UX for Cloud Applications with Nerdy Diva Founder and CEO Shanae Ullman

How is it being presented to our target audience? And we want something that's polished and professional, that invokes credibility, trust, and the harmony and the spirit of our brand. And when we talk about feel, we're talking about the interactions, the animations, the responses to the user behavior in the applications. And for usability, does it work how it's expected to work? Is it functional? Are you able to accomplish your goals? Is it predictable? Does it work like other applications that are similar to it? And for people who have spent some time in user experience, we also know that UX has a broad array of, uh, a spectrum around understanding technology, understanding design, understanding the business, and how to bring it together in a meaningful way to better serve our end users. So, by the end of this session, I have a UX challenge for you. I would want you to take inventory of your user-facing products that would benefit by migrating to the cloud. So, feel free to think about that as you listen to some of the topics today, and email me at hello@nerdydiva.com for the next step. Step in the UX Challenge. So today's agenda, we will talk about finding your why and how can cloud apps help your organization, some strategy for designing cloud applications, evaluating UX for cloud applications, and most importantly, team collaboration for designing UX applications. So for finding your why, this is a sample problem statement. So legacy systems, poor security can pose a threat to vulnerabilities and cause disruptions in productivity, increase help support costs, and decrease user adoption. So this is something that I have actually created for some of the corporate businesses that I have worked for previously, and this This talks about some of the things that come up as we start migrating to the cloud. Some of our legacy systems have unintuitive UIs, so when we move to the cloud, making sure that the UIs are easy to use and simple. It's hard to discover elements that our users need. Sometimes there's inconsistent content styles and layouts, so making sure that although we work for sometimes large enterprises, are startups, and there's different teams working on different pieces of our applications, making sure that it all looks cohesive and like it comes from one organization. Having text, and making sure that that text adheres to web writing standards. Very different writing for the web than it is writing for academia, or writing technical documentation, and making sure that we have language that is helpful for our users. And making sure that they are able to accomplish their goals and don't have to spend a lot of time completing tasks within the application so that they have a higher task completion rate. So, discussion question for you all: What security challenges does your organization face in moving products and services to the cloud? So security is something that is also very important when we're designing cloud applications. Companies are often targets for phishing and other cybersecurity attacks, and the first step in defense is what they have in their applications and the type of data that is being exposed there. So there is some necessary friction that we have to design for in order to protect our resources and our intellectual property. Some of the regulations that are in industry, or some of the international data privacy regulations. Sometimes supply chain has different data privacy regulations as well. And often if you're working with domestic and international audiences, making sure that you understand the national security and government agencies regulations. If you have healthcare companies that are Working with sensitive data, understanding HIPAA regulations and code of ethics is also very important. And feel free to use the chat to add in some of your security challenges that your organization faces with the products and services that you have that are moving to the cloud. So some of the strategy that we have for designing cloud applications Firstly, talks about communicating trust, that the systems that you are building are being understood by the people who are using them, that you're using the appropriate terminology and language, that it resonates with them, that they understand it, using icons that they have seen before that make sense to them, and notifications, so confirmations when they've done something successfully, notifications when something is not working correctly, And as appropriate, using modals to help them understand if something is important that they need to focus on. Also, we talk a lot about ease of use and user experience, but when we design secure cloud applications, we also need to make sure that we create necessary friction. So sometimes we need to stop the user in their tracks and verify information and identify if it's the appropriate person who is trying to access data. So sometimes pop-ups are necessary, alerts and notifications to specify that you're making changes and are you sure you want to make those changes. Having additional login authentication is necessary and having some timed authentication, so having the ability to Have a timer for the amount of access per session is something that we think about when we are designing secure cloud applications. And also having SSL integration. So if you're working with sensitive data, making sure that you have the web frameworks in place that secure that data on the backend as well. Permissions and roles is something that we also think about as we design secure cloud applications, and having access based on role type. So it's very important that, uh, the UX designers, researchers that you work with understand who the target users are for your application and what type of data do they need to have for their particular role. So having that knowledge transfer between UX designers, researchers, uh, and the business product managers, developers, so so that they're on the same page about the type of access that is appropriate for the user types. Designing experiences that have some consistency across the board. So, although you may have a manager who needs all the access and you have employees that need a fraction of that access, it should still appear as if it's the same application, and there should not be any doubt that this is from the same company. So making sure that you're able to commit to some consistency, no matter what type of users accessing your application, is important. Also allow your admins to view the non-admin view. So this can be helpful in helping your admins, uh, identify if they have the right type of content on display for the non-admins. So again, in the manager, uh, scenario, so having, uh, the view of the employee perspective for the manager so that they can verify if the information that they are disclosing is indeed the right information for the employees as well. So another discussion question for you all: How do you manage the tension between designing for ease of use and necessary friction for cloud apps? And feel free to add in what has worked for you in the past and any suggestions you may have as well, anything that you want to try out, definitely want to hear that as well. So something else that comes up is, are we successful? How do we evaluate the cloud applications and the user experience work that we have done for these cloud apps? A lot of times we think about UX outcomes, and for UX designers and researchers, we always start with the people. So, people first experience. Do our users understand the application? Is it intuitive? Do they understand some of the friction that's in place? Do we have contextual help for them to help them understand the process and why we are asking for additional credentials? Building trust in the system. We do that again with adhering to branding standards for our look and feel across the application, having appropriate security, so as in the SSL integration, having icons that verify the secure nature of the application as well, and knowing when to use ease of use in the application. As well as understanding when it's appropriate to create that necessary friction. Having discoverability that is helpful for our users. So if there's an item that they need on a daily basis, making that clear and upfront and easy for them to access so that they can be able to complete tasks by themselves. So informing them via self-service. Less calls to your help desk, less calls to technical support, allowing them to be empowered and to complete tasks on their own. Using contextual help as often as possible, and definitely thinking about keeping and maintaining visual clarity. So I often like to hide contextual help in different menus or have it on demand. Versus displaying it within the application unless the user has called for it. And also using industry web and mobile standards for UI layouts. So, a lot of times we use the Google Material Design framework, also use the Apple Human Interface Guidelines. So, using what's already available in industry to help with building intuition in the application is helpful as well.

