Any fool can wireframe … getting it right is the trick.

A while back I wrote WTF is UXD in an attempt to explain what user experience design is, as response to bewildered looks from clients, colleagues and most of my friends and family. There’s still ambiguity around job titles, blurring the edges of user experienced designer, interaction designer, information architect and web designers (or to make it doubly-Dutch confusing UXDs, IXDs, IAs and web designers) and, in line with Ryan Carson’s “‘UX Professional’ isn’t a Real Job” there are a lot of charlatans peddling half-baked wireframes and someone else’s personas as website panaceas. However, against Ryan’s tech-heavy list of UX capabilities (I don’t have even a passing knowledge of JavaScript, but I’ve been making / saving companies A LOT OF MONEY over the past decade), Jared ‘UIE’ Spool lists the ‘Five Indispensable Skills for UX Mastery’ as:

• Sketching
  (my article:Drawing on walls: Lo-fi prototype sketching’s quick, cheap AND good)
• Storytelling
  (my article: Once upon a time – storytelling techniques for communication)
• Critiquing
  (my article: Comparing apples with bicycles – reviewing the big picture experience)
• Presenting
  (my article: Presentation is a skill, not a human right)
• Facilitating
  (must blog about facilitation, to mirror the Royal Spool flush of articles)

But there are some core attributes that set aside the common wireframe monkey from real, proper, actual user experience professionals and these are very very simple, yet very very potent and to be frank, not everyone has them:

Adding value: If you’re not understanding where to add value or remove waste it really is just boxes and arrows. This is the biggy. If you’re not focussing on this, you really are charging money for old rope. You’re just pongo-pongo pictor vulgaris*. Stop reading and go and start adding value – you disgust me.

Relationship management: Including the areas of presenting and facilitation, any UX worth their salt must be able to articulate, demonstrate and even defend, in necessary, their work and approach with clients, suppliers, co-workers and even recruiters. Trouble is, clients come in all shapes, moods, capabilities and prejudices, so in the morning you could be shining the bright light of enthusiasm onto the hitherto ignored facilities team for your intranet project, and spending the afternoon convincing The Board that you’re right, because you’ve done the research and the testing and they’re just making it up on the spot while answering someone else’s emails on their Blackberries.

Experience: Sorry kids, this is one you can’t buy, qualify in or (unless you’re unusually talented and which case you have no need of my sagely wisdom) bluff. I’ve sometimes thought that interaction designers grow up to be user experience designers, widening their scope from the page to the big picture, but this again is just terminology (death threats or outrage to the usual address please). But experience is essential. While trying to help a friend get into the digital biz, a recruiter once said to me “there’s no such things as a junior user experience role”. When someone asks “how” and you answer, you’d better have a “because” to back it up. If you haven’t put the years in, experience can be borrowed from the knowledge of others, so keep learning. You may start, but not stop at “Don’t make think”, so keep creaming blogs, books, podcasts and blagging your way into conferences.

Enquiry: While experience gives you oven ready parboiled solutions ready to finish off in workshops, you will NEVER know as much your users, your clients, their employees – the subject matter experts. Your job is to be as good as you can get as being a UXD. I’ve worked with clients in engineering, banking, pharmaceuticals, gardening blah blah blah .. the point is, I never understood as much my clients about their businesses, but I knew how to get them to tell me what I needed to know.

Get it right: Don’t be precious about getting negative feedback. Take it on the chin and change or defend. Do the research. Build up the experience. If it’s not right, you’re not worth your money.

And lastly, adding value. Again.

You DON’T need working technical knowledge of layout languages or computer scripts. You simply need to be able to understand your objectives from your clients and colleagues and find the right solutions. Whether that be some wireframes and a site map, or the education of entire team and the overseen production of working prototypes and stakeholder engagement workshops – who knows. Well, frankly, you – that’s your job. Forge relationships, enquire into the organisational goals and audience’s needs and produce remarkable products, processes and services, whatever they may be and however they may suit each individual project.

Be bold, be bloody, and be bloody bold while you’re at it.

Add value. That is all.

The Long Dog.
*Pongo-pongo pictor vulgaris: The common wireframe monkey.

From the fairy tales of our earliest years to the soap operas, newspapers and box office hits of our maturity, we humans love stories. But it’s not just about adventure and a happy ending. Stories are a medium through which we communicate and mentally store information in a handy recall framework of associated items.

“Stories are the creative conversion of life itself into a more powerful, clearer, more meaningful experience. They are the currency of human contact”. Robert McKee, screenwriter.

It’s easy to dismiss storytelling as something for kids and I wouldn’t recommend starting your corporate presentation with ‘Once upon a time there was a brave little CEO…” but as a technique for engaging audiences and conveying information it’s as good today as it was thousands of years ago.

