With an estimated 50% of employees requiring reskilling by 2025, businesses that offer training and upskilling opportunities own a significant competitive advantage.

In this environment, the digital transformation of employee training through eLearning is a game changer. From onboarding to reskilling, online learning saves companies time and money, and has the potential to revolutionize the way we work and learn.

Effective and scalable eLearning gives your workforce the skills and capacity to adapt, innovate, and drive business growth to meet the challenges and opportunities of evolving global trends. However, unlocking the transformational aspects of going digital requires a shift of mindset. It starts with understanding key aspects unique to the digital learning experience.

Diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI)

Effective eLearning incorporates principles of DEI by creating a sense of belonging for all course participants and helping them connect more deeply to the learning content. This not only improves the quality and effectiveness of employee training programs but can have a significant impact across your business.

Advantages of integrating DEI into your training program

• Increased profits. Companies without a DEI strategy or with an ineffective one are 27% less likely to be profitable compared to their peers. Bringing this practice to your training programs helps set the tone across your organization.
• Employee retention. Creating workplace environments that value the unique perspectives of employees reduces turnover. Demonstrating that you value your diverse employees through your training program content helps set this standard for every employee.
• Greater and more inspired innovation. Employees are more likely to innovate when they are empowered to bring their own ideas and worldviews to their work. Delivering improved, more inclusive training helps every employee grow their capacity and capability to innovate.

When inclusion flourishes, it permeates the whole work environment. It enables everyone to succeed, and it leaves no one out. It has a positive impact on people’s desire to work for an organization and how productive they are, the quality of decision making, customer relations, innovation, revenues, and reputations. ~ Rebekah Steele, INdivisible, 2020

How to leverage DEI to enrich your corporate learning programs

Championing DEI in learning involves engaging learners on a deeper level, for example, by:

• encouraging employees to bring their rich perspectives and realities to their learning experiences
• empowering employees to broaden their perspectives and innovate solutions for diverse markets
• exploring creative ways to promote DEI in organizational processes and practices

To achieve these objectives, digital learning programs can be made more accessible and inclusive through the following tactics.

Snapshot from an organizational training module on inclusive writing guidelines that we created for a client offering health support services for a diverse group of clients. We designed this custom writing guide to support their capacity to be inclusive in serving their market base. These kinds of writing considerations can be applied to any training program content and extend to any content developed by your organization.

• Ensure the stock images, videos, and illustrations used in a course reflect the diverse identities, backgrounds, and roles in your company.
• Use simple, clear, and inclusive language that everyone can easily understand and relate to. We recommend creating a company-wide inclusive writing framework that can be customized for each department.
• Incorporate video translations to serve a multilingual market. For Canadian organizations, consider French, American Sign Language (ASL), and Langue des Signes Quebecoise (LSQ). US organizations may prioritize Spanish and ASL.
• Give learners agency by providing a balanced mix of audio, text, images, and videos.
• Evaluate content for bias and preconceived assumptions about the employees and any other course participants. Are there options for flexibility in the learning program? Do all employees have access to resources and requirements to take the course?

Put learners at the centre of your training programs and watch them flourish.

User experience (UX) and accessibility

Today’s employees have high expectations of their online experiences and interfaces, and that includes your eLearning offerings. Leveraging the convenience and flexibility of eLearning requires expertise in designing a user experience that helps ensure employees can retain and connect new knowledge to their work.

Complicated learning software features, unfamiliar navigation controls, and disorganized course interfaces and content structure on learning management systems (LMSs) can make content inaccessible and difficult to understand.

Drawbacks of poor UX design

• Low learning engagement. Learners disengage when navigating poorly designed interfaces.
• Poor knowledge retention. Employees can’t assess their knowledge and retain information if the course interface and structure are not accessible, organized, and responsive.

How to enhance UX and accessibility to maximize eLearning ROI

Screenshot from a case study demonstrating user experience-led features we developed for George Brown College. Read the case study here.