We did have a question come in. Okay. Wondering what is the best workflow to integrate best for the UX/UI team to the rest of the development team?

Oh, very good question. Yeah. So I have some slides a little further down about collaborating with the team, but I definitely think from the beginning, getting the team together, so having kickoffs with the team, the whole team, so UX, Product management, developers, architects, even your QA, having them in the room together and understanding what is the, the problem that you're trying to solve and understanding what the roadmap is. And if there are activities that user experience designers are doing, such as interviews or usability testing, sending a meeting invite to the whole team if they want to observe and see and hear from the real users and take notes. That's a way for them to build empathy for your users as well. So, often our developers do not have interactions with our end users. So, giving them the opportunity to listen and hear from the horse's mouth, so to speak, what some of those pains and challenges are. And hey, you know, if you know your developers, you can also allow them to ask some questions at the end of your session as well. If you think that they're pretty safe to ask questions and not get too down in the weeds and too technical with your users. Good question.

We actually have another one coming through. Do you have A/B tests? Do you do A/B tests for your UX decisions? And if yes, What are some methods, best practices, tools that have worked well in your experience?

Yeah, so it depends. I have done A/B tests.

Oh, you know what, apologies, I've muted you and give me one moment. I am so sorry. Can you unmute yourself?

I'm not hearing you. Can you hear me now?

Yes.

All right.

My apologies.

It's okay. We're back. Yeah, I have done A/B testing previously. So, it depends. Some organizations are very in support of A/B testing, and I have found other organizations want to follow one design at a time and see how that goes. With their users. When you are doing A/B testing, I would suggest leaving most of the UI the same and picking specific elements to change. So not having completely different layouts side by side, but perhaps changing some features of the navigation so that you can clearly see what is it about the navigation that is more helpful from layout A versus layout B. I think sometimes we get into some tricky areas when we try to change too much at once, and it's hard to decipher what elements were more helpful to the user or not. So being specific and strategic about which elements in the UI you want feedback on if you're doing A/B testing is very valuable. Right, good question. All right, so in evaluating UX for cloud applications, these are also some ideas that you can think of to possibly use for the cloud applications that you are building. Reducing Tier 1 help support calls by 25%. Reducing Tier 1 online case requests. By 25%, decreasing time spent on tasks by 40%, and increasing task completion by 30%. And so with these, uh, last two bullets, decreasing time spent on a task and increasing task completion, the way that you would evaluate this is you would have a baseline usability test. So before you make any changes to your application, you would test how long it takes someone to complete a task And after you make those changes within the UI, you would have a secondary usability testing session and see if the time spent on the task decreases and if the task completion rate increases as well. All right, another discussion question for you. What are some ways you can measure UX success for cloud products and services in your organization, or have you measured UX success for cloud products and services in your organization? So, team collaboration when designing cloud applications. Someone mentioned this in one of the questions previously. It's all about knowledge transfer. So, cloud and security knowledge coming from our developers and architects. And product managers and user experience designers and researchers sharing methods for gathering information from our users and designing applications that meet modern standards. So having teams who work together and trust each other and have relationships where they're able to contact each other and have that sense of psychological safety as well. And although most of us are remote now because of COVID there are still great ways to build that, that team bonding. And some of the things that we do on my teams is have standard working sessions. So we'll have UX sessions twice a week where I'm working with them. So we are doing the UX work together. We are brainstorming. We are using digital whiteboards like Miro. Previously known as Realtime Board. Also, Mural has a digital post— posted and whiteboard as well. And we are collaborating in real time as distributed teams. And that's very helpful in being able to, one, build those connections and relationships using video cams when possible. So having the ability to see each other's faces and facial expressions and communicate and understand that these are my teammates and we all have the same interest in producing a product and service that works very well, and we're here to help each other. And we will always have questions. As a UX designer researcher, I am not a cloud expert, and I have to lean on the developers and product managers to help in that space. And also, I am kind. They are not UX experts. So when we have a need to do interviews and usability testing and create updates to the UI, they will come to me and they will come to other UX researchers and designers for suggestions and for ideas about how to make the systems easier to use and how to streamline processes. And how to create strategies for asking the right types of questions of our users as well. So understanding that we all bring different attributes and different strengths to the table and leaning on each other and really asking those questions, how can we help each other and make these products and services better for our users?

