Make Your Work Meaningful and Go from Sleepwalking to Sparkle

Make Project Artifacts Visible and Connect Them to Form a Narrative

Communication is hard work. Clear communication is even harder work. Important requirements can get lost in documents where they are not sufficiently visible.

Project artifacts can be posters that you place on the walls in project spaces, so a team can see what they’re working on and understand why. Examples of such project artifacts include the project purpose, customer profiles, design principles, journey maps, assumptions, questions, core design principles and objectives, task models, and designs—from sketches to concepts to finished designs—to name a few.

Connect project artifacts together to form a narrative about how a customer interacts with the business and how designs and improvements to the designs can help the customer. Unfortunately, project artifacts often are neither understood nor visible. Such artifacts serve to help people on a project better understand the customer narrative and their role in that narrative. Project artifacts create a common language that lets team members from different disciplines reflect on designs that are right in front of them, with the intention of iteratively improving the design direction over time. This lets the team chart their course in a meaningful way.

Inform Design Through Customer Stories and Engage in Sense-making with Your Team

Having a regular routine for learning about and understanding your customers implies that you’ve collected customer stories and brought them into a space with your other artifacts, where your team can make sense of them together.

Transforming customer stories into valuable, accurate information and using sense-making techniques—such as asking questions, looking at data through the lenses of various disciplines, and having multidisciplinary conversations—enables a team to engage in well-informed product or service design rather than relying on random, inaccurate assumptions. Collecting this data helps you to map product and service features and solutions to customers’ actual needs and desires.

Using customer data to inform design decisions through sense-making is not a one-off activity. Nor is it just the responsibility of the user researcher or UX lead. It should be a constant activity that is integral to conducting business. Without this kind of research and sense-making, a business simply won’t be able to innovate over time.

Share Observations in a Shared Context

When sharing observations about customer and stakeholder behaviors, a team should come together to read the stories and absorb them into their collective memory. This routine enables a team to identify surprising or deeply memorable situations that deserve further analysis by the whole team. Sharing the stories with other team members and groups allows a broader interpretation of the stories, which can help in making sense of everyone’s observations and determining what artifacts would give their observations and insights life.

Once a team has a routine for sharing these stories, they can list their assumptions, discuss their source and the evidence available to support them, and either challenge or accept particular assumptions or sets of assumptions, depending on the insights they’ve gained from sharing their customer observations. This helps a team to prioritize certain features by determining which features deserve more of the team’s time, focus, and attention and which features require more research or further design iterations.

Give People Time to Think

Delivering projects against a static set of requirements without taking a break to reflect on the project and get a clear outlook is a sure way to lose perspective and stifle innovation. People need time and space to be able to look beyond the current work in progress and reflect on how a product or service could look in the future. Allow people to get away from their desk and computer. Encourage conversations outside the project. Giving people time to think can provide an opportunity to tackle problems with a fresh mind.

Encourage Open and Honest Conversations to Foster Creativity

Some of the best project conversations seem to happen outside meetings. Perhaps part of the reason for this is that people may be afraid to share their feelings and opinions in meetings or that the meetings aren’t facilitated well. Encourage teams to have open, honest conversations and to be okay with saying, “I don’t know.”

Businesses sometimes see creativity as the primary responsibility of the artists and designers who work for them. Thus, they often misunderstand creativity, limiting it to making things pretty or trying to fix designs without giving them the necessary thought that should happen beforehand. But creativity is much more.

Elements of creativity include giving people in a business the spaces, time, and tools to explore new ideas. The goal should be to discover better ways of arriving at ideas and capturing the outputs of our conversations. A lack of creativity in a business hurts it to the degree their designs for products and services look the same as others, making them increasingly commoditized.

Get Inspired by the People on Your Team

Businesses are often conservative in nature and avoid taking risks. But the world needs big thinkers and big dreamers—people who are willing to look beyond the day-to-day operations and current constraints and look for ways to inspire.

Inspiration comes from people, so businesses need to attract and invest in people who can dream big. In addition to attracting the talent, they need to create cultures that encourage and nurture this way of thinking. Businesses need to take a deeper look at the skillsets they’ll need if they are to prosper in the future.

Know Your Project Roles

Some of our work requires that we focus our minds and delve deeply into design details, while other work requires us to take a step back to see how the elements of our work connect with one another, enabling us to deliver solutions that meet well-identified customer needs that are part of a broader narrative.

As members of project teams, we can play an important role in helping our teams to work more effectively by advancing ideas and recognizing when it’s time to consider alternative approaches.

Teammates can play the following roles:

• facilitator—As facilitators, we can define approaches to guiding the processes of informing, sense-making, and evaluating. We can craft agendas for working sessions and identify what problems need our attention. We can manage interactions between functions, aggregate a team’s learnings, and map these learnings to shared artifacts. We can identify themes that require further study and set goals for the team’s next working sessions.
• mentor—As mentors, we should be aware of approaches and skills that require ongoing development and practice and organize safe spaces in which people can practice them—using them over and over again, both during working sessions and across projects. Mentors should work closely with facilitators and custodians to identify what knowledge the team has captured and map it to a learning program for team members, with a focus on informing, sense-making, and evaluating.
• connector—As connectors, we connect people’s skills and roles and create artifacts that help bridge gaps and facilitate interactions between people, making them feel more fluid.
• custodian—As custodians, we maintain the knowledge base that forms over time and leverage it in creating new approaches to our work and courses that help our teammates on projects to get better at what they do.

Being Human

The human qualities and capabilities that we possess can help or hinder our ability to gather great customer stories. These capabilities include the following: respecting, seeing, listening, probing, feeling, synthesizing, playing, leading, mentoring, facilitating, connecting, collaborating, critiquing, communicating, constructing, deconstructing, framing, envisioning, and persuading. Our ability to dip into or rise above these human capabilities is important—and we need to be able to expand or contract our perspective as necessary. It’s vital that we provide safe forums in which to practice these capabilities, which help us within the context of our UX practice.

Implications for Personal Learning and the Mature Business of the Future

Throughout each project experience and all of the interactions between people in different functions on a project or across projects, it is important to reflect on our skills and practices. We must maintain an awareness of the need to apply our skills and practices as we seek to improve and gain maturity in our business purpose and mission. 

Acknowledgments

Thanks and acknowledgments to Jennifer Fabrizi, Michael Davis Burchat, Andrew Mayfield, Louis Rawlins, Davide Casali, and Chris Marmo.