversation and collaboration, and whiteboard pens excel at preventing any chance of drawing in fine detail.

Most importantly, in this project, the next design decisions were made by people in the room who could congregate around the whiteboard.

2. What can I create to best demonstrate the essence of the concept?

It’s easy for interesting ideas to get lost in the backlog or to be considered only at the end of a project if there’s any time left. Creating micro demos throughout a project helps avoid this.

These small proofs of concept don’t have to be digital. It’s amazing what you can mock up with paper, pens and basic craft equipment. You don’t have to wait until you’ve figured out the entire end-to-end journey. Better to create demos for parts of the product as you go along.

As designers, we can over-fixate on the precision of execution to the detriment of the thinking behind the design. With a demo for a concept, it’s useful to remind yourself you’re not showing the proposed design; you’re showing your ideas that may (or may not) edge toward being the delivered design.

Performance, accessibility, browser compatibility, alignment with brand guidelines, considered typography, and beautiful touches of design delight are all important, but not yet. At this stage, it’s perfectly okay for your demo to be bootstrapped together with poor code and held together with sticky tape. Test out your ideas with something tactile and throwaway while you have the time and space in a project.

I worked on a project with an intricate checkout flow with layers of conditional logic. Designing small discreet demos to pilot novel interaction ideas helped evaluate and develop our potential solutions. In this case, getting a feel for how something behaved in a browser was the fastest way to try and share new ideas without becoming too attached and committed to any of them.

3. How can I most effectively share the thinking behind the design with decision-makers?

Until you get into the final phases of delivery, the thinking behind the design is more important than how it looks. Early design sketches are ways of expressing your thinking. The success of your sketches is in helping whoever’s looking at them more easily imagine the final product.

In communicating the thinking behind the designs, I’ll take time to identify who needs to make what decisions and what will help them to do so.

In most projects, you use a variety of channels and formats to share your work in progress. The trick is to use the best channel for the decisions you want made and the situation of the decision-makers. To do this, I start by answering some questions:

• Who is the decision-maker, and what do they need to make a confident decision?
• Is the conversation going to be synchronous or asynchronous? If there’s a choice, what’s my preference?
• What’s the perceived size and implication of the decision being made?
• What type of feedback am I looking for? A firm agreement or a nod to indicate that I’m moving in the right direction?
• How familiar are people with the challenge, and how much context is required?

Your job is to make it easy for the decision-makers to arrive at a timely, informed, and confident conclusion on how to progress.

I’m a big fan of using screen recordings to show work early to get feedback on ideas. They’re quick to produce, easy to distribute, and for the viewer, they are convenient to watch when they have the time and space to do so.

Showing the work and simultaneously sharing the thinking behind it is a potent combination. This approach is especially useful when the design ideas are more radical and when decision-makers benefit from having more time to reflect on and consider the proposed approaches.

I’ve found that keeping videos short and focused on a single design decision is most effective. The recordings don’t need to be Hollywood blockbusters. However, like all good stories, they need to have a beginning, middle, and end. Avoid a tour through the interface. Instead, highlight the problem you’re trying to solve and explain why and how your proposed ideas provide an interesting and impactful solution.

Putting the ink into design thinking

Design can make the abstract concrete. It allows us to play around with and stress-test new ideas. Design enables us to explore possible futures and then bring them to life.

In articulating ideas, look to create just enough to express an idea, to spark a better conversation, and to rapidly investigate alternative (and hopefully radical) options.

I like to think about my work as being a step on the road to confident decision-making. Most of my work is a set of disposables rather than deliverables, and I celebrate this. The value is in the depth of thinking and clarity of communication that comes from creating visuals to share. That’s more important than the quality of the marks on the page.

This article was originally published on the Clearleft website: https://clearleft.com/thinking/putting-the-ink-into-design-thinking

Putting the ink into design thinking was originally published in UX Collective on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

The internet is killing the planet. We’ve designed a ferocious energy-consuming monster.

The statistics are sobering:

• If the internet were a country, it would be the sixth most polluting country in the world, with annual emissions similar to those of Germany¹.
• Communication technology will probably use 14% of global electricity by 2040, up from just under 4% in 2020².
• A single request to ChatGPT can consume 100 times more energy than one Google search according to Sam Altman, CEO, OpenAI³.

It’s easy to feel helpless and overwhelmed in the shadow of such catastrophic facts. The problem is hard to ignore, and it’s difficult to know what to do that might have a positive impact.

Here are five ideas to design with the environment in mind. They might be small steps, but many small steps can soon add up to a significant change.

Make the planet one of your stakeholders

Deciding the planet’s role provokes an environmental conversation at the project’s outset.

We start projects by bringing practitioners and stakeholders together for a kick-off workshop. This session ensures we have a common understanding of the work ahead.

One of the activities in this workshop is to agree on a project RACI. We list who is responsible, accountable, consulted, and informed within the project. It’s a simple exercise but the clarity is useful for identifying what expertise and input we should seek from the named individuals.

Having the planet be a proactive partner in your project ensures its needs are considered.

If the planet is to be consulted, get someone to act as a proxy for Mother Earth. Then the project team can interview them or email them a set of questions as they would other subject matter experts.

If the planet is to be informed, consider what updates to include in your project communications. Adding a placeholder slide to your playback deck, having a hashtag for messages in Teams or Slack, or including a recurring agenda item in steering committee meetings all help to keep the dialogue ongoing and front of mind.

Design with the planet as a user

Be intentional in giving the planet a voice within your design and innovation process.

Successful digital products come from meeting the needs of your users. A deep understanding of their goals, tasks and context enables design teams to create usable, engaging and elegant solutions.

When based on research, personas are a useful tool to help a digital team walk in the shoes of the intended users.

