Last Black Friday I took the chance to buy the UX Masterclass from Jose Caballer, one of the most respected designers in the field. In this masterclass, he explains how to become a valuable person for companies empowering them through UX. Also, this improves designers practice as the approach sets a situation where clients can't complain about the design because they'd be contradicting themselves. The purpose of it is to teach designers how to be business designers, and not mere graphic designers, which can be translated to being a consultant, a partner for clients instead of an order taker. For that, there's need to be a shift in the mindset in how we designers perceive ourselves. The masterclass lasts around 11 hours, and these are a few things I've learned from it.
The UX is a mindset, not a tool or a skill. It doesn't only improve the design outcomes, it improves the business. Customer profiling is important for the client, but our clients must also be profiled. Designers need to ask a lot of questions to really have the full picture of the problem or common problems.
The order in which Jose proceeds to design is as it follows: first meeting (discovery phase), proposal, CORE, Contract and then he designs the brief based on what the client has told him. In other words, he is not selling the outcomes, they are just a natural consequence of the problems that need a solution.
An interesting aspect is how he insists on not overselling this framework, but to listen to the client first and then talk about the process with examples.
UX patterns are more focused on the UI design, where 3 main aspects must be considered: behaviour, function and cognition. Designers mustn't underestimate client's laziness, so everything has to be very easy to use and to understand. Also, he explains how to encourage sales through different patterns, like logo aversion, scarcity or illusion of control. It's very important to listen, synthesise and document.
Jose also speaks about how the structure of stories ties in with designing a user experience, as these are stories at the end of the day. It's also important to provide a timeline for clients. There's a theme, divided into what makes it epic, which is informed by the user stories they have from doing small tasks.
Anchors are as important in the design of business as they are for climbing a mountain. An interesting lesson from this part is that if a client wants to skip a vital part of a project they are not being empathetic with us. Instead of getting mad, designers need to find out why that is happening and be the empathetic ones. Strategy, for example, is a very abstract aspect of design and therefore it is obviated or, worse, ignored. If a client doesn't want to do strategy there's no point in forcing them to do it, but it can be done by the designers anyway and tweak it through feedback. At some point, they'll want to do strategy to save time. If possible, this should be explained to the client from the beginning to avoid it. There are three different types of anchors: conceptual (brand attributes, pillars), contextual (competitive audit, user profiles, sitemap) and structural (visual schedule, resources, budget). By anchoring everything based on the information they give it's going to be very difficult for the client to contradict themselves.
Agreements are made all the time in a project. It's the glue that keeps everything together and there are 3 different types of agreements: Implicit (too soft), explicit (can be too harsh) or best practices, which is proven by many times.
And last is 'validations'. What designers make have to be usable. If a picture is worth 1000 words, a prototype is worth 1000 meetings. There are three types of validations: pre-validation, inline-validation and post-validation. If an old man can use the product, then it will most likely succeed in meeting its goals.
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