King & McGaw Developers

There is something of a revolution underway in the way that we approach user experience at Easyart. With Agile processes so important to the way we build software, we felt we were ready to implement Lean UX approaches to help solve some of our user experience problems. It’s early days but I thought I would share some of the things that have worked for us so far.

Note: I’ve added some notes on this to the tech handbook which is emerging at the moment, but I thought I would elaborate on some of the processes in this post.

Agree on outcomes before deciding on features

By starting with a KPI we want to affect, we can develop hypotheses which we believe will help us reach that goal, and have a clear-cut way of measuring success.

Use personas to guide decisions

Focussing on user needs helps us build a more human experience so we have developed three personas which we can use to step through different on-site journeys.

Shared understanding and hypotheses over design heroes

Getting stakeholders involved in the conception of ideas builds a shared understanding, which is invaluable for collaborating across departments and skill-sets. We’ve had some success with gut test exercises when working on new homepage visual design, group sketching design studio exercises to improve navigation and card sorting to agree on priorities.

Use the live styleguide to build pages from modules

Changing from a page-based approach to a component-based approach allows everyone to sketch pages, and our live style guide is the directory of available modules.

Validate as early as possible

Our opinions are not as important as customer feedback, so we try to validate our hypotheses as early as possible. We use Usertesting.com for user testing, and Optimizely for split testing.

We’re at the formative stages of this process at the moment, but I’m hopeful it’s going to make a big difference.