Most products and services have multiple personas representing a range of audiences and their needs. To help make greener digital design decisions, you could add their environmental attitudes and needs to each of your personas.

You could even go one step further and have the planet as a discreet persona within your set of audiences. This approach becomes a powerful statement of the importance you place on your environmental commitment.

Why stop at personas? When you document product requirements, give the planet a voice within your design process. User needs, user stories, and user requirements specification documents all offer the opportunity to hear from the planet.

Set a climate budget for your digital products

‘Successful societies and institutions recognise the need to record their history’. This is a mantra that guides the open-source HTTP archive. Its regular state of the web report shows a continuing fight between code optimisation and webpage bloat. The latter has the upper hand.

In March 2014, the median page weight for desktop webpages was 1.08MB. Jump forward five years to March 2019 and it increases to 1.82MB. Moving forward to March 2024 the median size of a desktop webpage is 2.56MB with mobile pages rapidly catching up at 2.27MB.

As webpages grow bigger they become ever greedier in their need to consume energy.

What’s the climate budget for your website and individual web pages? Setting figures ahead of projects helps to guide the work to achieve a smaller carbon footprint.

Page weight is the responsibility of the whole digital team. Everyone’s input is needed. What content can you remove? Do you need the purely decorative images? Can you cut the duration time from your videos? Can you eliminate redundant steps in a process? Can you remove unnecessary pages? How can you refactor to reduce repetitive code?

Development decisions, visual design choices, content approach, and product strategy all contribute to the environmental impact of your website.

Creativity and low-impact websites aren’t mutually exclusive. Increased energy consumption and a greener web are.

Invite the planet to your design critiques and code reviews

Better products are created when you show work early and often and ask for input from colleagues and collaborators.

You want to invite people to your critiques who ask probing questions. It’s even better if the mix of expertise spans different disciplines and encompasses a range of viewpoints. After all, no one person can know everything.

A great critique forces you to articulate your work and the thinking behind it. They provide a moment to take a step back to check your outputs meet your intended outcomes. They give the space to have the work challenged by critical friends with the collective aim of improving the product.

To design with the environment in mind, invite the planet to be an active voice in your product feedback sessions. Give one person the explicit role of representing the planet in your reviews. Get them to ask questions about product decisions through the lens of the impact on the environment.

This will initially seem odd but trust me the awkwardness soon goes. This role-play has a bonus. By switching the person representing the planet you quickly broaden your colleagues’ and organisation’s knowledge and empathy for sustainable design matters.

Measure the impact of your work

Contrails left in the wake of aeroplanes, smoke billowing from factory chimneys, the shimmer of heat and the smell of vehicle exhaust fumes on motorways. These all give a visceral sense of industries with a green challenge.

The impact of the internet is less obvious to our senses. The glow from the screen belies a catalogue of energy consumption needed to serve a webpage, from the hosting and transmission of data to the cooling of heat-spewing data centres and server farms. Much of the power needed is still being generated by dirty energy. The enormity of the problem is in the scale of usage with a predicted 30.9 billion (and growing) number of internet-enabled devices in the world by 20254.

Tackling your carbon footprint starts by making the invisible more visible.

Audit your digital footprint to see what changes you can make. Review your website to see where reducing the code base, removing unnecessary plug-ins, optimising file sizes and simplifying the information architecture can increase both your sustainability and page performance. The web carbon calculator, Digital Beacon and Ecograder are free-to-use services useful for an initial evaluation.

Take a look at your hosting solution and where their energy is coming from. The Green Web Foundation has a growing open directory of green hosting providers to make switching to cleaner options easier to find.

Alternatively, take a more radical approach like low-tech magazine which is entirely solar-powered. No sun, no website. Or branch magazine whose design changes based on the quantity of fossil fuels on the grid to always stay inside a carbon budget.

Make your commitment visible to give it the focus it requires. Set targets based on where you are and where you want to get to in what timeframe.

Making your digital output more sustainable is an ongoing initiative not a one-off project. Measure, implement changes and share your progress. Rinse and repeat.

How do you ensure the planet gets a voice in your digital product decisions?

The tips in this article won’t save the planet. They will help get your teams to consider their work’s environmental impact and find ways to design sustainability into your digital products.

Let me know how you design with the environment in mind. What practical advice would you suggest? How do you put the planet into your project teams?

References

1. How to stop data centres from gobbling up the world’s electricity. Nature Journal. https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-018-06610-y

2. Assessing ICT global emissions footprint: Trends to 2040 & recommendations. Journal of Cleaner Production.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S095965261733233X

3. AI’s Growing Carbon Footprint. Columbia’s Climate School. https://news.climate.columbia.edu/2023/06/09/ais-growing-carbon-footprint/

4. IoT and non-IoT connections worldwide 2010–2025.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/1101442/iot-number-of-connected-devices-worldwide/

This article was originally published on the Clearleft website: https://clearleft.com/thinking/is-the-planet-the-missing-member-of-your-project-team

Is the planet the missing member of your project team? was originally published in UX Collective on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

When planning a workshop I start with the stops. Once I know the duration of the workshop I begin by plotting out the breaks before thinking about activities. It gives me a framework to help participants to stay attentive and engaged.

Post-it® notes, either paper or digital, are the perfect tool for workshop planning. Tactile and easily moveable. Small enough to keep your words concise. Visual to give a spatial representation of your session. My approach is to work horizontally to give myself a timeline for the session, add in the breaks, and only then fit the activities into the gaps.

How many breaks and how long?

We can look for guidance from other people who ask for time and attention.

There’s an adage in the theatre referred to as the Broadway Bladder. It states audiences have a need to urinate every 75 minutes. It’s a rule of thumb used by playwrights for the placement of intermissions.

Alfred Hitchcock kept his movies concise. He advised fellow directors “the length of a film should be directly related to the endurance of the human bladder”.