• Ensure consistency in content flow, navigation controls, and design elements. (Leading with people-centred design allowed us to build a flexible and accessible eLearning program for George Brown College that is now being used across Ontario higher education institutions.)
• Make the course more flexible by providing access via multiple screen sizes and devices. It’s helpful to adapt the course to fit the needs of employees who prefer to learn on their smartphones and mobile devices.
• Tailor the interactions and activities to give choice and agency to the learners. For instance, you may want to incorporate features such as resource aids, personalized reflection activities, and scenario-based assessments to enable course participants to put their learning into practice.
• Deliver similar content in multiple formats—from text to images, quotes, and videos—to improve accessibility and enable participants to engage with content in more than one way and support the diverse learning preferences of each of your learners.

Digital instructional design principles

Instructional design is different from UX design in eLearning, although they work hand in hand. Instructional design focuses on how people learn and how to transform subject matter content into a learning product. UX design then leverages instructional design to ensure the course material translates seamlessly on an LMS platform and is usable, scalable, effective, and accessible to all course participants.

Business impacts of incorporating instructional design principles into corporate training

Implementing instructional design principles in your training programs benefits your employees and organization, improving eLearning ROI in the following ways:

• Enhanced productivity and engagement. From onboarding to reskilling, effective learning programs empower people with the skills to become more effective at their jobs, which leads to increased efficiency and productivity.
• Improved retention. A 2023 Work Institute report analyzing employee retention complexities shows that professional development is a leading reason people resign. Learner-centred training programs help address this by opening up ways for employees to add value and impact to the business while pursuing self-improvement.
• Saved costs. It costs more to hire new employees than to train and reskill existing ones. Improving retention through people-focused professional development programs will save you time and money while adding to your bottom line.

Investing in learning helps establish a critical competitive advantage—and eLearning designed with a focus on DEI, UX, and instructional design will give your organization a chance to realize this advantage in terms of hiring, employee retention, and performance.

Start the discussion about eLearning ROI with your learning and training team by asking the following questions:

• Is there more we could be doing to make our eLearning programs inclusive, accessible, and effective for all employees?
• Are we creating opportunities for learners to apply new knowledge and skills in their work?
• How are we leveraging the latest eLearning practices to improve retention and productivity?

Interested in learning more about how to maximize the impacts of your digital learning and training programs?

We’d love to chat. Our multidisciplinary team at Say Yeah specializes in delivering holistic and customized corporate eLearning solutions that help organizations turn training into a competitive advantage.

Get in touch

The post How to Maximize Your Company’s Learning & Development ROI in 2024 appeared first on Say Yeah!.

Whether you’re a researcher, research leader, a designer who conducts research, or just someone who is eager to learn more about user research, these two conferences you should take advantage of with opportunities to learn from research practitioners.

UXRConf 2022

The fifth annual UXRConf will be taking place from June 6-7, 2022. UXRConf is the world’s largest UX (user experience) Research event, and we are excited to be attending this year’s hybrid conference.

The discussions will cover topics from growth research to UX insights to behavioural science.

Talks we’re looking forward to hearing:

• Insights to Equity: Applying User Research to Spotify’s Dib Strategy, with Alexandra Hornsby, User Research Manager, Spotify and Ashley Graham, User Research Manager, Spotify
• The Next Step in Accessibility, with Joel Isaac, Accessibility Manager, Novaelis and Pia Zaragoza, UX Mentor and Innovation Fellow at Springboard and General Services Administration

Check out the full lineup and conference schedule

Get your tickets today

The virtual tickets are free. The in-person tickets cost $1800 USD and limited spots are available.

Grab your tickets here

ReOpsConf 2022

The ResearchOps Community will be holding its first annual ReOpsConf on June 8, 2022.

This full-day hybrid event will allow you to gain insight into the field of Research Operations (ReOps) and learn about topics such as research repositories, scaling ReOps, and knowledge management.

