UI/UX Articles And Interesting Tidbits Of The Week
April//17//2020
Here are some interesting finds on UI/UX of the week!
1.
Managing Teams You Can’t See. As working remotely has become a new standard for a vast majority of organizations, managing team members can at times be a challenge. This article provides some food for thought, essentially relying on the analogy of Sprints and Agile methodologies so well known in Software development. Essentially, making team members accountable to each other, in specific timelines to get tasks achieved. It’s an interesting article, very pertinent for the days we’re currently experiencing. Highlight of the article includes:
“Peer-to-peer accountability is the overloaded manager’s best friend. If you have to keep everyone accountable, you’re not actually leading. You will be in the weeds, and you’re not doing anyone any favors; in fact, you’re probably slowing your team and your company down. One of my clients is a prominent investor. This individual was managing a portfolio of about $1 billion, and the firm’s vision was to boost assets under management to $10 billion. The only way to grow 10x was for my client to let go of his chokehold on new business development. That meant delegating, but more importantly, dispersing accountability into the fabric of the firm’s team.”
2.
The Digital Future is Now. Not something I typically highlight in this newsletter, but worth noting nonetheless. Since the escalation of this massive Pandemic started, we have collectively witnessed a massive shift in how we collectively work, and how individuals have had to change habits almost overnight. Unlike the Titanic who was going far too fast, and was unable to bypass its hurdle, Society in general, even at warp speed, had to shift its course, ingratiate itself with new tools and be ingenuous in order to achieve its goals. If anything, this is also a lesson for Design Thinking and for solutions well devised: effective product solutions respond to a variety of factors, scenarios, and users who come into play. Highlight of the article includes:
“We have demonstrated the power of the digital world through SaaS tools and the amazing resilience of cloud infrastructure, but we’ve also see the power of the human spirit. What we are witnessing right now in the world is pretty amazing, and we should stop for a moment and just appreciate it. Take a moment and consider that all of this technology has allowed our economy, our education and our emotional selves to keep going in an impossible situation. The COVID-19 virus has pushed us collectively into a digital future, and it’s happening right now, not some day. Companies and people have gone through a 90-day flash digital transformation. If there is one positive thing we can take away from this crazy situation, it’s that we have embraced this digital world, and we are never turning back.”
3.
Research from a Distance. Hailing from Shopify’s UX Blog on Medium, this article is an actual interview with Ariel Chernin and Cassie Kaiser, both professionals focused on Research, how that practice, has had to adjust itself, due to the reality we’re currently living. The teams have adjusted how they process their research, and have for instance focused on observing social media and specific groups on those platforms, all of which can also provide further insight into their users, specifically their feedback, their reviews and so on. Highlight of the article includes:
“Our methods are usually surveys and one-on-one interviews. But, because we don’t want to default to that, one area that our team is really exploring is doing deep dives into social media. We want to really understand how our merchants and other independent business owners are reaching out through social media, let’s say, on Reddit or through Twitter or Facebook groups. So we’re trying to analyze the content of those messages and see if we can come up with some key themes about challenges that merchants are facing. Of course, we’re trying to be conscious of the strengths and weaknesses of different approaches. We’re exploring other sources of information, but our questions are still the same — things like “How is this unprecedented, unique, scary situation impacting small business owners right now? What type of support do they need? How can Shopify help them?” So the questions don’t change with this approach, it’s more learning if there are different sources that we can go to that allow us to get the same information, but without putting as much of a burden on our merchants.”
