Dear Reader,
If you’d like to be more data-driven, this email is for you.
In Google’s meeting rooms, there are two projectors.
One is for presenting slides, notes, etc.
The other one is for presenting data.
Former Goog execs Eric Schmidt & Jonathan Rosenberg, write about how this dual-screen approach at Google promotes fact-based decisions:
If you can learn to say "Let me show you," it will do wonders for your career.
Every time you show a pretty visual in a meeting, you could also show data on customer behavior.
Design can be a very subjective practice, and any objectivity you can bring to the process will be a bonus in the eyes of business people.
Here are 2 quick ways to do that.
When you're just wandering into the fog of a new project, there isn't a lot of data...especially if the project has never been done before.
Some great sources for "Let me show you" might already exist on your company's Google Drive:
This is all qualitative data, and that's just as important as quantitative data, especially in the early stages where there is no quant. data. But if you have analytics, use them!
You can also generate your data with customer-facing activities like interviews. These create humanizing data to help your stakeholders fall in love with the problem, not the solution.
COURSE: Defining UX Strategy COURSE: Facilitating Workshops |
The answer to this one's a bit trickier.
When you're ready to design solutions, it's hard to say "Let me show you" with anything except sketches and designs. How in the world can we find data on the sketches we just did?
Instead of convincing stakeholders with visuals you made, show visuals to customers then share the resulting data with stakeholders.
Here are some ways to do that:
It’s an extra step, but it will de-risk your design decisions.
That's the premise behind product experimentation.
It’s setting things up in a test and letting the customer decide if it’s a good idea or not.
What could be more user-centered than that?
So next time you find yourself saying "I think," consider that second screen in the Google office and all the data you could be showing.
Jeff Humble
Designer & Co-Founder
The Fountain Institute
P.S. We've got a Saturday workshop coming up called How to Design Product Experiments. Grab your FREE ticket here→
The Fountain Institute is an independent online school that teaches advanced UX & product skills.
5 Signals the UX of AI Is Changing by Jeff Humble Dear Reader, The AI landscape is changing fast, and the way we interact with AI is changing even faster. Who knows what the UX of AI will be in 2035? Right now, most of us talk to AI through clunky, chat-based interfaces. But new hardware hints at something more human and ambient. Today, I want to share 5 signals: surprising examples from today that suggest where the future might end up, and a method used by future foresight professionals....
When Your Strategy Slides Hit Silence By Hannah Baker Dear Reader, I’ve shared strategy before, and watched it stall. Not because it was wrong. But because the room didn’t know what to do with it. I wasn’t looking for feedback. I wasn’t asking for approval. I was hoping they’d pick it up and run with it. Instead? Confusion. Silence. They didn’t see what I saw. Not because they didn’t care. But because I’d built the strategy, not the on-ramp they needed to step into it. It’s something I’ve...
Let's Talk about Liquid Glass by Jeff Humble Dear Reader, Goodbye, paper-like design. Hello, moving blobs of liquid glass! Play button blunder from Apple Apple's new paradigm in aesthetics is both cool and potentially awful at the same time. "Rather than trying to simply re-create a material from the physical world, Liquid Glass is a new digital meta-material that dynamically bends and shapes light." -Apple Just when you thought skeuomorphism was dead, it rears its realistic head again. I...