Talks we’d like to highlight:

• Building and Scaling ReOps at the UK Dept of Education, with Alice Kiernan, Research Operations Lead at Department for Education, England, UK and Lucy Sutton, User Research Operations Lead at Department for Education, England, UK
• Building a Research Toolbox, with Andy Garber-Browne, DesignOps Program Manager, JPMorgan Chase & Co. and Carolyn Morgan, UX Researcher, Cisco
• Repositories in Practice: Using Knowledge Management to Create Research Stories, with Emily DiLeo, Sr. Design Research Specialist, SAP

Check out the full lineup and conference schedule

Get your tickets today

Remote tickets are free. In-person tickets cost $900 USD and have limited spots available.

Grab your tickets here

Our user research methodologies can help you reach organizational objectives

Learn about our approach to user research and explore our inclusive research toolkit.

Ready to evolve your research practices?

Contact us

The post UXRConf + ReOpsConf, June 6-8, 2022 appeared first on Say Yeah!.

Until March 19, 2022, you can sign up for the Service Design for the Real World: A Practical Introduction, Online Course, for free!

This program is perfect for those looking to incorporate service design into their organization, expand their current knowledge, transition into a service design role, or collaborate with those in the field.

Front stage and back stage. This service design concept illustrates that a consumer engages with some aspects of a service but there is more that happens behind the scenes to best facilitate that service.

The course ensures that you not only have an understanding of service design methodologies, but it teaches you how to apply Service Design in an organizational setting.

In this program, you will take part in a number of activities and be provided with a resource list to enrich your learning experience as you work through the 9 course modules.

9 course modules

1. Introduction to Service Design
2. Research & Discovery
3. Ideation
4. Prototyping and Testing
5. Stakeholder Management
6. Artifacts & Deliverables
7. Business Modelling
8. Becoming a Service Designer
9. Resources & Activities

For a detailed explanation of the course content visit the course website.

Service Design Course Website

The instructors

This program has been put together by three industry professionals who will also virtually guide you through your learning.

The instructors are:

1. Patrick Bach: As a Service Design & Behavioural Economics Leader Patrick has had the opportunity to speak at the Global Service Design Conference and other service design and customer experience conferences worldwide.
2. Chelsea Omel: Being in Innovation Strategy as well as Facilitation & Design, Chelsea has consulted individuals from many industries like financial services, technology, consumer packaged goods, and charities. Her experiences have provided her with the knowledge needed to guide others in surpassing difficulties and bettering their use of service design.
3. Markus Grupp: From his experience as a Design Leader, Markus has helped clients like Indigo, TELUS, Rogers Communications, and Orange/ France Telecom to embrace more human-centred design practices.

Free until March 19, 2022

This course usually costs $62.99 CAD, but if you sign up before March 19th you will have free access to the entire course.

Register here

Do you need further support with service design? We can help.

Learn more about our approach to service design.

Get in touch

The post Service Design for the Real World: A Practical Introduction, Online Course appeared first on Say Yeah!.

The pros and cons of the persona

Getting through the user research phase of a design project can seem daunting, but in reality it’s just the beginning. When you and your team get to reviewing and synthesizing your research, you’re getting ever closer to bringing your concept to life. Usually, one of the first steps post-research is to create personas.

Personas give you and your team an overview of a user or a group of users. They also outline high-level assumptions about your user’s preferences and their behaviour patterns.

An example of a completed proto-persona highlighting motivators, behaviours, and needs for a single archetype. Leah Buhley, 2013, for Rosenfeld Media.

As a tool in a designer’s toolkit, personas nudge us to perceive a possible user’s situation with greater empathy. They also spark fresh thoughts about how a product or service could be used. For digital products, a focused, task-based persona can be crucial during these initial stages.

However, if your team’s aim is to understand what your users need, personas aren’t the most effective tool. Personas alone can’t reveal how users would behave, and the contexts where they might use your product or service.

Ideally, methodical user research results in many artifacts that inform your design team’s understanding of your users. Other research tools include: customer journey maps, service blueprints, empathy maps, emotional journeys, and user stories. A combination of these methods will often lead to the best results.