The Pomodoro technique for productive time management developed by Francesco Cirillo splits tasks into repeated periods of 25-minutes of focussed activity followed by a 5-minute break.

I have a simple scale as my starting point for workshop breaks.

• Don’t go more than an hour in a workshop without having a break.
• For a 90 minute workshop I’d have at least one 15 minute break.
• For a three hour workshop I’d have a half-time stop for 20 minutes and at least a couple of 10 minute breaks.
• For a day-long workshop I’d start with lunch for at least 45 minutes, then have a 15 minute break in the morning and a couple of 15 minute stops through the afternoon.

Now these timings are a guide. They are compounded by context. The time of day, the day of the week, what else attendees have on that week; all have an impact on how you design your session. If you have to host a workshop last thing on a Friday afternoon, and who doesn’t love hosting or attending a project-critical session at this time, then you may wish to either make the session shorter, or make the breaks more generous.

Let people know when the breaks will be coming. Set expectations at the start of the session and as you approach each break. They shouldn’t come as a surprise.

The longer the workshop, the more I’d also look at varying the cadence, format and duration of activities. Variety definitely helps to keep attendees fresh and focussed.

Does it change if you are running the sessions remotely?

Being on screen requires more stamina from your attendees. Staring into the glowing screen for extended periods of time is hard work. Some people make it even harder on themselves by getting distracted with pop-up notifications and the need to reply to that oh-so urgent message (and yes, as a facilitator we can tell).

How much time do you need for a short break? To find out, go time yourself. Start your stopwatch and go boil the kettle and make a cuppa or brew an aeropress of coffee. Then fit in a trip to the toilet. Now add in a quick check on messages. If your planned breaks are under the time on your stopwatch then you aren’t allowing your attendees the time to comfortably take a break.

When designing your workshop plan for movement and getting away from the screen.

For online workshops I like to get attendees to take a photo of what refreshments they’re drinking and add them to the workshop whiteboard. The gallery of uploaded images provides both a collective talking point and a subtle nudge to step away from the screen.

Likewise for longer workshops, especially if they span a lunch break, ask attendees to take and share a photo of something outside. Keep it simple, something in their neighbourhood or even the clouds where they are. Being outdoors and looking at scenes of nature is the basis of attention restoration theory. Even when done for a short moment you’ll find your participants’ concentration will increase.

Breaks get you better results

As a facilitator and workshop host your aim is to get the most from the time you have with your participants. You are looking to create a positive experience where people feel energised rather than exhausted.

Successful workshops help participants to focus. They are purposefully designed to give attendees the space to explore, debate and create.

Make the most of the time you have with workshop attendees by starting with the breaks.

This article was originally published on the Clearleft website: https://clearleft.com/thinking/when-planning-a-workshop-start-with-the-stops

When planning a workshop start with the stops was originally published in UX Collective on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Our experience working with companies in travel, fintech, education, utilities, local government and the third sector is that behind-the-scenes frontline staff are wrestling with poorly designed digital tools held together with fragile processes.

Internal service design is about getting it right for your employees so they can get it right for your customers. Technology should support your staff to be efficient and effective when helping your customers. You can radically elevate the quality of service delivery by redesigning the employee experience.

Projects to improve the design of internal tools and processes can tend to take a backseat to more visible public-facing websites and apps. So how can you spot opportunities for improvement and build a business case for change?

Here are three ways to quickly identify and evaluate which internal systems and processes to focus your redesign energies on.

Review the tools you get your staff to use

Your staff are booking holidays, ordering takeaway food, looking for potential partners, renewing passports, watching movies, paying taxes and buying clothes on the digital devices in their pockets. The mobile phone is their remote control for running their busy lives.

Your staff have high expectations of the ease of use of digital tools. These expectations are set not by the tools you provide them but by the best websites and apps they choose to use daily.

All software dates. Over time new features get added, information to input changes, and interaction patterns evolve. These all add to an accumulation of technical and design debt.

An annual review of the tools your staff use is an effective way to spot opportunities to redesign them to keep them modern and efficient.

Context is key when undertaking a review of tools in use. Staff are often using systems whilst synchronously talking to customers, inputting data, and searching for information. These physical actions can be compounded by being in noisy spaces with challenging lighting.

A service safari is a cost-effective method to observe and evaluate the tools being used in real-life situations. In looking for design enhancements pay particular attention to how you can improve the speed to complete tasks and the accuracy of data entry.

In reviewing internal tools improvements often arise through:

• Re-organising the interface to more logically group content and actions.
• Minimising data to enter by using sensible defaults and appropriate form input types.
• Removing unnecessary content and clutter from the interface to make the task at hand easier to focus on.
• Reducing the need to switch between different screens or systems to complete a task.

Speed up onboarding and ongoing training

In many cases, your support staff are the human face of your organisation. Knowledgeable support staff who effortlessly resolve customers’ questions help build the reputation of your service.

Successful customer support doesn’t happen by magic. Initial onboarding and the ongoing training of your staff need to be designed for effectiveness.

Optimising the onboarding process for staff can result in significant operational efficiencies. Whilst working with an insurance company to redesign an internal system we were struck by the upfront cost of training. In talking to new staff each had undergone a ten-day course ahead of answering calls from customers. Experienced staff underwent a five-day refresher course annually. With a big support team and over 100 new joiners a year, a small reduction in training time soon adds up to a large increase in the capacity to answer calls from customers.

In helping customers with their queries, the speed to find, digest and impart the right information is critical.

In the insurance company, information for staff to refer to was available across multiple digital systems and in numerous printed manuals. To counter this confusing situation staff showed us the elaborate and inventive ways they bookmarked the information they frequently needed to go back to.

It’s only when getting back to the floor and talking to support staff do you get to see how they’ve hacked processes and systems to make them easier to use.

