Join Monique, a seasoned UX designer, as she reveals her top three UX tips gained over the course of her career. Jessica, co-host, who often feels like a UX impostor, is all ears and eager to bridge the gap in her own design process. They go into detail on why knowing your audience is critical, why simplicity and consistency are your greatest friends, and why feedback is the hidden hero of UX design.

 

This episode is a gold mine for anybody trying to reinforce their UX foundation, as it includes Monique's go-to techniques for performing user research, establishing user personas, and offering concrete advice that you can put into practice right now. Monique and Jessica's lively exchange provides real-world examples, tangible advice, and a new perspective on how a solid UX strategy can make or break your digital products.

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Transcription: 

Monique Jenkins Welcome to the Design Imposter podcast. In today's episode, we'll talk about my top three UX tips, things that I've used throughout my career and while I've been working with clients to help me navigate how to design for our ideal users.

Jessica Valis: This episode is definitely going to be a learning experience, especially for me. I definitely feel like a UX imposter and I don't know as much as I should about it. And it's probably that critical step I'm missing in my design process that would give me more confidence with my pricing strategy, just more confidence talking to clients. So this will be an episode for me too. So let's dive in. Monique, what UX tips do you have for us?

Monique Jenkins: So tip number one is I think that you should always start your projects by understanding who you're designing for. I think that this is wildly underestimated and I can't emphasize enough why you should start with knowing who your ideal user is. So a while back, I think I can't remember what episode it was, but I'd made a comment that I called my million dollar design mistake. So that's the story that our audience should be familiar with. And the lesson that I learned in that is that you can't effectively build sites or any digital product without having a deep understanding of who your users are.

Jessica Valis: You definitely need to know who your audience is before you start the design. You can't design for everyone. And actually, that's a huge red flag for designers when a client says, I'm designing for anybody or my client is everybody. So once clients can express who their target market is, what are some ways we can learn more about their perspective audience?

Monique Jenkins: Well, it all starts with user research. One of the first things that I do is I conduct interviews. So interviews with people who have already used your site or interviews with people who are new to your site. I run usability tests, I send out surveys. So like NPS score surveys where you're trying to find out from your customer, you know, the experience that they've had with your business, those are all good ways of collecting additional like feedback from someone. So whatever it takes for you to get into the mind of your users is incredibly valuable. And once you've gathered all of that valuable insight, you should be creating user personas. You should be creating journey maps. So how are people navigating through your site? Where are the pain points that they're experiencing? How can you alleviate those things? Where are good friction points? So sometimes, you know, we talk a lot about, you know, ineffective design and, you know, how you can lose a person, but there are also good friction points. Maybe you don't want a specific type of client or a specific audience member and you want to be able to filter those people out. How do you do that using effective design? Doing all of those things, creating personas, journey maps, those are tools that are super helpful because they allow you to visualize your users' needs and expectations. And it's incredibly valuable when you're talking to clients because they get to see who their client is and it's great for them to be able to correlate that back to who a user is. So the argument that I would have to, hey, I like blue, let's use blue, is, hey, your audience is, you know, more holistically men and men have color blindness. So you don't want to use a color that would be hard for them to engage with because they're not a part of your core audience segment. So that's a good, you know, that creates good conversation between you and your client and the executives that you have kind of monitoring projects as you go through. They also, again, help guide design decisions. They make sure you're not just designing for yourself, but for people who are actually using your product. And let's get real for a moment. CEOs and executives will always tell you who they think is losing their site. And by and large, they do not have the data to back that up. They are building their site for this hypothetical person, ideal client that you're dealing with. And you can't trust that data and you can't trust those sentiments. You really have to figure out who they're missing and their target demographic can be completely different than who they think it is.

Jessica Valis: When you say build user personas, is this kind of like, you know, writing down, oh, John Smith, he's a 35 year old man, he lives by himself, he has no children, he has a dog. Like, is that what you need by building user personas?

Monique Jenkins: Yeah, so a user persona is a semi -fictional character created to represent different type of customers that are using a company's products or services. So you're exactly right. We are building a site for a 34 year old. It just personalized. So these things can be very generic. Oh, our audience segment is a 60 year old white male, da, da, da, da. That's helpful context, but it's not everything. Getting specific into our audience is a 56 year old Caucasian male named Brad, who has three grandchildren and is married to Betty and they've been married for 15 years. Betty likes to bake and Brad likes sports cars or whatever the case is. Those specifics will help you to navigate what imagery, what content is the best for that audience segment. Because then you get a lot more detailed in what you're building out versus this generic mysterious figure that you really don't have context for.

Jessica Valis: Yeah, in my design questionnaire that I do, I ask all these really random questions like, what does your ideal client do on the weekend? Do they have, well, kind of describe their house? Like, do they have a fence? Do they garden? Do they do this? And when I go through this exercise with the clients, I'm sure they're like, why does this matter? But again, it's building that persona and understanding the values. Like, if your client on the weekends, they go to church and then they volunteer a weekend versus somebody who goes on hikes and or versus somebody who goes, they do all their shopping over the weekend. Like, those are three different types of people. So, yeah, I always build it out. And I also read somewhere or I was doing, maybe I was doing a course and they said, think of your favorite client, building user persona as if that's them. So I, I always think of that when I anything I do, I'm like, oh, this is my ideal client. And that ideal client, well, actually, that client comes back and quotes the stuff that I put online. Because I'm like, I'm talking directly to him and everybody like him. So that's pretty cool. Okay, so for those who have never done UX before, what are some of the tools or like platforms you use to conduct your research? Because I wouldn't even know where to begin. So

Monique Jenkins: So to get started and UX, there are a couple of different tools that you're going to use. One is if you want to send out surveys and things like that, you can use something like type form, Google Forms that you can push out to your audience and you're gathering a bunch of quantitative data. For qualitative data, you can use platforms like Suzy. You could use suzeretesting .com. You can just reach out to people across Facebook, whatever platforms, Reddit, whatever you have, and ask them if you can do a moderated test with them. So a moderated user test is you actually sit down and you interview the person. So you come up with a script, you have questions that you want to ask about a design or some context and you have that conversation with the person. Moderated tests are really good at helping you to pull out information that you probably wouldn't normally get from someone because someone can make a question in a user testing environment like, I like this design. What do you like about it? Is it the colors? Is it the placement? Is it the size of the text or the font? You need to draw that out of the person that you're actually talking to. Unmoderated test is very similar. You can use a user testing platform to do this, but it's you write out the script in a format and a person just takes the test online. There is no person, you c