The UX Reader: MailChimp UX Team Book [Part 1]

[ Tl; dr ]

[ 2nd part of the book ]
[ 3rd part of the book ]
[ 4th part of the book ]
[ 5th part of the book ]
[ 6th part of the book ]
[ 7th part of the book ]
[ 8th part of the book ]
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Introduction

The MailChimp team likes to share the results of their work, which subsequently gives an amazing effect. This helps us to be more attentive to what we are doing: “Let's see how we did it? And why did we decide that this is the best method? ”

We single out effective approaches to solving various tasks: “We saved a lot of time by solving it this way.” The publication of such approaches gives rise to an interesting discussion: “So, you did it that way? I wonder why. "

It helps us not to conceive: “Yes, you are right. We could do it differently. ” Modesty and openness to new ideas is a source for our professional growth: “Well, we were guided by this method, but we decided to revise it and conduct an experiment. As a result, we came to the conclusion that there are more effective approaches. ”

We share the results of our work in order to achieve the best results in our activities. This is the essence of our book. We hope that she will help you in the same way. But there is another reason that we decided to release this book: it allows us to study many issues through the eyes of our customers.

All the money earned on this book we will send RailsBridge, who spend a lot of effort on teaching programming to groups of people who historically constitute a minority in the general mass of developers. The format of this book corresponds to our ideas about working with user experience. We start by looking at the aspects of collaborative and teamwork, followed by our UX trio: research, design and development. In the final articles, we decided to consider the issue of improvements and improvements that can be done without end and edge, of course.

In the process of reading you may have questions and comments - they can be safely sent to us. We share with you the results of work that we love and appreciate very much, and if it helps you to improve your work at least a little, it will be the best reward for us.

Aaron Walter, UX Director at MailChimp

Formation of UX-team

“User Experience” is a rather vague term. It can be used as a kind of container that includes research, design, development, and even technical support. Based on this uncertainty, the question arises about the formation of an effective team.

In 2008, the MailChimp UX team consisted of one person — me, and I had to do everything: interface design, front-end development, prototyping, customer interviewing, and usability tests. Combining these disciplines in my work allowed me to understand which UX team I would like to form.

This team should be able to think and implement their ideas. In large companies, UX teams often focus on working with wireframes (wireframe prototypes) and processes (workflows), while they lack the competence to work directly with interfaces. The weak point of this approach lies in the loss of some of the ideas and meanings in transferring the results of one department to another. A team of specialists who do not have interdisciplinary experience, creates inconsistency of work, which ultimately leads to a delay in iterations, leads to an increase in entropy and, ultimately, to a mediocre user experience.

I wanted the opposite - to form a team of people with interdisciplinary experience and special competencies, which would allow to work out individual details, keeping in mind a general idea of ​​user experience. Over 6 years of work, we slowly and methodically worked on the formation of such a team. I brought to our team a designer, developer, usability specialist, and so on. And these are not just diverse specialists, they are those who make their creative contribution to the project, inspire us and progress with the team.

We deliberately work within a small team of 12 people: four are engaged in design research, two - interface design, another four - front-end development, there is another person engaged in layout and design of mailings, and I. A small number of employees facilitates communication within the team, not to mention understanding that you work with smart and capable people.

Reflecting on how we came to the current version of our team, I make a number of conclusions about how to select employees in order to get a strong UX-team. These are not some magic tips, but just an analysis of how we manage to do quite a lot using intuition and experience.

Hiring a person is easy, and dismissing is difficult

Finding the right candidate for the position is not an easy task. It requires incredible time-consuming. Tasks of this kind often seem overwhelming, but are key in the process of forming a UX-team (or any other team). Mediocre specialists are not difficult to find, but to dismiss them is much more difficult.

Such people usually do not demonstrate any significant merit as performers or organizers, but they are kept at the level of a sufficient minimum, which allows them to justify their stay in one or another position. The spirit of mediocre attitude to work is serious, it may well scare away talented job candidates. The key to working on this aspect of the team is to pay attention to the process of hiring new employees.

