Optimal Blog

Every month we have fun and informative “bite sized” presentations to add some inspiration to your lunch break.  These virtual events allow us to partner with amazing speakers, community groups and organizations to share their insights and hot takes on a variety of topics impacting our industry. 

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Join us at the end of every month for Lunch n' Learn.

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Jamal Abdulrahim 👋🏽

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Technology is an integral part of our daily lives, but how does it affect people with vision impairments? In this presentation, Jamal shares his personal story of being a blind person who uses technology for education, work, and entertainment. Jamal demonstrates some of the tools and devices that he uses, such as screen readers, braille displays, and magnification software. He also discusses some of the challenges and opportunities that technology presents for people with visual impairments. Join him for an informative and interactive session that will give you a new perspective on technology and accessibility.

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Speaker Bio 🎤

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Hey I'm Jamal! By day I work with See Me Please not just for the usual user testing gig, but to create inclusion from within. 

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Officially, I lead engagements with clients, but my job is a mixed bag of surprises. Sometimes I get paid to chat with some really interesting people about tech and accessibility.  

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I was born with a vision impairment and I'm passionate about accessibility and technology. I also love talking with people. In my opinion, accessibility shouldn’t need to be a heavy or intimidating conversation. Organisations shouldn’t be worried about compliance or getting in trouble when it comes to the accessibility of their services. Creating interest in accessibility, and the users who rely on accessible services is incredibly important to me. 

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By night, I perform stand-up comedy at various clubs around Sydney and am a regular at The Sydney Comedy Store. I try to use humour as a way to humanise the blind experience in hopes of making interactions with normies a little less awkward. 

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My passion for tech and comedy overlap as I rely on accessible technologies such as transport apps, productivity apps and accessible tech devices. All of which I use to get me to and from shows, manage my own books and write new material to keep my sets fresh.

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Grab your lunch, invite your colleagues and we hope to see you at our next Lunch n’ Learn! 🥓

Innovation is at the core of revenue growth - finding new ways to create and capture value. The reason most innovations fail is not because they don’t work (organizations are very good at building products and services with features and benefits), they fail because they don’t create value on dimensions that drive customer choice. If you don’t understand the causal drivers of customer choice, then you’re largely shooting in the dark and at risk of creating something that customers don’t choose above the alternative market solutions.

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Chris Green, Head of CX and Innovation at Purple Shirt, recently spoke at UX New Zealand, the leading UX and IA conference in New Zealand hosted by Optimal Workshop, about the Jobs to be Done (JTBD) methodology and uncovering the causal drivers of customer choice in innovation.

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In his talk, Chris talks us through JTBD methodology, how to use it, and how it will change the way you think about markets and competition.

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Background on Chris Green

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Chris has a long and deep background in strategy and innovation. Chris cut his strategy teeth in the UK before moving to New Zealand in 2000 where he led various strategy teams for organisations like Vodafone, Vector, and TelstraClear. He moved to Australia in 2011 where he started to develop his expertise in the emerging field of innovation. He sharpened his innovation knowledge and skills by studying under Professor Clayton Christensen (the godfather of modern innovation theory) at Harvard University and went on to lead one of Australia's leading innovation consultancies where he helped organizations run innovation projects and build innovation capability.

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Chris returned to New Zealand at the end of 2021 to lead the innovation practice of Purple Shirt, a UX design consultancy with offices in Auckland and Christchurch. In his spare time, you'll find Chris out on the water learning about foiling boats and boards.

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Contact Details:

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Email: chris@purpleshirt.co.nz

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LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/chris-green-kiwi/

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Jobs To Be Done methodology and its role in driving customer choice

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In this talk, Chris is specifically speaking about UX research in the context of building new products and services, not optimizing existing ones. He answers a critical question - how can we improve our odds of success when we launch something new to market?

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Performing UX research for products and services that already exist is very different from totally new ones. Why? Generally, it’s because customers of existing products are good at recommending improvements for things that they already know and use. They are good at this because they have user experience to draw from. The famous Henry Ford quote illustrates this well; “If I’d asked our customers what they wanted, they would have told me faster horses.”

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Just because customers are giving researchers helpful and constructive feedback on a product or service, it doesn’t mean you should implement these improvements. In a user-focused discipline, this can sound counterintuitive, but when it comes to new products and services, UX researchers should be careful in relying on user feedback absolutely. 

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Chris argues that customer feedback can sometimes lead us in the wrong direction. Assuming that a customer will choose our product if we simply implement their feedback is problematic. Chris stresses the difference between implementing changes that drive improvement versus implementing changes that drive customer choice. They aren’t the same thing. Many businesses continually release new features, but rarely do these new features drive or improve consumer choice. Yes, a new feature may make the product better than before, but does it make it so much better that it makes customers choose your product over others? 

