This week: UX impact data claims, influencing product, customer outcomes, skip personas, DS and DesignOps retrospectives, and more.
Here are 10 things in the field of UX I recently found interesting:
- Earlier this week, I shared my first UX field guide which focuses on UX impact data claims ?(Medium, site). While these general insights might be helpful to advocate for UX, they won’t compare to using your own research and analytics in storytelling that influences product strategy and roadmaps.
- If you’re struggling to move beyond the vicious cycle of small optimizations, try one of the following: 1) persuade your product team through loss aversion to invest in user research discovery, 2) conduct funnel analysis then RICE prioritization, or 3) follow these strategic steps (h/t Marina Krutchinsky).
- Use this framework to move your jobs-to-be-done higher (user motivations / the “why”) or lower (user actionable steps / the “how”). Listen to the interview with Jim Kalbach to learn more. Revisit and layer in customer outcomes framework (1, 2) into your JTBD hierarchy.
- Designers should play around with AI tools that can create editable vectors (Recraft.AI) or apply motion to static designs (jitter) in their spare time.
- Avi Siegel made a strong case for teams to stop building products for imaginary users. “The problems with user personas are that they oversimplify complex humans into stereotypes. They create false confidence in our understanding. They make use lazy about user research. ?They emphasize aspirational behaviors over actual ones. They encourage us to build for averages that don’t exist.”
- On Design Systems: Review a 2024 respective on accessibility in design systems. Prevent component detaching in design systems with slots. Learn by studying great systems, such as Wise, Polaris by Shopify, Orbit by Kiwicom, Atlassian, Workbench by Gusto. Revisit the component cut-up workshop method.
- “The opportunity I see is finding affordances in AI experiences to check for understanding.” David Hoang wrote about the role of comprehension in AI workflows.?
- If you’re designing notifications, use this UI decision tree to choose your notification depending on your context.
- Explore benchmarks and year-over-year insights in the 2024 DesignOps Benchmarking Report, such as: 1) “Nearly87% of dedicated DesignOps teams who are already tracking DesignOps metrics said those metrics are aligned with broader organizational goals,” and 2) “Nearly 42% said their Design org designs and builds AI into their products.”
- Unexpected delights: tech trading cards, Notion faces illustration kit, dark patterns detective, and the monster list — 46 top resources for design inspiration (notion, g-doc).
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