Do not try to evaluate a person strictly according to his skills - pay attention to such qualities as purposefulness, curiosity, unselfishness, openness, confidence, sociability, ability to control one's emotions and internal motivation. All this can not be taught, but the skills - is a new business.

In addition, think about the general impression that makes people. Of course, at first glance this approach looks too general, but let me give an example from my practice:

Proceeding from an overly strong handshake and a loud greeting from one of the candidates, I understood that a person with such an imperious character would not be suitable for my team. In the course of the interview, I became more and more convinced of the correctness of my presentiment. I realized that such an assertive person would just crush the atmosphere in the team.

We spend more time at work with our colleagues than at home with our family, so why don’t we listen to our gut feeling when deciding to hire?

In the process of recruiting employees, you can go to the extreme in your quest to find the best of the best. Unfortunately, these guys often have difficulty in interacting with the team and can without any malicious intent to exert psychological pressure on colleagues. When hiring a new employee, ask yourself: “Can this person say“ we ”instead of“ I ”? Will he not “pull the blanket” over himself? Will this person have enough will to delegate the continuation of work on the best projects to someone else? ”If the answers to all these questions are positive, then you have a really good employee in your hands.

Respectful attitude

The lack of proper attitude to the results of work can cool demoralize your colleagues. There are many studies on this topic, but few people take them seriously. Designers' work verified to the pixel, the brilliant software code of developers - all this is often lost in a working rush. As a result, many simply leave.

This applies to both individual employees and teams, and as a result, to their companies. What is the reason? The answer is simple: lack of respect for each other.

A respectful attitude is based on the time we devote to understanding each other and understanding the expertise of our colleagues. A specialist who is a master in his field of activity cannot be considered effective if he does not understand the connection between the results of his work and the work of his colleagues. A good designer should understand the specifics of the work of an engineer in order to properly respond to his requests, listen to him and understand those who bring to life the designer. A good developer will not focus solely on performance aspects and will spend additional time in order to develop a truly effective interface with the designer.

Respectful attitude makes it easier to exchange ideas and creates an atmosphere of trust. You can achieve much more by starting your phrase with "Yes, and it would be possible ..." than with the word "no."

Mutual respect in the work of the designer and developer is a key ingredient for obtaining a good product, but it rarely appears by itself unless it is perceived as one of the fundamental values ​​of the company. In this case, employees should follow the example of managers.

Autonomy

Respect is not the only element of an adequate working atmosphere. The lack of autonomy in making certain decisions can demoralize a team to no less a degree than the lack of proper attitude to the results of work. It is quite difficult to experiment if you need to take a written permission each time, and this in turn does not allow to demonstrate significant progress in work. If your company does not allow any unsuccessful decisions, then you can not wait for something outstanding.

Autonomy is necessary for teams to quickly make decisions based on their gut feeling and leading to something new: experience, information, etc. Autonomy allows you to achieve better results in a short time and no frills in the available resources. Having hired an excellent specialist, you must show him the vision of your work, its principles and simply not interfere. This requires a certain level of trust in each other.

The MailChimp team doesn't have many employees, but this is our advantage. It is easier for us to interact, plan and start implementing ideas. Each team has a certain level of autonomy regarding its work. If necessary, these teams interact with each other and develop joint solutions.

Nevertheless, in this matter it is necessary to feel a measure: absolute autonomy leads to chaos.

Working in the framework of small autonomous teams, we do not forget about our belonging to a large team of the company. Our solutions affect the work and processes in other MailChimp divisions. Making substantive decisions requires a compromise between your autonomy and the views on the business of the entire company.

Many quite often demonize meetings, but they are useful if they are short regular discussions of the work done. Each of the employees belonging to an autonomous team should be aware of what their colleagues are doing. A brief overview of current activities allows employees to help each other and be aware of what is happening. Even a simple chat over a cup of coffee helps to synchronize work. In MailChimp, this is exactly what happens.

