The golden filter of UX design
A new model for creating human centered UX design.
This article is the second part in a series about design guidelines. Also read part one about design guidelines and part three about organizing a workshop.
To create design guidelines for human centered design, we will need to take a look at the context of our design problems. Without understanding the context, we won’t know which problems need to be fixed by the design. To do this, we can use existing methods, like human centered design and the golden circle. But while these methods are powerful on their own, they won’t enable us to create design guidelines yet. So I’m proposing a new method based on these existing methods that makes it easier for anyone to create design guidelines for human centered design.
Human centered design
By now, you might know that the context of design problems mostly consists of business perspective and user needs. We try to understand why our clients have certain needs, and we want the services and products we make to be received well by the users. This is not only because it earns us money, but also because we want our actions to have purpose.
As a UX engineer at WebNL, I research human behaviour in order to make the products we make perform better with users. So I do a lot of user interviews, usability tests and journey mapping. But I’m also responsable for creating frontend code while realising the user experience. I have to keep in mind the limits of device processing power, network speed and search engine optimalisation. I can’t have good user experience without knowing the boundaries of technology, simply put.
So a lot of designers combine the business perspective and user needs with a third factor: technology. Together, they are combined to create human centered design. This just means that humans are involved in all steps of the design process.
People: Users and consumers in need of services and products
Business: Organisations offering services and products
Technology: The advantages and possibilities of modern science
We can create design guidelines based on people, business and technology. But a lot of human centered products and services still fail, ironically since they’re still not solving user needs. And that is mostly because businesses do not understand the why behind user needs. So to create good design guidelines, we also need to know why.
The golden circle
A method that teaches us more about the why is the golden circle, created by Simon Sinek. As an advertising executive, Simon looked at businesses and found out they mostly start with what. They sell computers or make software. Then sometimes they look for how and why to justify what they do. But simon also saw that the most successful companies start with why. This way he learned that companies should look for the why if they really want to know what and how. That is what he called the golden circle.
As it turns out, Simon’s model is not just a great motivator for companies to find out why they do what they do, it’s also a reminder for us designers to find out why we are designing things. But in itself, the model isn’t enough to create design. It doesn’t tell us how we find out the why behind the design, or where to look for it.
A new model: The golden filter of UX design
Since human centered design and the golden circle aren’t enough to create design guidelines alone, we might try to combine them into a new model. A model that gives us a more concrete way to handle things. First we would need a starting point, because we can’t start with the business, the user and technology all at the same time.
Let’s think about human centered design again and turn it into a design process. If it really should be human centered, people should come first in our design process. If we would start with business, we would need to limit our resources right away in order to make profit. And if we would start with technology, we would need to think about the limits of technology right away. By starting with humans, we make sure there are no limits to our creativity. We’re just trying to find out what our focus should be.
I’m not saying you should forget about business and technology. We just need to postpone those factors so we can explore more freely. Later we can combine humans with the business to get real again. This works a litle bit like a filter. We mix those two ingredients, human and business, together and a result will come out of it. That way we create design that matches both humans and the business.
But like mixing cooking ingredients in reality, it’s not really that simple. When you want to understand what your users need, it is important that you know what they do, how they do it and, most important of all, why they do it. It’s like the golden circle from Simon Sinek. If you don’t know why or how, you won’t really know what you need to do.
The golden filter — User research
When I’m doing user interviews, I’m usually trying to find out the layers behind the actions of users to find out what, how and why. I always like to find out why the most, because often users don’t think about why they do things before you ask them. When you ask them, they find out something about themselves they didn’t know yet.
The things users want to have or want to do are called attributes. They might want a good pair of sneakers, or they want to eat healthy. We can ask about these attributes, or observe them.
When you ask users why they like to have a good pair of sneakers, or why they want to eat healthy, they’ll most often answer with consequenses of those attributes. A good pair of sneakers might give them the ability to run further, while eating healthy might give them more energy. Knowing about these consequences, we will also know how the attributes satisfy their needs.
But we can still go one step further. When you ask users about why these consequenses are important to them, they really start thinking. They’ll probably say that running further is important to them because they like to achieve, and that they need the energy in order to achieve. Achievement is a human value, it reveals the identity of your user because values are the reasons why they do what they do.
Like pouring water into a filter to get to the gold, we can put users through a filter of interviewing and observing to find the values behind their needs.