Opportunities to improve the expertise your staff deliver can be achieved by:

• Consolidating information into a single searchable source of truth.
• Optimising search for the natural language terms used by customers and support staff.
• Designing help pages to enable quick and confident consumption of the content.
• Delivering short bursts of training based on timely data of questions currently being asked.

Remove the need for unnecessary calls

Content has a cost. To be more precise, missing or misleading content has a cost. And it’s your customer support staff who unintentionally pay for it.

To elevate your quality of service you ideally want to have your support team solving complex and unique queries. To give them the time to do this you need to remove bad demand from the system. The calls that could and should be answered in other channels.

Customer support staff are a goldmine of insights. In many organisations, they have the most contact with customers. As a result, they can readily tell you the catalogue of unmet needs that cause unnecessary support calls.

How do you uncover the high frequency calls that are frustrating for the customer and the support staff? It’s surprisingly simple. I like to call it the eye-rolling test. Ask your customer support staff what topics they are asked about daily that they wish would disappear.

“I’ll scream if I have another call today about baggage allowance”.

We recently worked with an international airline on a project to improve their online help centre. The customer support team consistently told us of a single issue they dealt with everyday. Calls from customers asking about the size and weight of the bags they could take on a trip.

The scale and cost of the problem was enormous. It was common for each member of the team to take two calls a day on the topic. That’s ten calls a week each lasting around five minutes. With a support centre of 200 staff that quickly adds up to over 167 hours a week. That’s a lot of time dealing with a topic that frustrates customers in having to call to ask it, and support staff in needing to deal with it.

In knowing the problem we could then take a service design approach to finding a solution. We created a user journey map and plotted the communication touchpoints with customers over time and across channels. We then added to it where information about baggage allowances was given. It was apparent there were many moments in the customer journey where highlighting information on baggage allowances would be useful.

The result of relatively small design fixes was a massive reduction in calls on the topic with fewer frustrated customers and more capacity for the support staff to deal with more complex help questions.

“You can tell the time of year by the questions being asked. It becomes predictable”.

When working with a major utility company we used the same customer journey mapping technique to uncover how support calls changed with the seasons. In workshops with support staff, it soon became obvious which high volume and low value topics cropped up at different points of the year. This insight led to relevant information being added in call-outs on customers’ bills as well as being featured when relevant on the website.

The timely surfacing of information had an immediate effect on reducing unnecessary calls and freeing up time for staff to use their expertise where it added more value.

To reduce the number of unnecessary calls:

• Spend time talking to your support staff and do the eye-rolling test.
• Carry out call listening and run surveys with support staff to identify common issues that better content delivery could resolve.
• Run a journey mapping workshop to see where, when and how information on a topic is communicated to your customers across all your channels.
• Calculate the value and volume of support calls to help you prioritise the topics that cause bad demand.

Once you know the problem to tackle you are in a better position to design changes and measure the impact of them.

Improving the employee experience improves the customer experience

Small moments of internal service inefficiency soon scale up. This can quickly result in hours and days of unnecessary effort and frustration felt by your staff and your customers.

Great customer services are intentionally designed. And like all products and services, they need reviewing and updating to keep them fresh and fit for purpose. Taking time to regularly review how customer service is delivered is a cost-effective way to spot opportunities where design iterations can add value.

Make great customer service your competitive advantage by spending time improving the employee experience.

This article was originally published on the Clearleft website:

https://clearleft.com/thinking/supporting-your-customer-support-staff-with-internal-service-design

Supporting your customer support staff with internal service design was originally published in Bootcamp on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

If you’re redesigning an existing website there are huge benefits in getting to know the content you’ll be working with. The earlier in the project the better. A little upfront investigation will help you make informed design decisions.

A spreadsheet is an ideal tool to quickly see what content you’ll be working with. It’s somewhat helpful when optimising a website. It’s even more useful when you wish to explore more radical changes in design direction. Using real content allows you to push your ideas with the confidence that your designs will display beautifully even with the edge cases.

Here are four things you can do within 30 minutes to gain actionable insights to inform your design direction.

30 minutes to kickstart your design from a spreadsheet

For this article I’ve used Screaming Frog to carry out the content scrape and Google Sheets to manipulate the data. Other spreadsheets and content scraping tools are available.

First things first. Let’s clean up the data in the content audit. My first passes are broad sweeps to remove some of the noise. The intention is to swiftly move from drowning in data to being informed by information.

1. Sort the data in the content audit by status code and remove all pages with a 404 (not found), 301 (moved permanently) and 302 (found redirected) code.
2. Order the spreadsheet by content type and cut and paste anything that isn’t listed as text/html into separate sheets — images, audio files, application files etc.

What templates are on the website?

In analysing an existing website I’m more interested in identifying the variety of page types over the number of individual pages. In taking a systemic approach to the design I’m looking to create reusable components and flexible templates. A content audit can provide a good estimation for the variety of page types being used.

Start by selecting the data in the spreadsheet and alphabetically sorting it by URL.

Then select the cells with URLs that have the same folder name and page depth. For example /news/news_article_01.html and /news/news_article_02.html etc. Use your spreadsheet to give you a count of the pages.

Finally, create a simple table with the name of the page type and the count of pages in the adjacent cell.

Spreadsheets are set up to easily turn cells of data into graphs. Admittedly not often pretty graphs. Yet still useful ones. My aim is to visualise the information to make it easier to understand at a glance.

In most cases there is a corollary between location in the site structure and the templates in use. This can be used as a proxy for page types. It is also worth sampling a handful of URLs from your list to do a visual check for similarity.

A spreadsheet gives a 10,000ft guide to the variety of page types in use and quantities of each. This breakdown is a speedy way to kick off and prioritise a backlog of design tasks.