Parallel development and research cycles

Flexible development methodologies ( Lean and Agile ) are a kind of religion of technology companies trying to outrun competitors by performing fast iterations in product development. This approach also has weaknesses, for example, a lack of research on solutions. Thus, the rate of work does not always lead to the implementation of those decisions that could really be considered effective.

The MailChimp team adheres to these methodologies, but does so without fanaticism. “Fast implementation and error correction” is the motto briefly describing our approach.

At some point, we tried to link the research process to a 5-week update release cycle, followed by our developers and interface designers. We managed to do this, and this approach works for usability testing, conducted in order to find opportunities for a slight improvement in the results of work, but at the same time we are faced with significant time constraints for detailed studies of problems and developments.

Design researchers are working on a long study of key aspects of the work of our services, and this work requires interviewing a large number of our customers, conducting surveys, ethnographic research, etc. All this takes time. The cycle of detailed research is much longer than the 5-week development cycle, and we conduct them parallel to each other.
The theory loses its meaning without confirmation in practice, and the parallel operation of these cycles should not lead to full autonomy of the working groups. Our researchers constantly share the results of their research with designers and developers, and not just wait for months in order to share their achievements. At the same time, researchers do not expect the immediate implementation of their recommendations - they form the context in which the product is being developed.

As large-scale research is completed, we discuss steps to incorporate the proposed recommendations into our overall plan. This approach is a bet not just on the speed of work, but also on the guaranteed effectiveness of the proposed solutions.

Empathy culture

Development of updates is a “dust free” lesson, which cannot be said about work on improving processes and correcting errors. A good product requires both, made with an equal degree of commitment and enthusiasm.

Motivation is needed to work on improvement. The best motivation for the UX team is those difficulties in working with the application that users encounter. From time to time, we invite our customers to the MailChimp office and invite them to participate in usability testing of our products. The guys from the technical support department and our UX-team are always very worried when watching such testing. Especially in those moments when users encounter difficulties in performing a particular task. As a result, we simply become so uncomfortable in front of our customers that we double-up to work on improving our products.

In addition, we also conduct remote usability testing and polls, answer questions on Twitter and sort out thousands of feedback from our customers, including those who refuse to continue using MailChimp products. This work is done by our research team, but it does not do without the participation of front-end developers. They communicate face to face with customers and learn their approaches to using our products.

As you begin to pay attention to the user experience of your customers, the level of empathy within your team will increase. Your colleagues will not only be motivated to improve products, but will also take on this work with double perseverance and dedication. Without any requests.

Share stories

Introducing design research into the workflow of our UX team, I was sure that the recommendations drawn from these studies would be quite enough. I made a mistake, because there is no sense in the dry reports without a convincing presentation of the results.

Our experts are not too lazy to compile 50-page materials about how our customers use MailChimp products. Such materials really help us to improve our products, and sometimes force us to review the activities of the company as a whole.
Few people are interested in dozens of pages of reports that require a considerable amount of time to study. Proceeding from this, we decided to work with the user experience of our colleagues who, on duty, need to delve into the essence of such materials.

We experiment by formulating high-level results of our research in the format of posters, videos and web pages, which greatly speeds up the process of their study and makes it easier to work with such documentation. Research results are much more useful if they are easy to perceive and share with colleagues.

Keep improving

I have been working within the framework of the UX team, having been involved in management and recruitment for many years, but I have not been able to deal with all aspects of our work. It seems that the universal solution, which many of my colleagues are busy looking for, constantly eludes us. Maybe there is no such solution at all. The exact definition of the concept of “user experience” has not been formulated, so why should there be a universal approach to working on the creation and management of a UX team?

We try to harmonize the work of researchers, designers and developers, and I know for sure that intelligent and qualified specialists, united by the common goal of helping our clients, manage to create amazing things.

Teamwork

A couple of months ago I was at Stanford, where I was fortunate enough to give a lecture for students of Enrique Allen. They worked on prototypes, lined up user feedback gathering and an iterative workflow. This course was full of startup spirit.

The audience is located on chairs and sofas, evenly distributed throughout the hall. Subsequently, the seats were replaced by tables, at which discussion of the students' work continued. I was struck by the dynamics in the use of the working space, which changed depending on their activities.

