Making a difference: ideas from UX New Zealand 2022

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Optimal Workshop is thrilled to welcome Designlab as our newest education partner. This collaboration merges our strengths to provide innovative learning opportunities for UX professionals looking to sharpen their design skills and elevate their careers. 

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The Power of a Design-First Education Partner

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What makes Designlab unique is its exclusive focus on design education. For more than a decade, they have dedicated themselves to providing hands-on learning experiences that  combine asynchronous, online lessons and projects with synchronous group sessions and expert mentorship. With a robust catalog of industry-relevant courses and an alumni network of over 20,000 professionals, Designlab is committed to empowering designers to make an impact at both individual and team levels.

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What Designlab Offers for Experienced Designers

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Designlab offers a range of advanced programs that support ongoing professional development. Some courses that might be interesting for our audience include:

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• Data-Driven Design: Gain confidence in your ability to collect and interpret data, justify design decisions with business impact, and win over stakeholders. 
• Advanced Figma: Accelerate your design workflow and become a more efficient Figma user by learning tools like components, auto-layout, and design tokens. 
• Strategic Business Acumen for Designers: Learn the foundational business knowledge and frameworks you need to influence strategy and get your design career to the next level.  
• Advanced Usability and Accessibility: Strengthen your usability and accessibility skills, integrate universal design principles into your work, and improve advocacy for inclusivity in design.  

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These courses ensure that experienced designers can enhance their technical and strategic skills to solve complex problems, lead projects, and design user-centered experiences.

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Solutions for Design Teams

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Designlab also offers solutions for design teams looking to upskill together. These solutions can range from multi-seat enrollments to their courses to custom facilitation and training programs, perfectly tailored to your teams’ needs. By partnering with Designlab, companies ensure their teams are equipped with practical skills and a forward-thinking mindset to tackle design challenges effectively.

READ: Designing for Accessibility with The Home Depot

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Special Offer for the Optimal Workshop Community

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To celebrate this partnership, Optimal Workshop users can take advantage of a special discount—$100 off any Designlab course with the code OPTIMAL. Whether you’re looking to refine your skills or explore new areas of expertise, Designlab’s programs offer the perfect opportunity to invest in your professional growth.

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Explore how Designlab’s offerings can help you level up your design career—whether it’s through mastering advanced tools, leveraging data more, or becoming a more strategic thinker. With continuous learning at the heart of success in UX and product design, there’s no better time to start your journey with Designlab.

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Unlock your potential and discover new possibilities with Designlab’s courses today. Use code OPTIMAL to save $100 on your next course and take the next step in your design career.

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There’s not much a parent won’t do to ensure their child has the best chance of succeeding in life. Unsurprisingly, things are much the same in product development. Whether it’s a designer, manager, developer or copywriter, everyone wants to see the product reach its full potential.

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Key to a product’s success (even though it’s still not widely practiced) is UX research. Without research focused on learning user pain points and behaviors, development basically happens in the dark. Feeding direct insights from customers and users into the development of a product means teams can flick the light on and make more informed design decisions.

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While the benefits of user research are obvious to anyone working in the field, it can be a real challenge to convince others of just how important and useful it is. We thought we’d help.

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Define user research

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If you want to sell the importance of UX research within your organization, you’ve got to ensure stakeholders have a clear understanding of what user research is and what they stand to gain from backing it.

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In general, there are a few key things worth focusing on when you’re trying to explain the benefits of research:

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• More informed design decisions: Companies make major design decisions far too often without considering users. User research provides the data needed to make informed decisions.
• Less uncertainty and risk: Similarly, research reduces risk and uncertainty simply by giving companies more clarity around how a particular product or service is used.
• Retention and conversion benefits: Research means you’ll be more aligned with the needs of your customers and prospective customers.

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Use the language of the people you’re trying to convince. A capable UX research practice will almost always improve key business metrics, namely sales and retention.

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The early stages

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When embarking on a project, book in some time early in the process to answer questions, explain your research approach and what you hope to gain from it. Here are some of the key things to go over:

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• Your objectives: What are you trying to achieve? This is a good time to cover your research questions.
• Your research methods: Which methods will you be using to carry out your research? Cover the advantages of these methods and the information you’re likely to get from using them.
• Constraints: Do you see any major obstacles? Any issues with resources?
• Provide examples: Nothing shows the value of doing research quite like a case study. If you can’t find an example of research within your own organization, see what you can find online.

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Involve others in your research

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When trying to convince someone of the validity of what you’re doing, it’s often best to just show them. There are a couple of effective ways you can do this – at a team or individual level and at an organizational level.

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We’ll explain the best way to approach this below, but there’s another important reason to bring others into your research. UX research can’t exist in a vacuum – it thrives on integration and collaboration with other teams. Importantly, this also means working with other teams to define the problems they’re trying to solve and the scope of their projects. Once you’ve got an understanding of what they’re trying to achieve, you’ll be in a better position to help them through research.

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Educate others on what research is

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Education sessions (lunch-and-learns) are one of the best ways to get a particular team or group together and run through the what and why of user research. You can work with them to work out what they’d like to see from you, and how you can help each other.

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Tailor what you’re saying to different teams, especially if you’re talking to people with vastly different skill sets. For example, developers and designers are likely to see entirely different value in research.

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Collect user insights across the organization

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Putting together a comprehensive internal repository focused specifically on user research is another excellent way to grow awareness. It can also help to quantify things that may otherwise fall by the wayside. For example, you can measure the magnitude of certain pain points or observe patterns in feature requests. Using a platform like Notion or Confluence (or even Google Drive if you don’t want a dedicated platform), log all of your study notes, insights and research information that you find useful.

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Whenever someone wants to learn more about research within the organization, they’ll be able to find everything easily.

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Bring stakeholders along to research sessions

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Getting a stakeholder along to a research session (usability tests and user interviews are great starting points) will help to show them the value that face-to-face sessions with users can provide.

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To really involve an observer in your UX research, assign them a specific role. Note taker, for example. With a short briefing on best-practices for note taking, they can get a feel for what’s like to do some of the work you do.

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You may also want to consider bringing anyone who’s interested along to a research session, even if they’re just there to observe.

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Share your findings – consistently

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Research is about more than just testing a hypothesis, it’s important to actually take your research back to the people who can action the data.

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By sharing your research findings with teams and stakeholders regularly, your organization will start to build up an understanding of the value that ongoing research can provide, meaning getting approval to pursue research in future becomes easier. This is a bit of a chicken and egg situation, but it’s a practice that all researchers need to get into – especially those embedded in large teams or organizations.

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Anything else you think is worth mentioning? Let us know in the comments.

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Read more

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• Selling your design recommendations to clients and colleagues – Guest writer Jeff Tang outlines some of his techniques for presenting UX recommendations and answering objections.
• Quantifying the ROI of UX – Ashlea McKay delves into one of the toughest UX questions to answer: “What do we get for our money?”
• How to lead a UX team – With user-centered design growing in organizations around the world, we’ll need capable leaders to run UX teams.
• How do I explain what UX is? – Ashlea McKay covers how you can explain UX to people who may not necessarily have familiarity with the field.

If you missed our recent live training on Prototype Testing, don’t worry—we’ve got everything you need right here! You can catch up at your convenience, so grab a cup of tea, put your feet up, and enjoy the show.
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In the session, we explored the powerful new features of our Prototype Testing tool, offering a step-by-step guide to setting up, running, and analyzing your tests like a seasoned pro. This tool is a game-changer for your design workflow, helping you identify usability issues and gather real user feedback before committing significant resources to development.

Here’s a quick recap of the highlights:

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1. Creating a prototype test from scratch using images

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We walked through how to create a prototype test from scratch using static images. This method is perfect for early-stage design concepts, where you want to quickly test user flows without a fully interactive prototype.

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2. Preparing your Figma prototype for testing

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Figma users, we’ve got you covered! We discussed how to prepare your Figma prototype for the smoothest possible testing experience. From setting up interactions to ensuring proper navigation, these tips ensure participants have an intuitive experience during the test. For more detailed instructions, check out our help article 

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3. Seamless Figma prototype imports

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One of the standout features of the tool is its seamless integration with Figma. We showed how easy it is to import your designs directly from Figma into Optimal, streamlining the setup process. You can bring your working files straight in, and resync when you need to with one click of a button.

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4. Understanding usability metrics and analyzing results

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We explored how to analyze the usability metrics, and walked through what the results can indicate on click maps and paths. These visual tools allow you to see exactly how participants navigate your design, making it easier to spot pain points, dead ends, or areas of friction. By understanding user behavior, you can rapidly iterate and refine your prototypes for optimal user experience.

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