Extra tip: If the URL structure is more chaotic and doesn’t readily help identify page types then let the engineers in your team know. It’s a warning sign that automated content migration might be tricky with little to help map old content to new designs.

What are the longest and shortest page headings?

Setting type styles without working with real content is akin to walking a typographical tightrope whilst blindfolded.

As every battle-scarred and skilled designer knows, design is less about working with idealised examples of content, and more ensuring the integrity of the design can survive the inevitable clash with the extreme edge cases. Nowhere is this more apparent than with H1 page headings.

Using real content provides you with useful constraints to design within. Using real content allows you to show and select typefaces with actual examples rather than just ‘The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog’. Using real content enables exploration with meaningful words replacing nonsensical lorem ipsum. Heading lengths are a vital input to informing type styles.

I start by creating a new sheet containing just the H1 title and the H1 length. I then sort by ascending and descending order of character in the title. I’ll note down a couple of examples of the edge cases to use in design exploration.

I then go through the rows of headings to get the median value. The item located in the centre of the distribution. I find this more representative than using the average which can easily be skewed by anomalies in the data set. Again, I note it down to use later when stress testing my designs.

If you want to get more granular you can follow the steps above for each section of the website.

Extra tip: Share the full list of H1 headings with your content colleagues. Having a list of headings will help them spot themes and make suggestions on writing to get a reader’s attention.

What visual styles are used?

Displaying a montage of images in a spreadsheet. That sounds like nonsense. Okay it’s not what anyone tells you to do at design school. But give it a go.

Don’t expect a beautifully displayed grid of images. We’re favouring speed and utility. What we’re after is a sense of what imagery is used on the website and to spot any patterns in visual styles.

Sort the spreadsheet alphabetically by content type. Copy all the rows where the content type is an image (image/jpeg, image/png, image/svg) and then paste them to a new sheet.

You should now have an alphabetically sorted list of URLs for image files. So far not very visual. There are a few tricks to make the display more useful.

Add a cell to the right of the URL of the first entry and add =IMAGE(A2,1). The number 1 in the formula tells the spreadsheet to respect the aspect ratio of the image. If you change this to 2 the image stretches or compresses to fit inside the cell, and using 3 leaves the image at its original size, which may cause cropping.

Select the right corner of the cell and drag down the whole list of URLs. This will add the formula to each cell and reference the URL to the left i.e. A3, A4 etc.

To make the images easier to view, increase the height and width of the cells. To increase the height of all the cells click on a row and select all. Then right click and select resize rows N to N and add in a numeric value for the row height in pixels. Increase the width by dragging row B to the right.

Within a few minutes you have a scrollable list of images to be able to review the variety, quality and image styles in use. If you’ve ordered the list alphabetically by URL and there is a naming structure for images this will cluster together similar images such as icons, avatars, hero banners etc.

Extra tip: If you’re curious about familiar looking images the spreadsheet is a great stepping off point into a reverse image search. Select the URL and open it in Google, right click and ‘Search image with Google’ to see the image source and visually similar images.

How much text?

A content audit is a goldmine for colleagues in content roles. Content audits overflow with useful insights giving readability scores, sentence lengths, text ratios etc. Yet for this activity I’m not interested in the quality of writing. When designing a container for content I’m purely looking for the quantity of characters.

I’m most interested in looking at the page types designed for content consumption rather than hub pages. These typically are found at the end of the URL structure. The pages an information architect would call the leaf nodes or pages with no children.

Firstly sort the URLs alphabetically. Remove the navigation pages to leave just the content rich pages. Then sort the remaining data in the spreadsheet by word count.

With your spreadsheet ordered it’s straightforward to catalogue each section of the site with the pages that contain the fewest, the most, and the median amount of words.

The numbers prove useful in three key ways.

1. They help optimise the design of the reading experience. The volume of text guiding decisions on type sizes, line-lengths, and padding.
2. They highlight if you need to consider in-page navigation from a scrollspy or skip links.
3. And they give real world examples of actual content to stress test design ideas with.

Extra tip: Let your developer colleagues know if you spot page types that routinely have text ratios of less than 25%. These pages will benefit from investigation to see if code bloat is adversely impacting performance and the subsequent user experience.

Spreadsheets before stylesheets

If you’re a designer who’s spreadsheet-averse then you’ve probably stopped reading long before now. For the spreadsheet-curious designer give it a go on your next redesign project.

Knowing the content considerations early in a redesign project can avoid days of wasted design time. And the good news is when you start content auditing for design decisions you’re no more than 30 minutes from Figma.

This article was originally published on the Clearleft website:

https://clearleft.com/thinking/starting-design-work-in-a-spreadsheet

Starting design work in a spreadsheet was originally published in UX Collective on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Achieving quick win after quick win. What’s not to get excited about? The paradox of digital teams relentlessly chasing quick wins is that it is likely to be slowing down the growth of your business.

At this time of year in the UK the fruit trees are laden with the autumn harvest. If you go out picking fruit you can quickly spot the difference between the short term opportunist and the seasoned forager.

The opportunist grabs at what’s in front of them blinkered to anything not in immediate sight. Quality and taste are a secondary concern to their frenetic snatch and grab. They often drop as much fruit on the ground as they manage to collect.

In contrast the seasoned forager has a strategy. They know what they’ll do with the fruit they pick. They have the right clothing and equipment to get the job done efficiently. They know how to reach the best fruits.

The same can be said for digital teams. There are unintended and often unforeseen consequences from overly focussing your efforts on the low-hanging fruit. Here are five danger signs to look out for and ways to avoid them.

Danger sign #1. You get busy doing busy work

For you and your team it’s go, go, go. Calendars are bursting with meetings, workshops and design reviews. Decisions are being made. Delivery and deployment is ongoing. Analytics data is being paraded around in PowerPoint decks.