Personas are great for ‘humanizing’ users, and for painting a picture of individual experiences within an archetype. However, you shouldn’t rely on them to define what larger demographic or affinity groups—especially diverse ones—might want. In these cases, analyzing a larger dataset of behaviour patterns and contexts makes the most sense.

Understanding users on a behavioural and contextual level

The Jobs-to-be-done (JTBD) approach is a framework that focuses on how users “hire” those products and services that help them complete a task or meet a goal. JTBD frames all design requirements around how users functionally use a product or services. So instead of referencing static, presumptive, and homogenized demographic or affinity group descriptions that come with personas, you’re focused on outcomes a user wishes to achieve.

Here’s an example of framing a user need with JTBD for a digital task-management and note-taking product, like Notion or Evernote:

Job statement: The user’s key task, which they are hiring your product/service to accomplish
e.g. Keep my project notes organized when I’m on a tight deadline

Outcome statement: The user’s wants or expectations (outcomes) from using your product or service
e.g. Reduce the chances that I miss a deliverable for a project.

Since living, breathing humans are always changing their perceptions of their challenges, goals, and tools, it’s crucial to frame their needs in a fluid way, too.

Jobs-to-be-done is a perfect tool for this sort of framing, because it focuses on a user’s context and goals, rather than less-informative and generalized demographic or affinity group information.

Simply put: people are trying to solve a problem by using your product or service. Understanding what problem they’re trying to solve is far more effective than generalizing a non-task-centric group they may belong to. Knowing what they need to do is far more actionable information than assuming you know who they are by following a persona or archetype that can only hope to resemble who they may be.

Go deeper by mapping user stories, states, and contexts

Some other great frameworks to consider as you work to improve you and your team’s understanding of how people might want to use your product or service are user stories and user states and contexts.

A user states and contexts map visualizes all of the requirements and needs that users experience. Image from the Fluid project.

Moving from research to product and service refinement

Testing and refining all of the methodologies listed above will extend and deepen your understanding of your customers beyond the limitations of personas.

As you evolve your approach, patterns will emerge in your observations, and you will become adept at weaving them into design requirements.

Longer-term, you can expect to see significant benefits from this approach:

• more effective design requirements,
• better prototypes, and
• better-informed design teams operating with more empathy after understanding the needs and outcomes of real users.

The path to effective service models and products is to deeply understand your user’s contexts and needs and the outcomes you can provide to meet those objectives. The tools and frameworks we’ve outlined here can leverage your user research into JTBD and user context maps, which will seamlessly direct you into more efficient product and development strategies.

Need help getting started?

Get in touch

View article in uxmag.com

The post Understanding users by going beyond personas, demographics, and affinity groups, published in UX Magazine appeared first on Say Yeah!.

Getting through the user research phase of a design project can seem daunting, but in reality it’s just the beginning. When you and your team get to reviewing and synthesizing your research, you’re getting ever closer to bringing your concept to life. Usually, one of the first steps post-research is to create personas.

Personas give you and your team an overview of a user or a group of users. They also outline high-level assumptions about your user’s preferences and their behaviour patterns.

An example of a completed proto-persona highlighting motivators, behaviours, and needs for a single archetype. Leah Buhley, 2013, for Rosenfeld Media.

As a tool in a designer’s toolkit, personas nudge us to perceive a possible user’s situation with greater empathy. They also spark fresh thoughts about how a product or service could be used. For digital products, a focused, task-based persona can be crucial during these initial stages.

However, if your team’s aim is to understand what your users need, personas aren’t the most effective tool. Personas alone can’t reveal how users would behave, and the contexts where they might use your product or service.

Ideally, methodical user research results in many artifacts that inform your design team’s understanding of your users. Other research tools include: customer journey maps, service blueprints, empathy maps, emotional journeys, and user stories. A combination of these methods will often lead to the best results.

