Introducing digital product equity

Digital product equity is at the intersection of futures thinking, inclusive design and product accessibility. 

In a recent members’ call, Toronto-based UX researcher Christina Scriven from our design leadership community looked at how the tech industry leaders are approaching the concept, and offered ideas about how you could bring product equity practices into your organisation.

Christina most recently worked as Customer Segments Manager at Scotiabank reporting into the Head of Accessibility and Digital Product Equity.

During the summer of 2023, Christina did an extensive industry scan of digital equity best practices to both consolidate key themes and to better inform customer experience leaders on industry approaches and in our call she shared her findings.

Read more

Expert of the month: Susan Weinschenk

Susan Weinschenk has a Ph.D. in Psychology from way back when most people did not interact with a computer.

Back then, Susan also took a course in computer programming and these were the days with cards and card readers. One day, while programming, the card came back with ‘Job aborted’ and this made Susan think:

“How’s anyone going to understand what that means”

When speaking to Susan, this is the beginning of interest in the field of what was then called human factors and designing tech to better fit us humans. Initially she didn’t know human factors in computers existed, but now many years later she can look back at a career that has taken her onwards in a field later known as man machine interaction, then it became known as usability and today simply referred to as user experience.

Susan is the CEO at The Team W, a services firm focused on behavioral science. She’s also an Adjunct Professor at the University of Wisconsin and the author of several books, including 100 Things Every Designer Needs To Know About People and How To Get People To Do Stuff. She’s also our expert of the month.

Read more

Expert of the month: Anja Saabye

As designers, our purpose should be to design easy-to-use solutions, that don’t require expert users

When I talked to Anja Saabye, she brought up how everyone is busy these days and how time is the limited resource required to move things forward. This calls for solutions that require less effort and ideally no training.

In her view, we can’t expect that customers know everything, yet as she said, too many people who work with user experience forget this great responsibility and place a great burden on their users.

Anja is Head of UX and Product Design, Senior Manager at Universal Robots, where she has been a part of growing the design team. She’s been there for almost 2 years following an extensive agency background and lives privately in Odense, Denmark.

Read more

How to design for the human stress response

Emergencies—landing a malfunctioning plane, resuscitating a heart attack victim, or avoiding a head-on car crash—all require split-second decisions that can mean life or death. Fortunately, designers of life-saving products have leveraged research and brain science to help users reduce panic and harness their best instincts. In her new book called Life and Death Design, Katie Swindler brings these techniques to everyday designers who want to help their users think clearly and act safely.

Katie works as is Innovation Design Strategist, Sr. Manager at insurance firm Allstate in Chicago, IL and recently hosted a member call introducing her book. She included some of the many insightful stories featured in the book and told us more about what she learned while researching on the topic. Below you’ll find my notes with some of the highlights from the call.

She opened with a true story on how famous astronaut Neil Armstrong once had a life and death experience and turned to reading the manual.

Read more

Expert of the month: Grace de Athayde

How do you make design accessible for everyone in your organisation? One option is to build an internal design community of practice, drip feed your colleagues with inspiration, cultivate a sharing culture and at some point let it go.

When I first spoke to Grace de Athayde, back in circa mid 2020, I was preparing our first European conference during the pandemic and Grace wanted tell her story about building a UX Community at Danfoss which went from zero to 200 members in less than a year.

In the process, she made it quite clear, including on her opening slides at that time, that she was not an expert, but I think everyone who has met Grace in the past years, would say that she’s very knowledgeable about user experience and design.

These days she is wrapping up at Danfoss and getting ready to start a new job at the LEGO Group as Sr. Manager Digital Product Design as of 1 February.

She’s also our first expert of the month for 2022.

Read more

How Universal Robots works with UX and Design

“Nothing today is designed for old people”

For our final member conference call of 2021, we heard the story about how Anja Saabye is building a UX and Design team at Universal Robots. Universal Robots is based in Odense, Denmark and works with industrial automation. They are known for producing a robotic arm that is characterized by being extremely versatile and easy to use in day-to-day production.

Anja Saabye joined as Head of UX in late 2020 and has since rapidly grown her team. She joined with an agency background, including almost 6 years at Hesehus. She firmly believes that designers are the most important people in any company.

Read more

Expert of the month: Kristina Larsen

It’s all about building bridges - in particular between different ways of thinking

Talking to Kristina Larsen who is a UX specialist at VIA University College in Aarhus, Denmark, you might expect to hear about how her design leadership work bridges different departments, but as she shared her story, it became clear that her years studying at Aalborg University and Aarhus University, and now almost 14 years working in higher education, has taken her to the next level.

In her own words, she strives to make others feel welcome, heard, valued and supported, which applies whether you are a colleague, student, a customer at VIA or a close friend.