We did receive a response to your previous discussion question that might resonate with others on the line, so I will share it. The delay between UX mockups and the delivery to the user can be long and also can deviate quickly. How to stay on track?

Wow, very good question. So using some of those agile best practices, so using things like Kanban boards to track where we are as a team. And scope creep is real. It happens. It comes up. But being clear as a team about why has it happened, why have our priorities changed, Maybe there's something coming from the business, from the market. Maybe there's a need. Maybe there's something that is happening across our industry, like COVID, for example, that's forcing us to think about our priorities and change how we're doing things. And just being clear about that and brainstorming and prioritizing together. I think sometimes teams have some resistance when there are decisions being made but the team is not being empowered as a group to make those decisions together. So having that transparency and making the work visible so that there's clarity about why changes are occurring. And if there's more need for visibility from the UX designer, speaking up, saying, hey, you know, we have these mockups. It's been 3, 4 weeks. We haven't seen anything. Why is there a delay? Can we see something soon? So having those conversations and being able to have a way to meet on a regular basis would definitely help with that as well.

And Shané, we have about 5 minutes left of the session, just to give you time to check in. All right, sounds good.

So other ways that teams can collaborate is, you know, bringing together people when doing the user research. So, the UX designer researcher definitely is leading these activities, but these are not meant to be solo activities. So having developers, product managers at the interviews, as their schedule allows, listening to the users, asking questions as well, viewing usability testing, understanding where some of the, the common issues and hang-ups within the process and the workflows, that can help in building that empathy for the user, and that can help with creating that buy-in across the team for prioritization of the features that help the user. So, something that comes up frequently is feature parity. Identify what's already working well in your application, what's already doing its job successfully and does not need to change, and then that allows you to focus and prioritize on what needs to be updated. And finding those, those common issues across users and having a way to prioritize based on the development costs and the time it will take to create the update and maybe the needs of the market as well. So having those discussions as a team around how do we prioritize and develop the features that will help the users and help the business as well. Systems research, something else that teams can collaborate on. And a lot of this is done by our developers benchmarking security frameworks, but also as UX designers identifying UI design patterns that are already in our organizations. So I work at Boeing, so we already have design patterns for security. So utilizing some of the patterns that already exist. And also leaning on what we see in industry, whether that's B2B products or B2C products. You know, it can be quite fun to take some of the ideas that we see from some of our, like, social media type applications and brainstorm how can we bring some of this into our workplace and our enterprise-related applications and make use of that as well. And also definitely read security white papers. There's some gems in these white papers and being able to bring that back to the organization and even just sending emails to your team and saying, "Hey, I found out about this cool technology. You know, just think about it. Maybe it's something we can use in the future," and start brainstorming and the things that excite you, sharing that with your team and building a way to, one, have information sharing happening within the team and get people excited about coming to work and doing good work on cloud applications. Right. And a final discussion question: What are some of your top strategies for knowledge transfer between cloud product teams? And your UX designers can help you in building these cloud applications by leading user research. And helping with stakeholder management, designing modern UIs, presenting proposals to stakeholders, helping to achieve buy-in, evaluating designs, and helping teams identify methods to prioritize designs, and sharing report-out findings from the user research and the design research that we have collected. So definitely lean on your UX designers and researchers on your teams for that. So in summary, find your why, understand how cloud applications can help your organization, build a strategy for designing cloud applications, build in practices for evaluating UX for cloud applications, and always, always work together as a team in collaborating for designing your UX applications. So that's all I have. Thank you for coming to this talk, and again, I encourage you to take on the UX Challenge, take inventory of your user-facing products that would benefit by migrating to the cloud, and feel free to email me at hello@nerdydiva.com for the next step in the UX Challenge.

Thank you very much for joining the conversation and for leading it today.

Yeah, thank you. Feel free to connect with me on LinkedIn. Thank you.

Bye.