Personas are great for ‘humanizing’ users, and for painting a picture of individual experiences within an archetype. However, you shouldn’t rely on them to define what larger demographic or affinity groups—especially diverse ones—might want. In these cases, analyzing a larger dataset of behaviour patterns and contexts makes the most sense.

Understanding users on a behavioural and contextual level

The Jobs-to-be-done (JTBD) approach is a framework that focuses on how users “hire” those products and services that help them complete a task or meet a goal. JTBD frames all design requirements around how users functionally use a product or services. So instead of referencing static, presumptive, and homogenized demographic or affinity group descriptions that come with personas, you’re focused on outcomes a user wishes to achieve.

Here’s an example of framing a user need with JTBD for a digital task-management and note-taking product, like Notion or Evernote:

Job statement: The user’s key task, which they are hiring your product/service to accomplish
e.g. Keep my project notes organized when I’m on a tight deadline

Outcome statement: The user’s wants or expectations (outcomes) from using your product or service
e.g. Reduce the chances that I miss a deliverable for a project.

Since living, breathing humans are always changing their perceptions of their challenges, goals, and tools, it’s crucial to frame their needs in a fluid way, too.

Jobs-to-be-done is a perfect tool for this sort of framing, because it focuses on a user’s context and goals, rather than less-informative and generalized demographic or affinity group information.

Simply put: people are trying to solve a problem by using your product or service. Understanding what problem they’re trying to solve is far more effective than generalizing a non-task-centric group they may belong to. Knowing what they need to do is far more actionable information than assuming you know who they are by following a persona or archetype that can only hope to resemble who they may be.

Go deeper by mapping user stories, states, and contexts

Some other great frameworks to consider as you work to improve you and your team’s understanding of how people might want to use your product or service are user stories and user states and contexts.

A user states and contexts map visualizes all of the requirements and needs that users experience. Image from the Fluid project.

Moving from research to product and service refinement

Testing and refining all of the methodologies listed above will extend and deepen your understanding of your customers beyond the limitations of personas.

As you evolve your approach, patterns will emerge in your observations, and you will become adept at weaving them into design requirements.

Longer-term, you can expect to see significant benefits from this approach:

• more effective design requirements,
• better prototypes, and
• better-informed design teams operating with more empathy after understanding the needs and outcomes of real users.

The path to effective service models and products is to deeply understand your user’s contexts and needs and the outcomes you can provide to meet those objectives. The tools and frameworks we’ve outlined here can leverage your user research into JTBD and user context maps, which will seamlessly direct you into more efficient product and development strategies.

Need help getting started?

Get in touch

The post Understanding users by going beyond personas, demographics, and affinity groups appeared first on Say Yeah!.

Intent is essential in establishing a connection to explain and persuade towards an exchange between your organization and a consumer, whether on your homepage, an advertising marketing page, or elsewhere on your site.

When we look at a blog and the articles you’re publishing, or other long-form pages or cornerstone content, intent plays into how visitors will react to your CTAs, and how you can best support that person in taking their next step towards making a purchase decision.

One of the challenges businesses faces when investing in publishing longer, information-focused articles or pages on their site is falling into the trap of thinking like a publisher.

A publisher’s job is to grow time on site by offering more engaging content and promoting the consumption of that content, typically encouraging readers to click on an ad or buy a subscription. As a business, your blog is a tool to drive transactions that support your products and services, not your content, and not 3rd-party advertisers.

Learn the best practices that shift a business blog from being content-focused to conversion-focused with this 8 step guide.

In this guide, we highlight ways you can adapt your blog posts and long-form articles to enable those transactions that draw you closer to customers across all stages of their purchase journey. We’ll achieve this by walking through a series of best practices that helped shift one of our customers from a content-focused blog to a service-focused blog, increasing their service engagement, mailing list growth, and deal flow.

Here’s a look at the overall wireframe of a standard article on our client’s blog

The structure of the blog post was designed to facilitate action by consumers.