Kristina is also a leisure doodler, a freelance mini farmer living on a field in the middle of Jutland and dreaming about landing her first board position in the next couple of years. Earlier this month, she was a highly rated track leader at the Boye Aarhus 21 conference and she is our expert of the month.

Read more

Commoning in a digital context

There is nothing better than shared purpose, shared values and value created for all involved. But how does that actually work? You have probably heard of community gardens, co-ops and other community-based initiatives where people come together, put in an effort and everyone gets an output. But how can that work digitally? Does it even work?

When everything we build digitally has some sort of commercial angle or way to create more value for the organisation building it, is it then true commoning? Or is commoning in the digital world quickly on its way to becoming the next greenwashing fad?

Helle Jensen is Experience Director at digital agency Valtech and in a recent member conference call, she shared examples of good, bad and unexpected angles on commoning in a digital context. You might be a part of it already without even knowing it. Helle discussed whether commercial commoning is actually commoning or just a fancy loyalty scheme and if psychological commoning is a trick or a treat.

Read more

Expert of the month: Mads Norlyk

How do you become an inspirational leader of a UX department? In particular, one that needs to gather existing habits, change some of them, and set a new direction. There are many good leadership books you can read and plenty of management theory, but in these strange and surreal times, we need to observe leaders in practice and learn from how they act and behave.

I recently spoke to Mads Norlyk, Head of UX at Jyske Bank in Silkeborg, Denmark about his role, recent lessons learned, and his experiences keeping the team creative and motivated.

Mads has been 3 years with the bank and was previously Digital Experience Manager at LEGO Education. Earlier he was on the agency side as User Experience Designer at Designit. Mads is our expert of the month.

Read more

Introducing the handbook for ethical digital design

Tech companies exploiting consumers is unfortunately nothing new and dark patterns remain commonplace.

Still, we are experiencing a shift in consumer behaviour, where ethics matter more. How do you actually do ethical design from the beginning? To answer this and to and share practical techniques to make honest interfaces work, To answer this and to and share practical techniques to make honest interfaces work, Trine Falbe, Kim Andersen and Martin Michael Frederiksen have co-authored the new Ethical Design Handbook.

Read more

Navigation is for losers!

The digital game is seemingly always changing and today there’s yet another major shift happening in the way we design websites and apps. I’ve been in endless meetings with heated discussions over website or app navigation and information architecture. Should the navigation be aligned following departmental structures, product lines or copied from the competitors? Should it be on the top or to the left? Should we have 8 navigational items or 22? And so it continues

Read more

What really matters in a persona?

By Janus Boye

In June Susan Weinschenk guest starred at a Boye peer group meeting in Copenhagen and shared some of the typical mistakes often made when working with personas. These include:

  • they are created based on job role

  • there are high-level personas for customers

  • personas describe variables (age, income, and so on) that are not critical for the project at hand.

Susan Weinschenk is a US-based behavioural psychologist, who has published several books including How To Get People To Do Stuff and 100 Things Every Designer Needs To Know About People. I asked her to elaborate and she generously agreed to share some of her insights on the topic.

How to do personas right

According to Susan, to have an effective persona you have to look at the people who are actually going to use the particular product or service you are working on — and those people may be different from your “usual” target audience.

For example, you may be interested in a different geography or age or customers who have more or less experience with the subject matter than usual.

So don’t just use personas you’ve used before or those that someone in marketing research did for you. You have to ask:

  • Who is my target audience for this project/product?

  • What are the critical variables to describe them,  which are relevant for my project or product; depending on what you are working on, this might be any number of things. Don’t just use “typical” variables. It may make no difference to YOUR project how old someone is, whether they are married and so on. What are the variables that are relevant to your project?

What are the different personas on those variables? Are there differences among the critical variables you have identified? If so, then those define your personas.

In her work, Susan has found that each project often has different personas than another project for the same company. This is because the particular product she is designing is for a specific subset, so she has to redefine that with new personas.

The key question behind a good persona

Do I know who I am designing for? And how many different groups am I designing for? How do they differ? How are they the same? Which one is the most important? If you can answer these questions, you are on the right track according to Susan.

One more thing: Don’t forget unconscious and emotional variables too… their self-story, their fears, what will motivate them; not just “demographic” variables, but “psychographic” ones too.

New perspectives and new possibilities

From time to time we invite industry experts to join Boye peer groups to share their experiences and expertise and to have an open, unscripted and confidential conversation with the group.  If you think this sounds interesting, you should check out the benefits of joining, perhaps one of our design leadership or digital project management groups.

The entire Boye community has a get-together in Aarhus, Denmark in November for the annual international Boye conference. Here you can meet peers and expand your network.