UI/UX Articles and Interesting Tidbits of the Week
December//20//2024
Here are some interesting finds on UI/UX of the past week!
1.
Achieving Product-Market Fit. This article from the User Testing blog is a welcome reminder that Product-Market fit is a challenge organizations ought to keep in mind as they develop their strategies. The article details aspects of attaining this match, through Exploratory Research, and also keeping in mind additional aspects such as knowing core customers, uncovering unmet needs, indicating value proposition, checking key metrics, always improving the solution, to name but a few. The article also goes into an explanation of how to measure that product-market fit, including aspects such as Customer Intimacy and Understanding, Pirate Metrics (AARRR), User Engagement, Retention Curve. Finally the article also mentions evaluating risk in these situations, which is something every organization needs to keep in mind. Great read. Highlight of the article includes:
“As a society, we praise organizations, inventors, and creatives for their ability to predict what will be successful. People like Steve Jobs had a sixth sense for the next big thing. Yet, for every successful innovation or new product, thousands of failed ideas fall by the wayside. While there will always be elements of luck and fortunate timing, product-market fit doesn’t happen by chance. It’s a dance of art and science. As an organization’s research methods improve and become part of its everyday processes, so does its ability to see through the fog of uncertainty and create products that are likely to succeed. But, no matter what changes the future has in store, one thing will never change: Product market fit will always come from a fundamental need to connect with real people.”
2.
Vivid Seats, Designers and UX Research. This article from the dScout People Nerds blog documents the conversation between Colleen Pate (from dScout) and Brad Mattan, Senior UX Researcher from Vivid Seats. The conversation goes into how Research at Vivid Seats has become more of an embedded experience for product teams in order to organically be a part of the ideation process and infiltrate its findings as a natural input for Stakeholder decisioning. The article goes into aspects such as expanding on the value of Research, and communicating insights with broader teams, and while the subsequent observations are not by any means revolutionary in themselves, including prototyping, celebrating “wins”, and cross-functional empathy (this one in particular, is something professionals can take with a grain of salt, depending on which organization one finds themselves in), this article deserves a read through for the fact that it is an example of how an organization impacted change and how Research was a part of that change. Highlight of the article includes:
“About a year ago we switched it up and brought UXR into different product groups. There are several reasons for doing this and I won’t get into all of them, but I will say one pain point that we experienced in UX research was not always understanding or knowing what was going on as far as the decisions that needed to be made. People came to us when they needed answers, but we didn’t necessarily understand or know the full context behind why we were pursuing what we were pursuing. This limits your ability to make good research recommendations and even just set up the study if you don’t know the full context. We ended up switching to a more embedded matrix model where each UX researcher was embedded into a specific team. So that’s how I came to be more involved with the web team. That’s how Evelyn came to be more involved with the app team. And so now we’re attending all of these stand-up meetings and seeing the day-to-day.”
3.
Color Contrast and Web Accessibility. This article from Grace Fussell for the Shutterstock blog on Color Contrast and Web Accessibility isn’t necessarily the most in-depth view on the topic (the Web Accessibility Initiative — WAI, features a good article on this), but it does provide some interesting recommendations on what to read, what considerations to keep in mind when creating visual design concepts, and some great resources on checking color contrast. Worth reading through. Highlight of the article includes:
“While a high level of color contrast can make things easier to see, a low level can impact severely on web color accessibility, making information difficult to read and the user journey tricky and frustrating to navigate. The more similar in color contrast your chosen colors are, the harder the human eye has to work to process the difference between the two colors, resulting in illegible text or websites that discourage or divert user navigation.”