Rushing around can easily disguise the fact that although you feel productive you’re producing little of real value to the user and the business. You know you’ve fallen into this trap when you’re constantly asked to tinker with what already exists and implement small-scale predefined solutions.

A couple of great questions to regularly ask your team are: “What have you worked on in the last month/quarter that you’re most proud of?” and “What have you worked on recently that has most improved a user’s life?”

If the answers don’t come readily or don’t excite your team then the chances are you’re inadvertently just picking at the low-hanging fruit.

Danger sign #2. You can’t find time for more impactful work

When your team is head down with pressing deadlines it becomes hard to remember to also look to more distant horizons. A design team has a finite amount of time and energy. In focusing on the immediate you are sacrificing time to address the longer-term and potentially more impactful work.

Plotting a course to a more valuable future requires a plan, a map, and ongoing course correction.

Let’s start with your strategy. Do you have one? Does the digital team use it in their decision-making? Does it say what you’ll not do (or not do yet) alongside what you’ll focus on? A good strategy should give everyone clear direction and remove distractions.

In digital design you’re never far from a map. Be it a product roadmap, customer journey maps, service blueprints, agile user story mapping, site maps, data mapping etc. Maps are useful to give shape to otherwise hard to see landscapes. Zooming out gives you a wider perspective.

The often underrated “impact vs effort” matrix is a simple yet powerful map. Plotting your work in progress makes it visually clear if you’ve developed too much of a taste for the low-hanging fruit. If you have then it’s time to adjust course and restore balance in your team’s digital diet.

Danger sign #3. You develop a taste for vanity metrics

Low-hanging fruit is often accompanied by easy to reach analytics. Foraging around in analytics tools for a big enough number to justify the work done. As long as the graph goes up any data point will do.

Measuring cause and effect with accurate attribution is tricky. A precise single number is extremely hard to arrive at when actions result from a complex web of factors including decisions made over time, across channels, and influenced by multiple people.

3M has a long and esteemed track record of delivering value from innovation. They bring over 1000 new products to market every year. This focus on continuous innovation has helped them to stay competitive in constantly changing marketplaces. To create a culture of ongoing innovation they measure it. The company has a mandate for each division to generate 30% of its profits from products introduced in the last four years.

What gets measured provides a strong signal on what an organisation holds important. Introducing longer-term metrics for innovation shifts the culture to explore new opportunities rather than just optimising existing products.

Danger sign #4. Your sticking-plaster solutions mask the underlying problem

Design teams attract problem solvers. People feel energised and rewarded by work that has purpose. If you end up in an endless cycle of quick wins you’re not going to be getting the best from your team.

If the focus of your team’s efforts are quick wins then ask yourself what’s preventing them from doing more ambitious work. It could be the absence of a coherent strategy. Or it could be a lack of quality control. Let’s take each in turn.

With no strategy — or one that is so abstract it doesn’t translate into prioritising what to work on — design teams fill their time with work that has high volume but little value.

To find out if this is the cause, ask your design teams to go through what they’re working on and articulate how it aligns with the organisation’s strategy. If they can’t connect their work to it then it’s time to clarify and re-communicate your strategy.

A lack of time for quality control is the other major cause of getting stuck in the rut of endless optimisation. A culture of ship-and-then-fix can quickly lead to a growing pile of preventable technical and design debt. Get your team to estimate the time spent patching up what could and should have been better polished the first time around.

Danger sign #5. Your design teams forget how to be inventive

If all your design team is asked to do is small-scale work you’re at risk of a stagnation of the imagination.

Design innovation is a habit. The more you do the better you get at doing it and the better you get at doing it the more you do. Like many positive habits the hardest part is getting started and sticking to a routine.

A good test of your inventiveness is to periodically take stock of the work your design team is doing. I like to classify work into three broad categories futures, features and fixes to see if there is a healthy balance in the team’s efforts.

If you need to jump start the team to address more innovative ideas then run a programme of design sprints, host a hackathon or set time aside for skunk works style projects. These techniques ringfence the time to inject speed and intention into looking for and tackling more impactful work. They can provide the gateway to a more considered programme of innovation.

Design transformation comes from climbing a little higher

There are hidden and unpalatable side effects when you overly gorge on low-hanging fruit. Quick wins take time and attention from your design team that could be more productively spent. It’s too easy to inadvertently get trapped in an ever-decreasing circle of smaller and safer tactical patches.

Design transformation takes effort. Staying relevant to changing customer needs and keeping ahead of your competition are constant and ongoing challenges. Picking the low-hanging fruit might seem a sensible approach but the biggest rewards are only available for those who reach a little further and climb a little higher.

This article was originally published on the Clearleft website:

https://clearleft.com/thinking/how-picking-low-hanging-fruit-can-sour-your-design-effectiveness

• Grammarly insights proudly tells me ‘You’re building quite the voluminous vocabulary. You used more unique words than 95% of Grammarly users.’
• LinkedIn tricks me to click by letting me know ‘You’re getting noticed. You appeared in NNN searches this week.’
• Strava tells me I took a King of the Mountains (KOM) section accidentally without any intention on a hill that would be considered unimpressive by most average cyclists.
• Medium gives me the alliterative ‘stats for your stories’ on a weekly basis.

All meaningless metrics. At least meaningless to me. None of the above examples provide me with insights on anything I’m looking to understand or take action on. These numerical nuggets lack personal context — are the numbers good? They focus on easy-to-gather quantities and neglect any measure of quality.

Numbers somehow feel important. In business, decision-making figures are wielded as immutable facts. They become hard to argue against. Numbers are taken by many people as both powerful and persuasive.

What gets measured gets done. You are what you measure. Measurement eliminates argument. If you work in an environment that puts store in these oft-quoted business adages then I urge you to take a moment to challenge your calculations. Let’s review our metrics to ensure they can stand up and be counted.