As a service provider first (not a news publication), it was critical to guide behaviour toward service transactions. As you scroll the page, various paths to services are highlighted through different calls-to-action (CTAs), with no visible promotional marketing content or other article links until the reader has seen all the service options available.

Let’s examine a version of this wireframe that isolates and highlights the CTAs so you can see how they work together as a user scrolls down the page.

From the top of the page down to the links in the footer, we can map the page by intent.

Let’s review the methodology and detail behind each of the CTAs corresponding to the numbers from the wireframe so you can map your pages by consumer intent.

1. 

   The above-the-fold second column to the right of the article is there for visitors who are ready to buy now. The subtle but consistently placed primary CTA allows people who are there to read to focus on the content. Those prepared to shop can also get started, whether it’s their first visit to the site or they’ve been clicking through a series of articles.

2. For users focused on the content, an inline CTA contextualized to the content leads them into the purchase funnel (rather than related content or articles, which move people sideways across the purchase funnel instead of further toward a sale). Remember, you’re a business first; as a primary and secondary objective, help your visitor take the next step, not get lost in more content. Placing other contextualized service links throughout the content encourages people to take their next step towards a purchase as you build trust with the content. Suppose the user continues to be focused on the content. In that case, they can scroll down and read through while secondary CTAs designed to support people with different levels of purchase intent follow along the side:
3. 

   Not ready to buy today? We can share a reminder when it’s time to renew so you can get the best rate.

4. 

   Did you arrive through a search engine to read our great content? You don’t know much about us? Here are all the services we offer to assist with your needs.

5. As the user reaches the end of the article, there’s a prominent CTA widget to entice into the purchase funnel, paired with a renewal reminder link if they’re not ready to shop today. This structure has the added benefit of working great on smartphones, where the second column on the right may be hidden or unavailable. This combined end-of-article get quotes CTA and renewal reminder is another view of the content higher in the side column. It’s not too close to being repetitive and doesn’t take away from the content. Still, it’s there, so these critical CTAs don’t get lost on a smartphone while supporting everyone in taking the next step towards a business goal as they finish reading the article.
6. 

   From there, we get to our third level of intent: someone hesitant to shop immediately or share their details for a renewal reminder but has connected with the content. Did you enjoy this article? Sign up for our newsletter.

7. Not ready to commit to providing any personal information? Here are some other articles you may enjoy. We’ll ensure to use a similar conversion-oriented wireframe structure on each of those as we build trust with you through our premium content.
8. Lastly, we have a rich footer highlighting services and key links that help illustrate the organization’s capabilities, give everyone a jumping-off point to other aspects of the site, and support SEO initiatives by sharing key content categories and cross-linking on every page. In this case, we also highlight contact information and encourage connecting with the organization by phone, email, or social channels. To the user, the company is a customer-first organization ready to help! Another step toward building trust as the consumer weighs their purchase options.

This progressive, methodical, and courteous approach to providing access to services and information supports users at different stages of their purchase journey.

The journey begins with their arrival on the website from a search engine. It extends to the delightful reading experience in your articles, fast and free quote delivery and seamless purchase process. Ensuring to cover all these levels of consumer intent with your wireframes is a sure way to build towards increased conversions and business success.

Our customer’s results

The improved clarity and accessibility of services, content, and actionable next steps improved deal flow across many articles that were well-ranking on search engines but saw limited service engagement.

A before and after comparison

For this customer, the ongoing investment in content began to drive several improved business outcomes. The mailing list grew, the organic search continued to be a key driver of site traffic, site visitors began engaging with various helpful services that were previously siloed away from the content-focused blog pages, and time-on-site shifted from reading to taking action towards business goals.

In part, these improvements helped bolster Kanetix.ca ahead of their 2018 acquisition by the Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan.

The post Designing business blogs around consumer intent, a step-by-step guide appeared first on Say Yeah!.

Across digital products and interfaces, as well as service models, users of a product or service may interact with complex internal systems. This can include trying to navigate organizational rules related to data handling, security, access, language, and documentation. This can lead to a complicated user workflow that makes it more and more likely someone will get frustrated, complain, or move on.