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Causal drivers of choice 🤔

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When researching new products the most critical thing to understand is this - what causes someone to choose one product over another? If you don’t know the answer, you’re guessing about your product design from the very beginning. 

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Traditionally, market research (typically driven by marketing departments) has been poor at finding causation. Market research tends to find correlations between customer attributes and customer behavior (e.g. people in a certain age bracket buy a certain product), but these correlations are quite shallow and do little to inform true drivers of choice. A lack of causal studies can be explained by the fact that they are difficult to conduct. They need to uncover deeper, root causes of human behavior, rather than high-level trends to be truly useful.

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So, how can find causal drivers of choice? And why does it matter?

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Why it matters 🔥

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The best method for uncovering the causal drivers of choice was invented by Professor Clayton Christensen. Chris describes him as the guru of modern innovation theory. He invented Disruption Theory and Jobs to be Done (JTBD) methodology. His fundamental insight was this – researchers shouldn’t be worried about the customer, instead, they should be interested in what they’re trying to achieve. 

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Christensen’s JTBD methodology is about understanding the various things that people need to complete in certain contexts. He argues that we, as consumers and customers, all look to “hire” products and services from businesses to get things done. We make a decision to buy, hire, or lease products or services into our lives in order to make progress on something we’re trying to achieve. 

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These jobs to be done can be split broadly into three categories (which aren’t mutually exclusive):

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• Functional: Tasks that I want to complete
• Emotional: How I want to feel
• Social: How I want to be seen

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Value creation opportunities arise when the currently available solutions (products/services in the market) are not getting the jobs done well. This “gap” essentially represents struggles and challenges that get in the way of progress. The gap is our opportunity to build something new that helps people get their jobs done better.

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Chris uses Dropbox as a good example of an innovative company filling the gap and addressing a need for people. People found themselves “hiring” different solutions or workarounds to access their files anywhere (e.g. by emailing themselves and using USBs). Dropbox created a solution that addressed this by allowing people to store their files online and access them anywhere. This solution got the job done better by being more convenient, secure, and reliable.

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The strategic relevance of “jobs” 🙌💼🎯

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Using the JTBD methodology helps to change how you see the competitive landscape, thereby providing an opportunity to see growth where none might have seemed possible. 

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Chris uses Snickers and MilkyWay chocolate bars as examples of similar products that on the surface seem to compete against each other. Both seem to sit in the same category, are bought in the same aisle, and have similar ingredients. However, looking at them through a “jobs” lens, they address two slightly different jobs. A Snickers is bought when you need fuel and is more a replacement for a sandwich, apple, or Red Bull (i.e. it is a product “hired” to prepare for the future/get an energy hit). A MilkyWay on the other hand is bought to make people feel better, eat emotionally, and is more of a replacement for ice cream or wine (i.e. a product “hired” to cope with the past).

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Chris’s talk helps us to think more strategically about our design journey. To develop truly new and innovative products and services, don’t just take your users' feedback at face value. Look beyond what they’re telling you and try to see the jobs that they’re really trying to accomplish. 

Improved organization, privacy controls, and more with new Workspaces 🚀

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One of our key priorities in 2024 is making Optimal Workshop easier for large organizations to manage teams and collaborate more effectively on delivering optimal digital experiences. Workspaces is going live this week, which replaces teams, and introduces projects and folders for improved organization and privacy controls. Our latest release lays the foundations to provide more control over managing users, licenses, and user roles in the app in the near future.

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More control with project privacy 🔒

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Private projects allow greater flexibility on who can see what in your workspace, with the ability to make projects public or private and manage who can access a project. Find out more about how to set up private projects in this help article.

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What changes for Enterprise customers? 😅

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• The teams you have set up today will remain the same; they are renamed workspaces.
  
• Studies will be moved to a 'Default project' within the new workspace, from here you can decide how you would like to organize your studies and access to them.
  
  
• You can create new projects, move studies into them, and use the new privacy features to control who has access to studies or leave them as public access.
  
  
• Optimal Workshop are here to help if you would like to review your account structure and make changes, please reach out to your Customer Success Manager.
  

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Watch the video 🎞️

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What changes for Professional and Team customers? 😨

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Customers on either a Professional or Team plan will notice the studies tab will now be called Workspace. We have introduced another layer of organization called projects, and there is a new-look sidebar on the left to create projects, folders, and studies.