Now that we know the values and the consequences of the attributes that users are after, we can think of how we can make these attributes better. The sneakers need to be durable, and the food has to provide energy. These are good design guidelines, right? Wrong. We haven’t thought about the business side yet.
When you’ve done user research, you can create persona’s from user values, map a user journey to identify user problems and define a problem statement for the problem you want to solve. However, these steps are not part of the model. They are left out intentionally, because persona’s, journeys and problem statements are just tools to identify and communicate user needs and problems. It’s good practice to use these tools, but they are not the end result you should focus on. Also, when choosing a problem to solve, you might want to know what kind of problems your business can solve, and which it cannot. So let’s have a look at the business perspective first.
The golden filter: Business perspective
When it comes to business perspective, we can simply sell attributes as a solution to users. We can sell shoes for people to walk in, or we can sell food for people to live. In essence, this is what doing business often comes down to. But as Simon Sinek showed with his golden circle, a business can be much more successful if it knows why. So we need to find out how and why a business can help people better.
Luckily, we already found out why users want certain things. If we take their values and combine these with corporate values, we can figure out the why of the business. Corporate values are made from the combined values of the people that work in a business. Apple is a company that has always strived to be creative. Nike is all about achievement. And Disney gives us pleasure.
At WebNL I’m working together with a strategist to identify corporate values in client companies. The strategist will do research to find out which corporate values exist in client companies. These corporate values are important because they can be used to create a vision and mission statement: A short description of what a business wants to achieve and why. Together, these corporate values, vision statements and mission statements form the reasons for why a business exist: a business motive.
Mission statements and vision statements contain the final goals that a business wants to achieve. But the statements are not specific on how these goals and smaller goals can be achieved: They lack strategy. A strategy can tell us to create better communication through storytelling for example. This is a part of brand strategy. But sometimes the products or services that a business offers need to improved. In that case we need a concept or product strategy.
In the end, we will have a strong brand, a strong service or a strong product as a final solution. This is what a business produces, based on how it does this and why it does this. So instead of going down the filter, this time we are going up. The same thing happens with a real filter. If you throw water down at one side, it will shortly be pushed up at the other side before going down the drain of the filter.
The golden filter: Creating design
Finally, we will want to create design that meets business perspectives and fulfills real user needs. To do that, we need principles that are based on the corporate mission and the user values that we found earlier in our process. We can use those principles as widely applicable laws in our design to ensure that the why of the business and the users is represented in our design.
Next, we can create guidelines from those principles. The guidelines will tell us how to apply principles in a more specific way. But keep in mind that they’re still recommendations: They don’t tell us what to do with our design but rather the direction it should follow.
The final step is to create a set of rules that we can use to create visual design, wireframes or prototypes. They are like criteria that need to be met, or a checklist of things that need to be crossed of. Good rules tell us what a product or service should feel like, look like and behave like.
The model is now complete, as design will come out of the filter like clean water. But like a real filter, you can use the filter multiple multiple times to ensure that nothing is left inside the clean water.
Since strategy and consequences also tell us how, they are both on the same level as guidelines. We can use them to check if the guidelines are right. The guidelines need to tell us which consequences of attributes need to be achieved. And they should also comply with the strategy that is set to achieve business goals. If the guidelines do not match with the strategy and the consequences, maybe they need to be reformulated.
The same thing applies to rules. They are on the same level as solutions and attributes. We should be able to create the products and services that make up solutions by following the rules. And the rules should be what users expect of these products and services. Again, if they are not, maybe the rules should be changed.
But wait, what about technology. In human centered design, there are three main factors: Business, people and technology. But unlike business and people, technology does not have it’s own why. Technology is dependent on the why of people and businesses. They choose which technology gets development time. So it didn’t feel right to include technology in the model.
But technology is still a factor in making rules: When making rules they have to be feasible with current technology. But this also applies to ethics and laws, for example. So to make rules research has to be done into requirements and feasibility.
Conclusion
To create design guidelines, we need to have a clear view of the context of design problems. To get this view you can use the golden filter of UX design. The model teaches us how to create human centered design, while also taking account for the business, technology and other factors.
Using the model, we can create design that will out-perform common solutions that are just user attributes and nothing more. This is because we use the model to create guidelines and rules from user research and a business perspective. Finally we can check if our design meets those guidelines and rules.
In a best case scenario, we can continuously use the filter in an iterative design process to make sure that all the aspects of design stay in the right connection. Updates can be made when more user research comes in, our when a business shifts to another positioning, while ensuring that the design stays in touch with new insights.
