John Allspaw wrote a great blog post titled On Being a Senior Engineer.  I read it, nodding along, and realized that his post isn’t really about being a senior engineer.  As Allspaw puts it, “I expect a ‘senior’ engineer to be a mature engineer”.

He’s totally right.  A senior engineer, or a senior user experience professional, or (I think) a senior anything is about maturity.  It’s not just about the number of years that you’ve worked with a given technology or done a particular job.  It’s about how well you get your job done.  These items from his post particularly resonated with me:

• seek out constructive criticism of their designs – When you’re senior, you know that your work isn’t automatically perfect.  You know that others have valuable perspectives, that they have knowledge that you don’t have, that others can be the source of a valuable insight that you wouldn’t get otherwise.
• understand […] how they are perceived – Allspaw said it well here: “Mature engineers know that no matter how complete, elegant, or superior their designs are, it won’t matter if no one wants to work alongside them because they are assholes.”  Oh, and this too: “Be the engineer that everyone wants to work with.”
• understand that not all of their projects are filled with rockstar-on-stage work – There’s a lot of work to get done.  Being willing to do the work that needs to get done, not just the high-profile work, is one of the ways that you become senior.  This is related to, but definitely not the same as, being the person who everyone who everyone wants to work with.
• lift the skills and expertise of those around them – One of the most important things that you can do in a senior role is to help your team be better. If you’re the rockstar on your team, but everyone else around you is floundering, you’re not senior.  You need to help those around you so that they can be rockstars too.  Create a team of rockstars, and that’s one of the ways that you become senior.
• make their trade-offs explicit when making judgements and decisions – Nothing is perfect.  Life is a balancing act.  When you’re making trade-offs, document them.  It will help others understand your thinking, which makes the team better and which helps with gathering constructive criticism.  It will also help yourself in the future so that you remember why it is that you decided on one thing over another.

Allspaw makes a lot of other awesome points, and I feel like I’ve lifted enough from his post as it is.  His blog post is one of the most insightful and thought-provoking that I’ve read in quite some time.  It’s long, but I recommend reading all of it and thinking about how it applies to your career and your life.

Alex Griendling wrote an awesome blog post about the predilection of the design community to redesign something that they glance at and decide that they don’t like.  His post concludes with this, which I think applies to more than just design:

Were designers to simply offer their opinions on newly released identities or logos, that’d be one thing. Instead, by offering an opinion and an alternate solution that is presented as being better, we’re disrespecting the designer(s) that made the work while completely ignoring that the piece being critiqued went through the same process that we deal with every day. A little empathy towards work produced and, in turn, the designers that produce said work, would go a long way toward elevating the community’s discussion next time a redesign descends upon us.

It’s important to remember that, when you’re not involved with a project, you don’t know why design decisions were made, what constraints they were under, or what inputs they had to consider.  Coming in as an outsider, criticizing a design, and then presuming that you can create a new design in a day or two in a vacuum is a bad example of the design process, and it sets a bad precedent for all of us in user experience.

It might just be confirmation bias, but I feel like I’ve been hearing the same question a lot lately: how do you present your results from your user experience research?

I don’t think of the question in this manner.  When you state the problem in this fashion, it presumes that there is one way to do it, and that you do it once and that’s it.  My goal in conducting research is to have it make an impact.  I can do the most awesome user experience research that has ever been completed on any product anywhere in the world by any researcher, and it’s meaningless if it doesn’t actually result in an improvement to the product.  I think that the correct question to ask is, “how do you share the results from your user experience research such that they get acted upon?”

Presenting your research results is never a single task that you do once and never do again.  You will share the results of your research over and over again throughout the development process, regardless of whether the process is agile or waterfall or some mix therein.

The first thing that you should do when you are conducting research is ensure that you have buy-in from whoever you’re going to need it from.  This certainly includes the designer and program manager, and usually includes others as well: additional researchers and designers who are working on related projects, software architects, engineering managers, QA managers, and anyone else who could block the adoption of whatever results come out of your research.

The second thing that you must do is ensure that you and the designer are always on the same page.  After you have conducted the research and are in the process of analyzing the data, you need to involve the designer to ensure that you have captured all of their concerns.  When I am crafting recommendations, I usually create a first pass of them as part of the analysis, and then work with the designer to get their perspective.  In my eyes, that first pass at recommendations is a strawman, intended to kickstart the conversation about what the final results should be.   You want your final results to include recommendations that are the user experience recommendations, not just the user experience research recommendations.  You don’t want a designer to feel like they’ve never heard about an issue until an official results presentation meeting, and you certainly don’t want them to feel like your recommendations don’t meet their design goals.

Likewise, if you anticipate that these recommendations are going to be contentious or will require significant unexpected work, you should discuss the research results and recommendations  with those who are most likely to be impacted by that.  These discussions are usually 1:1, and give you the opportunity to understand other constraints.  If there are major constraints, such as scheduling constraints, you can work in advance to prioritize the recommendations, and work with the designer to come up with a design that addresses as much as possible now as well as a long-term design that will be implemented in the next version.