What's next for Workspaces? 🔮

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This new release is an essential step towards improving how we manage users, licenses, and different role types in Optimal Workshop. We hope to deliver more updates, such as the ability to move studies between workspaces, in the near future. If you have any feedback or ideas you want to share on workspaces or Optimal Workshop, please email product@optimalworkshop.com; we'd love to hear from you.

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Designing in teams with different stakeholders can be incredibly complex. Each person looks at projects through their own lens, and can potentially introduce jargon and concepts that are confusing to others. Simplicity advocate Ella Stoner knows this scenario all too well. It’s what led her to create an easy three-step tool for recognizing problems and developing solutions. By getting everyone on the same page and creating an understanding of what the simplest solution is, designers can create products with customer needs in mind.

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Ella’s background

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Ella Stoner is a CX Designer at Spark in New Zealand. She is a creative thought leader and a talented designer who has facilitated over 50 Human Centered Design Workshops. Ella and her team have developed a cloud product that enables businesses to connect with Public Cloud Services such as Amazon, Google and Azure in a human-centric way. She brings a simplistic approach to her work that is reflected in her UX New Zealand talk. It’s about cutting out complex details to establish an agreed starting point that is easily understood by all team members.

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Contact Details:

You can find Ella on LinkedIn.

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Improving creative confidence 🤠

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Ella is confident that she is not the only designer who has felt overwhelmed with technical and industry specific jargon in product meetings. For example, on Ella’s first day as a designer with Spark, she attended a meeting about an HSNS (High Speed Network Services) tool. Ella attempted to use context clues to try and predict what HSNS could mean. However, as the meeting went on, the technical and industry-specific jargon built on each other and Ella struggled to follow what was being said. At one point Ella asked the team to clarify this mysterious term:

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“What’s an HSNS and why would the customer use it?” she asked. Much to her surprise, the room was completely silent. The team struggled to answer a basic question, about a term that appeared to be common knowledge during the meeting. There’s a saying, “Why do something simply when you can make it as complicated as possible?”. This happens all too often, where people and teams struggle to communicate with each other, and this results in projects and products that customers don’t understand and can’t use. Ella’s In A Nutshell tool is designed to cut through all that. It creates a base level starting point that’s understood by all, cuts out jargon, and puts the focus squarely on the customer. It:

• condenses down language and jargon to its simplest form
• translates everything into common language
• flips it back to the people who’ll be using it.

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Here’s how it works:

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First, you complete this phrase as it pertains to your work: “In a nutshell, (project/topic) is (describe what the project or topic is in a few words), that (state what the project/topic does) for (indicate key customer/users and why). In order for this method to work, each of the four categories you insert must be simple and understandable. All acronyms, complex language, and technical jargon must be avoided.  In a literal sense, anyone reading the statement should be able to understand what is being said “in a nutshell.” When you’ve done this, you’ll have a statement that can act as a guide for the goals your project aims to achieve.

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Why it matters 🤔

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Applying the “In A Nutshell” tool doesn’t take long. However, it's important to write this statement as a team. Ideally, it’s best to write the statement at the start of a project, but you can also write it in the middle if you need to create a reference point, or any time you feel technical jargon creeping in.

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Here’s what you’ll need to get started:

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• People with three or more role types (this accommodates varying perspectives to ensure it’s as relevant as possible)
• A way to capture text - i.e. whiteboard, Slack channel, Miro board
• An easy voting system - i.e., thumbs up in a chat

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Before you start, you may need to pitch the idea to someone in a technical role. If you’re feeling lost or confused, chances are someone else will be too. Breaking down the technical concepts into easy-to-understand and digestible language is of utmost importance:

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1. Explain the Formula to the team..
2. Individually brainstorm possible answers for each gap for three minutes.
3. Put every idea up on the board or channel and vote on the best one.

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Use the most popular answers as your final “In a Nutshell” statement.

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Side note: Keep all the options that come through the brainstorm. They can still be useful in the design process to help form a full picture of what you’re working on, what it should do, who it should be for etc.

What is session replay?

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Session replay allows you to record participants completing a card sort without the need for plug-ins or integrations. This great new feature captures the participant's interactions and creates a recording for each participant completing the card sort that you can view in your own time. It’s a great way to identify where users may have struggled to categorize information to correlate with the insights you find in your data.  

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Watch the video 📹 👀

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How does session replay work?

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• Session replay interacts with a study and nothing else. It does not include audio or face recording in the first release, but we’re working on it for the future.
  
• There is no set-up or plug-in required; you control the use of screen replay in the card sort settings.  
  
• For enterprise customers, the account admin will be required to turn this feature on for teams to access.
  
