6 UX ADVICES FOR YOU

Last week, Martin Pock and I were invited to do a lecture about User Experience and latest UX trends. The group that invited us was a group of SAP BI/BW people working at some of the largest and most successful Danish companies. BI and BW means business intelligence and BW means business warehousing.

One of their main objectives is to generate informative, meaningful and good looking reports, graphs and spread sheets, which they deliver to support different units within the company. You might say that the BI people make a new App each time they generate a new report and indeed the better user experience they deliver to the end user, the better they meet their business objectives. We therefore talked extensively about the importance of doing a design thinking workshop at the beginning of a bigger project, and learn how that mindset and those ideas also can be brought into smaller projects, in a smaller scale. The design workshop helps cover clearly what the end user envision to be able to see and do within the application and helps develop a common understanding of the situation the application is used in, which are important components in building a greater user experience.

Also, we talked about what a great user experience is, and how to best optimize that user experience and how to appoint the best starting point of the design process. In this talk we incorporated inspiration from the latest trends and experiences in the UX field. By the end of the program we were asked to give 5-6 advices to bring home.

We want to share these six advices since they might be meaningful for you too:

1 Choose one project this year that you start up by doing a smaller design thinking workshop. It should involve IT, business and end users. By doing it once, you learn a lot, and you can use it as a template for other cases. Find someone in the company to help you get started.

2 Interview and understand your end users or user groups. What do they like? How do they think and work? What are their primary focus? Do they need help not getting stressed? You will be surprised how much relevant info you will get!

3 Use a grid system to frame your design, be persistent in your design patterns, but keep it appealing! This makes it more easy and attractive for the end users to accept and understand the logic in your solution.

4 Be aware of sizes of the numbers and the text in your presentations. Make it as big and easy readable as possible! If there are design templates that you have to follow and you find the numbers and letters too small, try scale everything up.

5 Get inspired from daily life. Take a look at road signs, advertisements, user guides, etc. Is it well designed? Does it help you to get a better user experience in the situation? Can the principles translate to your designs?

6 Get inspired from what others do: