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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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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Ahead of her talk at UX New Zealand 2016, Lana Gibson from Lanalytics writes about a project she worked on with Te Papa.Te Papa (a museum in Wellington, New Zealand) created audience personas based on user research, and I used these as a basis to create audience segments in Google Analytics to give us further insight into different groups. By regularly engaging with our audience using both qualitative and quantitative user insight methods, we’re starting to build up a three-dimensional picture of their needs and how Te Papa can serve them.

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Personas based on user research

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At Te Papa the digital team created six audience personas to inform their site redesign, based on user research:

• enthusiast
• tourist
• social
• educator
• volunteer
• Wellingtonian

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These formed a good basis for understanding why people are using the site. For example the educator persona wants fodder for lesson plans for her class — trustworthy, subject-based resources that will excite her students. The tourist persona wants practical information — what’s on, how to plan a visit. And they want to get this information quickly and get on with their visit.We’ll follow the tourist persona through a couple more rounds of user research, to give an example of what you can find out by segmenting your audience.

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Interpreting tourist needs with data

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Te Papa holds information for the Tourist audience in the Visit and What’s on sections of the site. I created a segment in Google Analytics which filters the reports to show how people who visit pages within these two sections interact with the whole site. For example the keywords they search for in Google before arriving on Te Papa, what they search for when on the site, and how many of them email us.Deeper digging revealed that the Tourist audience makes up about half of our overall audience. Because the content is useful to everyone wanting to visit the museum, and not just tourists, we broadened the scope of this persona and called the segment ‘Museum visitor’.

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Why segment by site category — what if the audience goes beyond these pages?

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Google Analytics segments allow you to see all the pages that a particular audience visits, not just the ones you’ve filtered. For example over 2,000 people who visited a page within the Visit and What’s on sections also visited the Kids and families section in July 2016. So, the audience segment allows us to expand our concept of our audiences.You can segment by a lot of different behaviors. For example you could segment visitors by keyword, isolating people who come to the site from Google after searching for ‘parking’ and ‘opening hours’ and seeing what they do afterwards. But segmenting by site category tests the information architecture of your site, which can be very useful if you’ve got it wrong!

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Visit persona wants opening hours information

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What did we learn from these personas? One example is that the most searched term on the site for the Visit persona was ‘opening hours’. To help fix this, the team put the opening hours on every page of the redesigned site:

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This resulted in a 90% drop in searches that include ‘hours’ (May 2016 compared with May 2015):

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Developing personas with Matariki

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After the re-design the team ran a project to increase the reach and engagement of the Te Papa Matariki audience. You can read more about this in "Using data to help people celebrate Matariki". Te Papa holds Matariki events in the museum, such as the Kaumātua kapa haka, and this event in particular enhanced and challenged our ideas about this audience.

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Experiencing Kaumātua kapa haka performances online

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The Kaumātua kapa haka is the biggest Matariki event held at Te Papa, and this year we had 4,000 unique page views to the two Kaumātua kapa haka event pages. Traffic spiked over the event weekend, particularly from Facebook and mobile devices. We assumed the traffic was from people who were planning to come to the event, as they sit in the What’s on section. But further analysis indicates that people were visiting for the live streaming of the event — we included embedded Youtube videos on these pages.The popularity of the videos suggests that we’re taking events held within the museum walls out to people on the move, or in the comfort of their own homes. Based on this insight we’re looking into live streaming more events.

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We’ve taken Te Papa personas through three iterations, based on user research, analytics, then a practical application of these to the Matariki festival. Each user research method has limitations, but by regularly using qualitative and quantitative methods we’re engaging with a  three dimensional view of our audience that’s constantly evolving. Each user research piece builds that view, and allows us to plan projects and site changes with greater clarity about what our users need. It means we can plan projects that will have real and measurable impact, and allow people to engage with Te Papa in useful and meaningful ways.

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Want to hear more? Come to UX New Zealand!

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If you'd like to hear more about how Lana and Ruth redesigned the Te Papa website, plus a bunch of other cool UX-related talks, head along to UX New Zealand 2016 hosted by Optimal Workshop. The conference runs from 12-14 October, 2016, including a day of fantastic workshops, and you can get your tickets here. Got some questions you'd like to ask Lana before the conference? You can Tweet her on @lanalytics00!