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Artifacts for UX eaters and teams: what is it, why are they needed and how to choose

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Why do you need to know this?


Iā€™m a UX designer in a big grocery company, and I really donā€™t like edits, and you already scroll further, because ā€œitā€™s impossible, you are not an artistā€ and ā€œnothing new, nobody likesā€. I value my colleagues, customers and users. But 10 stages of coordinating layouts, where each participant speaks out about what he does not like in design, is not only difficult, but also ineffective. Instead of discussing the product, why it will be used and why not, what is important for the user and what is our own speculation, we often go into holivars and discuss our tastes and preferences. This is a normal story for large companies: there are many people interested in the product, everyone wants to do something worthy or take part.

How then to give a designer a high-quality result, not to stretch the deadlines, not to get angry with the whole world and not go crazy?

Nielsen heuristics, user research, customer interviewing, and UX artifacts help me. Iā€™ll tell you about artifacts. My path is more suitable for UX-eaters in food companies with a large number of stakeholders than web designers from small studios.

From 8 to 20 people participate in the work on the product: the customer (often several customer representatives), the product owner, project manager, business and system analytics, layout designer, front-end and back-end developers, testers. They all have their own views on what they are working on: they want to do something cool (different people have a different concept), project managers want to meet the project deadlines and budget, product owners want to increase all metrics at once, developers write clean code.

What is the likelihood that your vision of the product coincides with the vision of all these people? Zero

If you think that you are a designer, and the appearance of the product is only your patrimony, you are mistaken. A couple of unsuccessful projects and problems in communicating with teams and customers will bring you to life or help you understand that it is better to apply your skills in some other field.

In our company, the responsibility of the designer is to make sure that the team and client have agreed on the expectations. It is advisable to do this before the layouts appear. Itā€™s already late and painful to understand how the product should look and work according to mock-ups.

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Layouts are just the tip of the iceberg and part of the designer's work. Behind them lies a lot more questions that the whole team needs to agree on.

Artifacts are a solution to the problem: with their help we discuss business goals and user experience, the designer can rely on them when defending the project as fixed agreements. Other designers and team members can work on artifacts, because mostly artifacts speak a clear, human language, and not the language of graphics, business intelligence or code. I studied artifacts in BHSA and  on the blog of UX designer Nastya Shchebrova (thanks, Nastya!) And actively use them in my work. Their use saved me a lot of nerves and accelerated the development of many products (although it seems that it should be the other way around).

What is an artifact?
Artifact - a description of the product from a certain point of view in a given format. It helps to negotiate with all participants in the process, but the end user will not see it.

What artifacts are there?


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Not all artifacts are generated by the designer: some of the artifacts are made by the product owner or other team members. All that is not a finished product is an artifact, including layouts in Fig, and TK.

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A good UX-yer works with such artifacts.

Not all existing artifacts can and should be used on a project. The task is to spend as little effort as possible to clarify the picture for all project participants. With experience, you can evaluate what artifacts you need to use for a specific task. It's cool to try everything: you will understand what you are comfortable working with, how much time and effort it takes to compile one or another artifact.

For those who have not yet encountered artifacts, I propose a scheme that I have developed for myself: I compose a character or empathy map, prescribe its scenarios, combine scenarios into scenario cards (if the product is new) or lay it out on the user's travel map (if the product is already in use) . We draw prototypes from them, test them, prototype them again and test them until we are satisfied with the result.

Characters


Characters can be described in different ways, but as a rule they consist of:

  • user portrait: age, gender, occupation, lifestyle;
  • his problems, goals and expectations on the topic of our product;
  • a description of the environment in which it is located and its actions on the topic of our product.

Characters are made to:


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  3. Complete the character and ā€œsellā€ it to the team. Collect all the insights and complete your characters. There can be several characters if they differ greatly in their desires, goals, and functions. Do not write the character in too much detail: you need to understand his lifestyle, desires and goals. Do not breed too many characters on the product, because you are likely to get confused. I highly recommend printing the characters and hanging them in the office: this way the whole team will think more often about the people for whose sake it works and show more empathy for them. Most likely you can handle it in 2-3 hours.

How long does it take


If you can quickly gather respondents and conduct an interview with them, then this will take 1-2 working days of the designer.

Underwater rocks


There are projects that are aimed at a very wide audience. Then they either have too many characters, or they are difficult to distinguish. For such projects, it is better to use a card of empathy or jobs, bi-dan (I will tell you further how they differ).

The character method works well when you work with a clear audience and market. But when you need to come up with a cutting-edge product, open up new markets and do things that you haven't done before, the character method will lead you to create faster horses instead of a car.