As the lecture was completed, one of the teachers, Scott Dorley, handed me a copy of his book, Make Space , which is about the different approaches to the organization of the working space. Scott also worked with this room by introducing new teaching methods using certain variants of the working furniture layouts.

During a small tour of the campus, Scott showed me a variety of rooms for working with ideas, productive activities and calm thinking. They were full of various artifacts designed to foster creative thinking embedded in the learning process at the basic program level and at the campus premises themselves.

A visit to Stanford changed the way I imagined working space. And relatively on time. At this time, Ron Lewis, our creative director, and Mark DiCristina, director of marketing, just designed for us a new design studio in Atlanta.

Design Studio MailChimp

Ron was already hard at work investigating possible solutions, visiting the offices of various companies in order to prepare groundwork for his own project, but we managed to agree with Mark on the basic principles that influenced the design of our studio. And the resulting workspace in turn influenced the way our team works.

Experiment with the location of jobs

Based on the fact that the organization of joint work of our team was a top priority in the creation of a new studio, we started from the location of jobs. Design researchers, content and illustration specialists, designers, photographers, and designers of interaction methods — everyone needs to choose the right place for their skills and character.

For our studio, we picked up a large open office (open space) on the fourth floor of the building. We did not separate the working groups from each other and decided to unite our colleagues with the most varied specialization. We planted analysts alongside design researchers, front-end development specialists alongside marketing specialists, and designers alongside content experts.

This approach allows us to look at work projects from different points of view. Regardless of what each of us does individually.

Design for traffic

Sitting for hours at the workplace leads not only to muscle atrophy, but also greatly undermines mental activity. We seized on this idea and arranged the furniture in such a way as to facilitate the easy movement of colleagues from one part of the room to another. At the same time, we used tables for working while standing and took into account the possibility of changing the workplace.

We have a special place for designers who want to work productively, coming to Atlanta as guests. We have already managed to work on James Victor , Dan Benjamin , Brad Frost and many other experts in their field. Such people drop in for only a couple of hours, but their cheerfulness and energy inspire us greatly.



Create a space to work with ideas.

Ron was able to visit the Iron Yard office in Greenville, whose walls also served as a huge board. We liked this idea, and we brought it to life in our studio. As a result, we noticed that people are more willing to share their ideas, possessing the necessary tools to bring them to others. So working together has become even more pleasant and productive.

In our studio, we combined the approach of colleagues from Iron Yard and Stanford, building mobile racks used as space demarcators and fasteners for writing boards. Thus, we can quickly organize the space for working with ideas and return to our workplaces, dismantling it as soon as the time comes for the implementation of our ideas.



Leave room for convergence.

We have a common place for lunch and socializing. The heart of this place is a coffee bar with a LaMarzocco Linea machine. Good coffee attracts not only designers, but also guys from other departments of the company. Here we meet engineers, accountants, colleagues from technical support, exchanging the latest news.

Convergence brings together the company's employees, as Gregg Bernstein , the senior design researcher, wrote in his article in UX Mag. Our design solutions have led to tighter teamwork. Thus, relatively expensive purchases like coffee machines have paid for themselves.

Allocate space for calm reflection.

Large open offices can sometimes be a great distraction with a lot of talk, albeit inspiring. Based on this, we have equipped a couple of offices located near our design studio for holding meetings, calls or just working in silence.

Of course, we wanted to unite the whole team within one space, but first of all we thought about the productive work of our colleagues and gave them the opportunity to choose.

Knowledge synthesis spaces

Without exaggeration, we can say that the new design studio has changed the way we work. Previously, we worked in rooms that were separated from each other by walls; as a result, a joint discussion of working issues was rare.

Now we can not imagine a day without interdisciplinary communication. Content specialists communicate with designers, photographers - with design researchers. We always knew that a good product requires a synthesis of skills and knowledge, but now we are convinced of this day after day.

[ Translation of the second part of the book The UX Reader ]