The importance of learning straight from the source: Design Sprint with Jake Knapp & UX Metrics with Jared Spool
Last November my Company, ITX Corp held two full day workshops and one conference in Portland, called ITX UX 2019: Beyond the Pixels. The idea of the event was to cover user experience and product design topics to explore user-centered design practices. From Design Sprint to Ux Metrics, both the conferences & workshops covered a lot of territory in the design field.
Day 1 — Measuring the Experience: Crafting Your UX Metric Strategy Workshop with Jared Spool
Jared Spool has been a pioneer in our field for more than three decades, so when we were first introduced to the idea of this workshop my team was already excited. He stressed about how quantitative metrics can sometimes be an underutilized tool and also explained the importance of understanding metrics, and choosing the right one for the job.
During his workshop, he focused on the fact that metrics without context mean nothing, and that they can often be construed as subjective. But according to Jared, there’s still hope since there are ways in which a Uxer can make turn the subjective into objective and this can derive into better design decisions.
“Qualitative findings must drive our quantitative research agenda” — Jared Spool.
Key Takeaways:
- Observations → Inferences → Design Decisions
In times where anything can be tracked and measured, wee need to always ask:
- What is the best we could expect?
- What is this data trying to let us know?
- Is this the only inferences this gives us?
- What else?
- What’s causing this? Why?
- Is there something else that might be affecting this?
- What can we do with this data that can actually benefit our users?
Day 2 — Design Sprint Workshop with Jake Knapp
Jake Knapp is one of the authors of the Design Sprint book. During his workshop, we followed a summarised version of what an actual design sprint is like. He lead us through the process and focused on passing on some facilitator tips and ways to maximize each of the sessions for the whole duration of the sprint.
He pressed on the importance of early testing and experimenting ideas before development. Therefore, it becomes necessary to adapt this type of methodologies in our product development process.
“It’s dangerous to have that much time spent on a hunch” — Jake Knapp.
Key Takeaways:
- The importance of “Work alone together” concept. All participants work some tasks in silence and then deciding in group. The idea behind this method is to allow everyone to capture solutions without being interrupted or being misinterpreted.
- The difference between conventional brainstorming and endless discussions and how Design Sprint promotes structured and fast-paced conversations and exercises that avoid draining the creative energy of the team.
- Every participant needs to use the same marker to avoid unbiased voting and also to make it easier to photograph later. There can only be two marker types. This is a great tip for all kinds of workshops.
- There’s a lot of Design Sprint activities that can be used in other types of workshops. E.g: Note-n-Map
- We shouldn’t combine ideas/solutions: We can test two solutions but there can’t be a Frankenstein made of different solutions. If we respect 1 idea, we will test it better.
- ‘Design, Prototype, Test, Iterate’ is key
Thanks!
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