Here are four questions to ask to see if what you measure adds up.

1. Why is this metric important to you?

Somebody clever once said ‘measure what you value, don’t value what you measure’.

If you start with the tools you are in danger of embarking on a fool’s errand placing importance on what the tools can easily measure. Google Analytics (other tools are available*) presents you with a wealth of data but how much of it do you — or should you — care about?

Average time on page; bounce rates; sessions with search; page depth etc. Which of these are important for you to know? And for each metric, what number is a sign of success?

If you create or receive regular data reports, periodically ask what changes have you made with the figures you capture. If you don’t make decisions or take actions informed by any particular metrics then it’s adding clutter rather than clarity.

*Why not turn the beast on itself and google “alternatives to Google Analytics”. I hear positive reports things about privacy-first products such as Fathom, Simple analytics and Matamo.

2. How can we balance this metric?

In striving to change a data point there can be an unintentional yet detrimental impact on something else you care about.

One way to counter this is to always pair your data points. State your primary goal, usually a positive increase or change in a number. Then balance it with a secondary goal that focuses on maintaining a different number you measure. For example, “improve customer satisfaction with a product whilst not adding to customer support costs”, or “reduce the churn rate for subscriptions by N% without offering additional promotions”.

The secondary goal is there to prevent over-optimisation of the primary goal.

3. How could we game this metric?

How could you get false readings, however short-term the blip, in order to meet your key performance indicators (KPIs)?

This is a fun question to ask in a meeting or workshop. Ask everyone to temporarily embrace their Machiavellian side to work out how the targets you’ve been set could be achieved in creative or underhand ways.

4. What change are we looking for?

I often see dashboards and business reports that provide a snapshot in time divorced from timelines and trends. Figures, percentage points, graphs and charts that look like meaningful data but don’t tell the wider story.

In setting any metric it’s important to benchmark where you are, where you want to get to, and by when. This information prevents panic and helps track progress.

For your key indicators decide and document when to take measurements, what numbers will be a cause for concern, and what numbers will trigger a celebration.

Stating this upfront gives you a framework to understand and act on the data you subsequently get.

Please measure responsibly

Goodhart’s law, named after the British economist, states “When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure”.

Numbers aren’t intrinsically good or bad. They’re just indicators to help you understand a situation and take a sensible course of action. They aren’t written in stone to be slavishly followed forever.

A good set of meaningful metrics should be personal to your situation. The numbers you track should be one of many inputs, both quantitative and qualitative. What you measure will benefit from regular review and should be changed if the measurements no longer help you chart a course into your desired future.

Numbers are important in business. Let’s make sure our numbers count.

This article was originally published on the Clearleft website: https://clearleft.com/posts/can-you-count-on-what-you-measure

Can you count on what you measure? was originally published in Bootcamp on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Desk research is a key way to get to know a client and what’s happening in their world. Search engines provide a series of useful, if somewhat hidden, shortcuts that help you to get more effective results.

Here’s a round-up of the seven search tips covered in the video. They provide a useful starting for UX designers and content strategists when doing desk research in the discovery phase of a project. You can mix and match them as you need.

site:clearleft.com

Use this to limit results to those from a specific website. It gives you an indication of the size and contents of the website.

Clearleft -site:clearleft.com

Using a search term (Clearleft) and then excluding a site from the results (clearleft.com) is useful to see where else online the client appears.

site:*clearleft.com -www

This syntax returns pages with clearleft in the url (*clearleft.com) with the exclusion of anything on the www domain (-www). This is a useful way to see what sub-sites sit on the same domain such as side projects, campaign microsites or pattern libraries to explore.

related:clearleft.com

The search operator ‘related:’ returns a list of websites based on similar content and user searches. It’s a good starting point for competitor research.

Search term -exclude

As an alternative to getting more precise with a search term (i.e “exact phrase”), you can remove phrases from results by adding a minus symbol ahead of a word. If you combine this with a wildcard asterisk your results will include stemming on a phrase (e.g. -photo* will remove photography, photosynthesis etc).

Predictive search terms

The suggested search terms are a useful shortcut to see key volume search queries. When referenced against a website you can see if the queries represent missing or hard to find content.

Image search

You can either use [google.com/imghp](google.com/imghp) or the tab for images on the results page. This gives a flavour for how the client or a topic is visually represented. I find it useful to think about what is missing that I’d expect to see and what is surprising.

Search engines regularly update their syntax both adding and removing operators. The supported search operators for some popular search engines can be found at:

Google refining web searches

Duck Duck Go search operators

Bing advanced search keywords

This article was originally published on the Clearleft website:

https://clearleft.com/posts/google-search-operators-and-syntax-for-ux-desk-research

Google search operators and syntax for UX desk research was originally published in Bootcamp on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Successful and sustainable digital products come from a blend of innovation and iteration. Yet most design teams and their digital product roadmaps are out of balance.

Start-ups over-index on big and new ideas at the cost of accumulating design and technical debt. Established organisations play it safe tending to focus on incremental optimisation and in doing so put themselves under threat from disruptors and challengers. Of course, these are generalisations. But ones I repeatedly see working across sectors with businesses of all sizes and at varying stages of digital maturity.

What does your product roadmap look like?

As any Product Owner will tell you, prioritising what to spend time doing is the challenge that gives them sleepless nights. Finding the time to explore potentially bigger and more valuable ideas is not a problem exclusive to digital product management. As many a President will confirm.

“What is important is seldom urgent and what is urgent is seldom important”
Dwight Eisenhower

“The most important thing you need to do [in this job] is to have big chunks of time during the day when all you’re doing is thinking”

Barack Obama

Immediate problems tend to shout loudly for attention. Yet making too many knee jerk changes and firefighting one crisis after another quickly leads to a product roadmap that is shortsighted and unstrategic.

