Experience Design Strategy: Eric Olsen, Product Design
An interview with Eric Olsen, Product and UX Designer. Topics include what is product design and UX design, reusable components and agile, and the importance of effective content.
This episode of the Experience Design Strategy podcast is an interview with Eric Olsen. Eric has a substantial career is UX and Product Design.
Eric started as a UX designer after receiving a degree in English and Journalism. The degree led to a job as a technical writer and then to a designer. Technical writing is a great background for design. Eric had to understand user scenarios and document them. When it took too long to document something, it was a sign that there may be usability issues. Usability testing confirmed his hunches. His journalism training has also been helpful in doing effective contextual field research where you need to know how to interview people.
Great quote by Eric: “In the early days of UX, we ere making it up as we go along”. Note: I agree with that. Many of the tools and techniques seen as industry standards were things we just tried as we worked to make products better, easier, and more efficient.
Eric recommends looking beyond a degree in UX to ensure you get a broad liberal arts training. Having an understanding of logic, data, visual design, and the ability to work effectively with people will be helpful to a career in UX. Erling mentioned his recommendation that designers strive to be T-shaped; with a broad understanding of the field and the ability to go deep on one part. Eric agreed and added that the thing you go deep on may change as your career progresses.
Eric and Erling discussed UX vs. Product Design. In product design, the goal is to align with product management to define the product rather than just the user interface. Eric described a project where we worked together to reinvent a set of banking products. We worked as part of a multi-disciplinary team. Erling and Erling led field studies that identified the challenges of using the current set of products; different log-ins and different user interface conventions. To accomplish one flow, a user had to use more than one application. In the re-invented product, the user had a single unified application that supported their work. To get there, the development teams were reorganized to support the new approach. Eric and Erling were the lead designers of the new product and created a set of interface guidelines to support the inclusion of additional products into the reinvented product.
Eric shared another example from his work in consumer banking. People need to have a consistent experience and consistent terminology when doing their banking, regardless of whether they use a web site, an app, or visit a branch. Terminology in this space has been an issue and Eric noted that in his experience, over 50% of issues found in the usability lab are terminology related.
Eric discussed measuring the business impact of design work. There are many potential metrics such as time on page, time on task, and abandonment rate. Usability testing data is also helpful. But, the most important metric is product sales. Regardless of all of the other metrics, if people aren’t buying the product, it isn’t a success.
We discussed the impact of agile for the designer. Agile can be a challenge both for organizations and for a designer. One thing that can help is the use of predefined components to create a product. However, when using predefined components, it is a challenge to reinvent a product. If possible, Eric recommends building a research and conceptual design phase into a project.
A training to consider is the Disney Institute. Eric mentioned a colleague who attended and found it useful for a designer. Note: Erling also attended the Disney Institute session on Organizational Creativity and can confirm that it is a fantastic session.
To stay up to date, Eric Recommends following: Nielsen Norman, Jarod Spool, and Luke Wroblewski
He also recommends listening to podcasts such as 99% Invisible
Good and relevant information can be found from a range of places. For example, Eric recommends this New Yorker article on Why Doctors Hate Their Computers.
You can find Eric on LinkedIn