It’s precisely in the face of these complex requirements that a simple, intuitive interface becomes essential to provide valuable, rewarding access to otherwise complicated systems.

Abstracting away complexity

While abstraction is a core tenet of computer science, rules-based and engineering-led products and services often fail to deliver compelling, usable interfaces due to a lack of abstraction.

Here’s how you can identify a lack of abstraction which limits the value of a product or service:

• organizational requirements are front and center, with complicated user workflows and language in place to prevent behaviour.
• users are asked to do all the work, instead of the product or service providing increasing value with every interaction or engagement. e.g. providing intelligent recommendations, helping organize information, or other automations or valuable outcomes.
• navigation models are unintuitive to users as they have to learn industry terminology or organizational processes instead of using familiar terms and supporting common, everyday behaviours.

The more complex your system, the simpler your interface needs to be.

The bottom line is: users aren’t interested in muddling through the complexity of your systems, but how a simple, intuitive interface can allow rewarding interaction and outcomes for them.

Achieving an effective user experience

Simply put: it’s the responsibility of an organization to translate complex organizational processes into a simple, intuitive, and ultimately seamless user experience.

It is okay for your organization to have complex processes, use language that would otherwise be confusing to your users, work within limitations or follow best practices that would not seem familiar to your user base. However, if you force these requirements on your users this will lead to confusing and frustrating products and services that will limit adoption, engagement, and use.

It is crucial to therefore find the balance between the complexity of the organization, rules, and data, and providing a compelling experience for your users.

The challenge: in most cases, there is always an alternative to your interface. Whether it’s taking up costly time at your call centre, requiring hands-on support, or, worse still, switching altogether to a competitor. The cost of a poorly executed interface is both measurable and profound.

This is where exceptional service design and product strategy expertise comes into play.

Succeed by making your product or service a rewarding alternative for users

Here are three rules to live by in shaping your organization’s products and services:

1. Users have a variety of ways of solving the problem you’ve designed your organization and product around. If your way isn’t a better way, you’ll lose them.
2. Users will work to follow the processes they’re familiar with or without your organization, including through competitors or their own methods. Your job in designing a product or service is to provide higher value for your user over any other alternative method of solving their problem. If not, you limit the incentive to try and continue to use your product or service.
3. Remember, the familiar is always easier. Your way needs to be more efficient, enjoyable, or informative than any current user process, or you end up wasting your investment in providing a product or service.

Simple and intuitive wins over complex every time

If you’re having challenges translating business processes into a seamless user experience, we’re here to help. Learn more about our approach to service design and product strategy.

Get in touch

The post Complex systems require simple, intuitive interfaces appeared first on Say Yeah!.

~ Adrian Zumbrunnen

In Deceptive Simplicity, Adrian shares multiple examples of interfaces which undermine the product, limiting user engagement or causing a disconnection with users.

I use the term simplistic in place of simple, to drive home the point that reduction purely for the sake of minimizing the elements of interfaces and highlighting an aesthetic minimalism ignores the fundamentally complex task of delivering value to users. If you’re not considering product purpose, user needs, and actual usage your simple form will lack functional purpose.

An example of how moving from a visually busy but explicit menu to a dropdown reduces engagement:

Read Adrian’s full article for more and different examples.

The post Designing interfaces for digital products: less isn’t more anymore appeared first on Say Yeah!.

But your product doesn’t define a user’s experience. That person’s own behavior, attitudes, and emotions do. Thus, user experience is a feeling. In reality, it’s even more than that, but if you start with the idea that user experience is a feeling, you’ve already made progress toward really understanding user experience.

A person’s experience when using a product is something that every business should be concerned about. A user can have a great experience or a horrible one. While you cannot directly design a person’s experience of a product, you can take steps to ensure that their experience is a positive one by employing a user-centered design process.

The post User Experience Is a Feeling appeared first on Say Yeah!.