Innovative ideas need time to find their voice. Being further away from the frenzy of delivery they can be muffled and easier to ignore.

A way to ensure balance in your product portfolio is to map out the work you have in play. Even better if this is put on display (not hidden in a PowerPoint deck) and updated as a living document.

There are many frameworks for plotting your activities within a product portfolio. The two I most often use are:

The Lean Enterprise innovation portfolio map. This moves the progress of initiatives through four gates (explore, exploit, sustain and retire) with the option to kill any that fails to meet the success criteria.

The portfolio map from Stratygyzer. This plots initiatives in two quadrants — explore and exploit — with an axis in each for risk and return.

If you’re working in a product team that doesn’t have a holistic view of your product portfolio then I’d recommend you run a workshop to create one.

How to get your product teams looking over different horizons?

Product portfolios and roadmaps are ideal for showing the quantity and movement of initiatives through stages of production readiness. But, how do you set up your product teams to work across these different spaces simultaneously?

One way (but certainly not the only way) is to rotate your design squads to give them focussed time on either futures, features or fixes.

Futures — finding the next big idea

Companies known for bringing new products and services to market are united by one common trait. They put considerable effort into the research and development of their next big idea. Piloting multiple concepts and placing numerous bets is a proven strategy for successful product innovation.

This is the time to explore big and radical ideas using low risk and low-cost techniques. You want to increase the number of ideas generated to gain confidence as quickly as possible in which ones to pursue.

This is a divergent phase. The number of ideas should trump their fidelity. For the team, a ‘yes and . . .’ attitude should replace ‘yes but . . . ‘. You’re looking to initially test ideas for their desirability with viability coming later.

The futures team should have a wide remit. Initiatives should explore unmet customer needs, potential new markets, different business models, emerging technology etc. Techniques such as Google Venture style Design Sprints, Wizard of Oz prototypes, and proposition testing fit into the toolkit for exploring potential futures.

Keep in mind these are learning projects with disposable prototypes. Success comes from finding out what not to spend effort on as much as identifying promising concepts to take forward.

Many organisations consider the skills for successful innovation needing a separate team of superstar designers. I disagree.

Setting up an innovation lab sounds impressive and a powerful marker of organisational intent. Most often, the creation of a separate innovation department divorces it from the realities of the business and leads to an indulgent form of technical and design theatre.

Another common approach is to employ an agency to inject a dose of innovation. The benefits of extra capacity and capabilities should be weighed up against a lack of detailed business context and the ability to see the idea through to fruition. In my experience, it’s much better to have an agency working alongside members of an in-house team where techniques for innovation can be gained through coaching, immersion and practice.

Innovation is exhausting. Moving your team in and out of this space gives them a chance to recuperate and come back refreshed. Having this secondment timeboxed also helps to focus minds on rapid creation and concept testing rather than over-engineering a single solution.

Features — improving the product

The feature team is the production line for your product. Their purpose is to take a brief, create designs that solve the problem outlined, and deliver something new into the interface.

This team is responsible for incremental but sizable changes. Typically the initiatives for this team have enough definition to outline the problem to tackle and the desired outcomes to achieve. A good brief should give space for creativity and be a problem to solve not a solution to implement.

This is the world of backlogs, user stories and user acceptance testing (UAT). Confidence in the designs comes from evaluative methods such as usability testing sessions and multivariate testing (MVT).

A successful features team has an eye for crafting solutions. The work is elevated through polishing the details in the layout, interactions and copy. To help with this the team should be carrying out regular crits and showing their work early and often to stakeholders. Project meetings should include discussions on performance, accessibility and success metrics.

Digital product teams live in a fast-changing world. The growing expectation of your audience, opportunities afforded through new technology and shifts in the competitive landscape all require a nimble delivery focussed unit.

Fixes — polishing your product

Trust from an audience is hard-won and easily lost. In usability testing sessions of existing websites, you often get to witness the death of a thousand cuts. A typo here, a broken link there, inconsistent design patterns and slow loading pages.

Accumulated technical and design debt can unintentionally come to define the experience of your product.

The team doing fixes, maintenance and enhancements should have a focus on velocity and autonomy. In this activity stream, there should be little need for meetings or protracted discussions. Bugs to fix and production debt to remove should be prioritised against set criteria and continually deployed when done.

This is vital work to do but it shouldn’t be the only work you do. It’s easy to fall into the trap of thinking you’re doing lots of work just because your time is filled with activity.

A note on rotation

In the futures, features and fixes diagram there is a suggestion that 50% join and 50% remain in the team for each activity. This is to ensure a level of continuity and handover. It’s most important within the futures and features teams, where work started, may not be finished or will benefit with further iteration.

Rotation allows the team a regular change in pace and exposure to all the activities required to develop and maintain a digital product.

Even small digital teams can use the approach to gain balance in the work they do. You could divide a week between a few days spent on the future and features and a day doing fixes. Or the whole team could do a week of features, then futures, then fixes. The exact slices of time in each activity will depend on your setup. The important thing is to have some time for each activity.

Three activities that benefit from different approaches

Digital products need teams tackling ‘fixes, features and futures’. Over-focusing in one area will be detrimental to another.

Each activity requires a subtly different approach and mindset. Teams gain in productivity when time is allocated to each activity as it provides focus and avoids context switching.

This is one way to approach managing a team’s activities and product portfolio. I’d be interested in carrying on the conversation to find out how you ensure a polished product backed up with a flow of new initiatives?

This article was originally published on the Clearleft website: https://clearleft.com/posts/futures-features-and-fixes-setting-your-product-team-up-for-success

Futures, features and fixes — Setting your product team up for success was originally published in Prototypr on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.