The fact stories follow a narrative, building up layers of information and associated items (first this happened, then as a result that happened) helps us create a linear mnemonic – one that photographic memory performers use to connect and remember huge lists of seemingly unconnected items.

Used as a communication tool, stories and storytelling allow us to lay out a message in a clearly accessible form that we’re all familiar with.

“Rapport is created between the storyteller and the audience. They feel that they are actively involved, rather than just passively listening”, Lindsey Warnes Carroll, comedian and story teller.

Our brains and basic cultures have changed little since the days of hearing the news, learning about the latest religion/King/invaders and keeping in touch with our community through stories. In fact, traditional storytelling is enjoying a renaissance with storytelling festivals like Beyond the Border, held in the grounds of a cliff-top Welsh castle, on the increase.  And now there are even companies like The Story Tellers who “help business leaders engage their people in strategy, vision, values and change”.

But you don’t have to be a pro who’s spent years learning the art – we tell stories all the time: “Have you heard? She was with HIM last night at the bar and then…”.  Engaging stakeholders, communicating the progress of a project, concepts for design or delivering an unpalatable message, we all engage with this medium without thinking – it’s how we’re taught as children, how we consume news and entertainment: it’s our common culture as a species.

Some principles:

• Beginning THEN middle THEN end. Build up to the ‘big issue’ from the beginnings so your audience can start with simple concepts and add the detail – like Lego.
• Make sure the end has a real end. A joke without a punchline doesn’t work. Make sure your story builds to the main point, deliver that point, then finish or move to a new and different thread. Unless you’re very good, don’t try to carry several threads at once – people will get lost.
• Use a narrative to plan your presentation material (yes, I do mean PowerPoint slides amongst other things).
• Make sure you include details if you’re introducing new ideas. Don’t be afraid to stop the narrative and explain. E.g. ‘for those of you who don’t know what social networking is…’, or, ‘And the sword he held was carved with sigils and signs of a dark and unnatural nature…’, depending on your subject matter and audience.
• Stories can be spoken, written, pictorial or use just about any medium for their production. The importance is in the structure, building narrative and communication of the message.
• Experiment with stories that don’t yet have an ending and allow or use the audience to discover and create as a collaborative exercise. Remember those ‘choose your own adventure’ books? On the internet, a user’s journey through a website doesn’t always follow a prescriptive path, but is … wait for it … hypertextual.
• Enjoy the telling of the story and your audience will enjoy the story too – no matter how potentially dry your subject – believe me, I’m delivered some stats stories in my time that could have bored people into an early grave, without improving the engagement through storytelling.

“And they all lived happily ever after. The End.”

The Long Dog.

Buttock-clenchingly awkward humour; jargon overdose; PowerPoint poisoning and just plain dull: all symptoms of bad presentations and bad presenters. Same way that some people sing like angels and some like storm drains, presenting uses innate skill and learned technique to really work.

Presenting is the art of delivering information to a live audience, responding live to their feedback and facilitating dialogue and discussion (alternative definitions welcome). I include telephone / video conferencing, virtual presentations and any other medium involving human interaction and instant audience feedback. The importance is that it’s an empathic and very personal skill.

With printed and electronic communication we’ve got used to the idea that anyone can publish, so anyone can communicate, giving rise to “newsletter communicators” who don’t (or won’t) care whether there’s reaction, so long as it goes out on time.

Early this year the UK government started a crackdown on boring teachers, blaming them for poor results and bad behaviour. We’ve all sat through interminable presentations and thought ‘what was that about’, ‘I could have done some real work’ or actually done some ‘real work’ during the presentation. Don’t mistake a subject matter expert for a good presenter.

Purpose. Why are you doing this? What do you want your audience to take away?  “Communicating <insert topic>” isn’t good enough.

Structure. Stories are a formula humans have been used to for millennia, from cradle to grave. Plot twists, cliff-hangers and humour work well when they’re well crafted.

Engagement. Be creative and come up with ways to ensure your audience absorbs the information and can make use of it; teachers spend years training to do this. Use games, group interactions, town hall sessions, feedback, discussion and facilitators.

Tools. Beware of PowerPoint dependency: it’s a visual *aid*, not the presentation itself (see this most excellent video of How NOT to use PowerPoint). Also beware of hefty print outs … what do you want them to do – read or listen? Either way, keep it lean.

Style. Be an interesting speaker, but know your limits. If you’re a natural born performer put it to good use, if not, work up to the edge of your ability and not beyond. Let someone else to do it or at least let them facilitate and you can field questions. Don’t be shy about … er … being shy, we’ve all got our different strengths. Vary the tempo with other speakers (not too many, it’s not Vaudeville), breakout sessions and ample opportunity for feedback and discussion.

Next steps. Support your ‘stand up’ with physical takeaways, follow up sessions and actions to give context and credibility

Now go do // that Voodoo // that you do … so well.

The Long Dog