Your UI design polls don’t add value for discourse because they lack context?

The inspiration for this short piece came from a comment on LinkedIn I had left under a post of a UI designer asking a this-or-that question, showing two designs competing with each other:

“Which UI is better?”

“Which UI is more accurate?”

My quick, un-revised comment went like this:

Never before had a comment of mine generated such widespread positive feedback. It seemingly had struck a chord.

Because let’s face it, words matter — always and everywhere.

Whether you pitch your ideas, look for more funding money or simply try to explain what you do. Being specific helps everyone.

‘Accuracy’ comes in many shapes and sizes

In itself, “accurate” is already less broad and general as the vaguer “best” or “good”. But this adds to the confusion instead of solving it. What is the UI design trying to achieve? It looks like it wants to sell more potato chips. In that case, copy is not even about being human-centred, it might be conversion-driven.

So as a UX professional, you get to work and you gather all of your knowledge about cognitive biases and behavioural psychology in regards to UX and UI design and apply them to your specific user demographic. You also need to take stakeholders’ opinions and other business constraints into consideration. Framing your problem space means drilling down on what words really mean. Frameworks for brainstorming and design thinking can help with this challenge.

Photo by Franco Antonio Giovanella on Unsplash

1. How Might We: insight-based, broad and positive

A quick recap of how How Might We works in the tweet by

:

How Might We allows us to really grind down on what we like to achieve with our designs, and we can elevate our context to narrow down possible audiences, too.

The Norman/Nielsen Group offers a nice list of 5 ways to write better questions for HMW:

• Start with the problems (or insights) you’ve uncovered
• Avoid suggesting a solution in your HMW question
• Keep your HMWs broad
• Focus your HMWs on the desired outcome
• Phrase your HMW questions positively

So instead of asking “which is better” or “which is accurate”, a this-or-that UI design choice could be framed with the HMW-question as an intro. This way, the people taking the poll can place the user experience in the correct context.

Sticking to Tom’s tweeted template, for our chips example from the beginning, this could sound a little like this:

How might we re-design (ACTION) a product detail app screen (WHAT) for a large Indian grocery online shop’s (STAKEHOLDER) so conversions go up and customer complaints about unclear pricing go down (IN ORDER TO)?

In a social media post, the last part is the most important one: what is the users’ goal? Creating context and tangibility, instead of grasping for vague terms like better or accurate. HMW is only the beginning… ever heard of JTBD?

2. Jobs To Be Done: peel away the onion’s layers

I am always up for employing the “Jobs To Be Done” framework for perfectly phrasing the design challenges our team is working on.

at wrote two books about JTBD worth checking out— and in my opinion, the method massively helps folks in product or service design to up their game when you want to pin down your words, thus your content and UI design.

The formula for JTBD goes like this:

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It is similar to HMW but takes on another perspective. In our example, a product detail page view for potatoes chips could sound like this:

When our customers throughout India use the app to find the best deals on potatoe chips (SITUATION), I as a UI designer want to maximize the usability of the product card (MOTIVATION) so I can live up to the KPI goal to decrease bounce rates by at least 20% which my team agreed upon last quarter (EXPECTED OUTCOME).

If you think I am laying it on too thick —as far as I am concerned, JTBD is about relevance, focus and the most you can make of your research insights, your last stakeholder meeting or the current stats from customer service.

Peeling away the onion's layers allows you to make it to the core of your use case.The social post could speak to the goal the design team has to reach —something along the lines of “which UI is better for higher conversions?”

3. Behaviour-driven Development: fancy a tennis match?

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In my comment’s thread, Gregory mentioned that defining words will help to bridge the gaps between different disciplines in their team:

shares this nice summary of BDD’s function within an agile framework:

BDD helps in getting done all. Developing stories based on scenarios help in getting small Increments out, release it internally or externally if it makes sense. Getting in detail of each story reduces ambiguity, rework, and rejection so the team produces less waste.

Reducing ambiguity helps members of teams better understand where they are going with their work.

shared a real-life example, with a memorable tennis metaphor:

In a BDD approach, our this-or-that post would be an invitation for a conversation, probably, true to the agile mindset. The person posting could show their UI picture and let people share their perspectives. With each take, you get another angle and in the end, the people commenting could also test the UI design presented…

Oh, did I take it too far for a simple social posting that is only supposed to make people engage with as little effort as possible? Ok, ok, let’s wrap it up and go back to my own ways of how I create context and depth for user scenarios.

HMW, JTBD, BDD — lost for words? Research insights will always help you out

Insights from user research, whether moderated or unmoderated, will not only deliver A/B results, design favourites and audience reactions. They will also reveal the words — spoken or typed — your audience uses.

How your audience speaks — this is the direction you can look for context and meaning.

As part of my job as Sr. UX writer at Sapera, I regularly check back with all the notes from user testing sessions and sync up with my team’s UX strategist. Confession time: my favourite words which make it to our selection many times do not resonate with the users. Especially with early stages of prototypes or initial name-storming results. It’s a journey to find your own voice, let alone the customer’s voice.

My colleagues and I keep our insights in

files to easily search whenever we are lost for words. For interviews and surveys we use UserTesting where we try to ask non-leading questions that leave out words like ‘best’ or ‘good’ — and if interviewees speak in vague words like ‘amazing’, ‘awful’ or ‘nice’, we always kindly ask them to be more specific, to use another word like ‘inaccessible’ or ‘usable’.

Most of the time we also just ask them to add more context to the words they use and how this is relevant to their situation when using this prototype we built. Context is everything to make sense of the words we use since they allow us to make sense of the world— valid for the audiences and us, who are looking to address them.

Helpful insights can be found in UX literature. Photo by Karl Solano on Unsplash