• Session replay is currently only available on card sort, but it’s coming soon to other study types.

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Help article 🩼

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Guide to using session replay

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How do you activate session replay?

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To activate session replay, create a card sort or open an existing card sort that has not yet been launched. Click on ‘set up,’ then ‘settings’; here, you will see the option to turn on session replay for your card sort. This feature will be off by default, and you must turn it on for each card study.

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How do I view a session replay?

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To view a session replay of a card sort, go to Results > Participants > Select a participant > Session replay. 

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I can't see session replay in the card sort settings 👀

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If this is the case, you will need to reach out to your organization's account admin to ask for this to be activated at an organizational level. It’s really easy for session replay to be enabled or disabled by the organization admin just by navigating to Settings > Features > Session Replay, where it can be toggled on/off. 

Being able to design for different perspectives and preferences is a real skill, and it’s extremely difficult. It can become even harder when designing for neurodiverse audiences, where people are hard-wired in unique ways. However, being able to cater to neurodiverse preferences is extremely important.

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Designer Kalina Tyrkiel says between 15-20% of people around the world are neurodiverse, which is a significant proportion. Various conditions such as dyslexia, attention deficit disorders, and autism can have considerable impacts on how people interact with interfaces and platforms. By considering these implications, designers can dramatically improve the accessibility of their work and improve engagement for neurodiverse individuals. Even simple tweaks like using an actual number instead of writing it out (i.e., 1 instead of “one”) can make a huge difference. 

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Kalina explores universal tips and techniques that allow designers to cater for neurodiverse audiences.

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Kalina’s background 

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Kalina Tyrkiel is a content designer with a unique background that spans both technical UX skills and a human-centric approach to design. She primarily works as a designer for Polish healthtech company DocPlanner, connecting users with relevant health services. Her background as a trained psychologist significantly supports her work and provides a deeper understanding into how people think.  She is also a UX writing trainer and university lecturer, which further speaks to her expertise.

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Contact Details:

You can find Kalina on LinkedIn.

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Words that welcome: content design with neurodiversity in mind 📖

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Neurodiversity is often misunderstood by society at large. Neurodiverse conditions often exist on a spectrum, and solutions that work for one person don’t necessarily work for someone else. Similarly, neurodiversity often comes in batches. Kalina outlines how 60% of people with ADHD also have traits of autism. This further complicates their perspectives and needs.

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So this leaves us with a pressing question. How can designers cater for all people with such different needs? Kalina describes how designing for a neurodiverse audience is actually not much different from designing for a neurotypical audience. For example, on any given day, individuals experience varying levels of stress or relaxation which impacts their energy and attention levels. 

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What to keep in mind when designing for neurodiverse audiences 

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1. Provide clear instructions

• Use bullet points and lists for better scannability
• For different options, use if/then tables
• Reduce the probability of displaying an error message. For example, when requiring a new password, outline password requirements up front.

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2. Make the purpose clear

For example, ensure the title aligns with the content the user can expect. Misalignment can create significant confusion for neurodiverse audiences.

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3. Don’t justify text

Justifying text and varying the spacing between words makes it harder to read, particularly for dyslexic users.

4. Include different ways to access content

For example, some people may prefer voice search, others may prefer content that’s not in a video. Again, this is no different from neurotypical audiences.

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5. Keep it simple 

The simpler the interface and the simpler the copy, the better. Pay attention to consistency too - if a platform or site varies a lot, this can be confusing. 

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Why it matters 💥

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Considering neurodiverse audiences in the design process is critical in making platforms easy to use for all people. The needs of neurodiverse users can amplify problems or create critical issues out of something that’s a minor inconvenience for someone else. Again, a 15-20% audience is not insignificant, so it pays to be mindful of their needs. So how can you actually do it?

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Hire for diversity 🌍

Having diverse teams can bring a broad array of perspectives to the design process. Just remember that not all neurodiverse people think the same. Dr Stephen Shore said “when you know one person with autism, you know one person with autism”.  Think about diversity as creating preferences, rather than labels. Ask respectfully about someone’s preferences and don’t judge them (or others) based on their condition.

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Tools and techniques 🛠️

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• In videos, use closed captions, not just subtitles - they can be much more user-friendly. Keep them to 40 characters per line, and up to two lines of similar length. 

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Interestingly, closed captions and subtitles are also being more and more preferred by younger generations. 

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• Kalina recommends Hemingway as a tool to keep language simple and consistent.
  
• Neurodiversity.design is a website that enables designers to get insights about fonts, typography, interfaces and other general design elements with an eye to neurodiverse audiences.

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