Once all of this is done, the way that you communicate your research recommendations depends on the needs of your audience. Your communication style needs to match theirs. If they communicate exclusively through their bug-tracking mechanism, then your design needs to be communicated there too. If they communicate via wiki, then your design needs to be wiki-fied. If there’s one stakeholder who really needs to buy off on your design and everyone else will follow that person, then you need to figure out who that stakeholder is and figure out how to get them to buy off on your design. If everyone needs to come to agreement that your design is the one that they will implement, then you probably need to have one discussion with project managers and a different discussion with engineering. Each of those groups have different goals and different needs, so having a separate discussion with each of them means that you’re able to address their unique goals and needs, as well as answer any questions that they might have.

As a part of all of this, you might give a presentation to a roomful of people to discuss your research results, and you might write up a big report and send it out in email.  But that’s not the end of the process.  It’s only the beginning.  You’ll need to share your research results more than once. You’ll need to track the development process and ensure that your recommendations are being acted upon, and communicate with the team if they’re deviating from the recommendations. It might be that they’ve forgotten elements of your recommendations, or that someone new has come on board and simply isn’t aware of them, or they disagree with it and so are conveniently disregarding the research, or (as in every software project that has ever existed) they’re having to make changes to their plan (adding features, cutting features, cutting parts of features, etc), and thus parts of your research recommendations are impacted by those changes. If they’re going to make changes or compromises in the design that you researched, you should be a part of that discussion — you know the design and the research recommendations the best of anyone, and you know why you made the design recommendations that you made, and you can help them make decisions and discuss the trade-offs between development time and user experience.

Remember: no-one cares about your work more than you do. For your research recommendations to be truly effective and fully implemented, you’re the one who’s going to have to track it and make sure that it actually happens.

Greg Hoy of Happy Cog has written an awesome blog post about being a great user experience designer: “Good work isn’t enough”.  Greg is right: creating the most amazing designs (and research) isn’t sufficient for you to advance in your career.  You also have to be a good person to work with.  You have to be a good team member.  Greg lists several points of what makes a great designer, including being respectful, being patient, and put in extra effort with no strings attached.

Greg says that this applies to people who ” work in an agency or web department within an organization”, but I think that it’s a lot wider than that.  I think it definitely applies to anyone in user experience, and quite possibly anyone in software engineering at all.

For those of you who attended my talk at DevFest today, here’s my slides from the talk.

Many thanks to DevFest for giving me the opportunity to speak, and for the people who asked me questions or just offered up kind words about my presentationin person, email, or twitter afterwards.

The HTC blog has a post from its Director of User Experience about how they redefined the HTC Sense, and did so via user research.  He doesn’t elaborate a lot on what research they did, but rather their key learnings and how that informed all of the design decisions that they made.

My little researcher heart goes pitter-patter when I hear of stories like this, of companies willing to step back and completely reconsider everything based on user research.  Go HTC!

This quote has been making the rounds again:

“User feedback is bad at telling you what to build. It’s great at telling you what you fucked up” – Phil Libin, CEO of @Evernote

I haven’t actually been able to find the quote in context, so I hope that Libin isn’t as ignorant about what user research brings to the table as he sounds in this Twitter-sized quote.

It appears to be making the mistake of assuming that gathering user feedback is the same as doing user research.  They’re different beasts.  It’s not difficult to show users something and get feedback on it.  User research is more than just showing something to people, writing down what they say or did, and then going back and telling people about that.

Feedback doesn’t just tell you “what you fucked up”.  If you think that’s all that you’re hearing in your user feedback, then you’re not listening to your feedback.  You’re only hearing part of the message in the feedback.  Don’t just take your feedback at face value.  Take the time to analyze it and understand it.  You’ll learn a lot about what you got right and what you got wrong.  If your users perceive that you got something wrong, then you’ve got to decide what to do about it.  I wrote a post about feedback and constructive criticism awhile ago that covers a lot of this.

Feedback also can tell you what to build.  By hearing what works and what doesn’t work from your users, you have the seeds of inspiration for building the next big thing.  It might or might not be related to what the feedback was actually about, but that’s the beauty of the human experience: every interaction we have impacts us, and it all comes together sometimes in ways that we can’t explain when we have that sudden insight that tells us what to build next.

But feedback isn’t everything.  Feedback is just a teensy subset of user research, and I sincerely hope that anyone who is CEO of a company knows that.  User research can tell you what to build.  The research that you do when you need to figure out what to build isn’t as neat or easy-to-conduct as the formative research that you need to do when you’re trying to figure out what to build, but it can lead to that lightbulb moment where you figure out what’s next.  If you don’t know what this entails, go find an awesome user researcher (hi) and ask.