If you do not test the characters and your other hypotheses, you run the risk of miscalculating greatly. Remember that any unverified hypothesis is just a figment of your imagination.

ā€œMen and women from 16 to 65 with high incomes who definitely need our productā€ are not a character, this is a copy-paste of a bad marketer.

Jobs Tu Bi Dan


It is impossible to build products of the future, focusing only on the requests and expectations of users from an existing product. Good metrics and sales are just the current state of the market. What numbers did Apple look at when removing keyboard buttons from their phones? What did Henry Ford rely on when he wanted to make a car at a time when everyone around asked for fast horses? People loved horses and push-button telephones, but nobody needs them anymore. To look for breakthrough solutions, you can use the Jobs Tu Bai Dan.

What is Jobs Tu Bi Dan


Jobs and bi-dan do not think about users and their desires, do not conduct retrospective studies. This is a test of the business hypothesis: now this is not, we are creating a new market. The product that you create solves the problem of the user - "does the job." Users buy, that is, ā€œhireā€ your product so that it makes their life a little happier. Conditional Ivan Vasilyevich does not buy a phone with buttons, but the ability to be in touch with loved ones, if you dig a little deeper - then with the whole outside world.

Why do you need jobs tu bi dan:


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How a user can solve his problem now, and what we need to work with:

  • he already has a tool, but he is not happy with it (for example, I use Lusid Chart to make charts. Charts are made, but they look bad);
  • he already has a tool, but a new one is more attractive (I use Lucid Chart, but there is Miro, and my colleagues use it);
  • he already has a tool, he is not very happy with it, but is afraid to change it (I use Lusid Chart, my diagrams look bad, but switching to Miro and learning how to use it is pain, time, I resist);
  • he already has a tool, he is attached to it and no longer seeks solutions (I use Lusid Chart, I have 100500 diagrams there, I create them in 5 minutes, they look bad, but they do their job).

All these things must be taken into account, and the characters will not help us in this.

Formula Jobs Tu Bi Dan:


When (a description of the situation),
I want (motivation)
to (result).

Jobs Tu Bi Dan example


Meet Oleg Ivanov. He is 28 years old, he is one of two designers of mobile applications under Agios in a small grocery company. Every morning he drinks coffee, sits down at his MacBook and makes mock-ups (although at first, of course, he thinks about the person). Sometimes he works in a coffee shop; he goes on vacation 3 times a year. He knows the basics of Swift, studied in British. He wears cool sweatshirts and colorful socks, goes to mitaps, and on weekends he does calligraphy.

And so Oleg buys a Figma for layouts and Miro for the product roadmap. Why such a set? Why not Photoshop or Sketch plus Lucidchart? Did his love of coffee, colored socks and mitaps influence his choice? No, it was rather influenced by the fact that in Figo and Miro you can work as a team together with a colleague. This ā€œworking as a team and simultaneously onlineā€ is the job that bi-dan.

If you think more globally, then the designer Oleg Ivanov does not just buy the opportunity to work teamwork on layouts and a road map, but the ability to quickly receive feedback from colleagues and work remotely from anywhere in the world, rather than in the office - that is, more convenient working conditions.

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Job tu bi dan example

How to create Jobs Tu Bi Dan


Just like the characters:

  1. We formulate hypotheses for jobs and bi-dan;
  2. Test hypotheses in an interview;
  3. We analyze the data;
  4. We compose jobs tu bi dan;
  5. We come up with solutions.

Underwater rocks


Job-bi-dan is best done on innovative products when they have a high degree of suspense, or when characters cannot be distinguished or there are too many of them.

Empathy Map


Empathy map is an idea visualization tool that allows you to put yourself in the user's place, to look at the problem with his eyes.

It can be used both as an alternative to characters, and as an addition to them. An empathy map is a diagram in the center of which a representative of a certain user segment is located, on different sides of it there are 4 blocks (ā€œI think and feelā€, ā€œI say and doā€, ā€œI seeā€, ā€œI hearā€). The findings are presented in two additional blocks: ā€œproblems and pain pointsā€ and ā€œvalues ā€‹ā€‹and achievementsā€.

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Empathy Map Example

Why use


  • Empathy map will help to make up your character
  • Sometimes itā€™s difficult to create a character, because itā€™s difficult to single out a common archetype. Then the empathy map will help: people can be different, but they have one pain and desire.
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In the following articles I will talk about scripts, script maps and user travel maps, mudboards and reference collections, interviews with stakeholders, usability audit reports, competitor comparison, prototypes, layouts and UI-kit. If you apply them on your product, then you can stand out from other similar products because they allow you to find gaps in the logic.

I will be very glad if you try to work with artifacts in practice and share your results with me in the comments.

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