Paul Lebovitz

I offer UX consulting services to organizations developing digital applications. My services include:

Process consulting relative to the integration of user experience design into the product definition and software development process. LeanUX, AgileUX and Agile software development are all a set of principles that must be adapted to the nature of the product, budget, and strengths of the organization .
User research (Quantitative and Qualitative) relative to both new and existing product and services.
Definition of interactive LO-FI and HI-FI prototypes

I excel at bringing together people, technology and process to produce products that excite customers, the people building the products, and the financial objectives of the business. I bring a set of skills and experience suitable to building products and services that have strong user experience (UX) and technology components. My skills have been honed at companies including Boeing, Lockheed, Intergraph, Autodesk, and my onging consultancy. My skills are academically founded in my BSME (mechanical engineering) and MSHFID (Human Factors for Information Design) degrees.

During my career I have both worked as an individual UX contributor, UX Architect, Technical Product Manager, as well as led and mentored geographically that have included member from China, Canada, USA, and Europe. I have built and led the product design teams for world class applications including Autodesk’s Inventor and Siemens’ Solid Edge. Additionally, I have led both technical and requirements research for products involving large scale customer engagement.

Designing for User Experience

Following are some of the key elements that should be considered when designing for the User Experience. Not all of these apply to all situations — I advocate a pragmatic approach based on requirements, budget, and schedule.

Total User Experience?

There are six primary components that should (to the extend that time and schedule allow) be addressed as part of the product development process. Total User Experience addresses all of these facets as part of the product’s design, the technologies it employs, and how the product or service is deployed.

Utility which asks question such as “Is this something I need?”, or “Does it solve my problem in a useful way?”.

Usability follows utility and asks questions such as: “Is this product easy and intuitive to use?”, or “Does this product help me complete my tasks or workflows?”. Many products achieve both Utility and Usability, but don’t achieve desirability.

Desirability answers questions like: “Does the user like the product?”, or “Given a choice would they choose this product over another product that provides ‘sufficient’ utility?”. It is not always enough that the end-user is happy; the product has to be Supportable.

Supportability asks questions like: “Is the product easy to deploy?”, or “Is the user’s data secure?”.

Affordability which asks questions such as: “What is the life-cycle cost?”, or “Can I lease or do I have to buy?”.

It’s a Team Effort

There are many stakeholders who can and should contribute to developing a product that optimally meets business objectives. However, many organizations struggle to integrate the roles of various stake holders. Great ideas and insights often come from the extended team.

Some common issues that limit the design of the optimal product or service include:

Lack of a shared understanding of the business objectives and the assumption on which they are based across the entire product development team.
There is no a clear understanding of the proposed solution and the minimum viable product by the entire team.
Barriers to the flow of information, or information not being in an accessible form.

All members of the team leadership must be able to answer questions such as:

What are the business objectives?
What is the proposed solution and what are the assumptions on which it is based?
What is the MVP (Minimum viable product)
How will the product architecture support the business objectives?

Shared Knowledge is Essential

Many organization talk about the value of an Agile workflow, but have a waterfall handoff between Product Management, User Experience and Software Development.

Each organization must support the development of the optimal product using their area of expertise.

User Research - Which Tools to Use

There are many types of User Research and generally no individual is expert in all techniques. Likewise, only some types of User Research are appropriate and or cost effective based on the objective of the research.

I very much like the classification system proposed by Christian Rohner that presents methods along a 3-dimensional framework with the following axes:

Attitudinal vs. Behavioral
Qualitative vs. Quantitative
Context of Use

Interestingly, advances in machine learning are allowing many qualitative methods to provide quantitate data.

User Experience Design within the Orgranization

Where to Spend Time

In an ideal world every step of the UX process would be performed and documented. However, product development always entails budget and time to market constraints.

It is important to define the sufficient effort to achieve the TUX objectives. For example, some projects may require no user research while it may be the most important aspect of other projects.

Integrating the User Experience (UX) and Software Development Processes

An ideal product development process integrates LeanUX, AgileUX and Agile Development. All three are a set of principles, not rules that need to fit both the strengths of the organization and the nature of the product being developed.

Critical to success of any product development effort is how the UX and Software development processes are integrated.

Regardless of the software development process (agile is one example), the two teams need to work within an integrative framework so that the user experience can be evaluated on an ongoing basis.

Product Experience = Affective + Performance

A product can have great visual appeal and low performance (usability). It is also possible for a product to be 'nothing much to look at' but have great value which users appreciate. From he viewpoint of the Dave McClure's AARRR framework the ‘Affective Experience’ and the ‘Performance Experience’ must be balanced to maximize revenue (or other KPI).

From a product architecture perspective there are six primary components, of which the UX team is primarily responsible for the Visual Design, Interaction Layout, Interaction Logic and Application (business) Logic.

UX Activities and Skillsets

Building User Experience is like building a house, and building a house takes many trades. Building user experience is the same, there are many skillsets that are required. It may be that some team members are skilled in many of the trades, but usually people tend to have more experience at one trade or another.

Following are the skill sets (trades) for User Experience

User Research

User Research is all about filling gaps in knowledge about what users need, their behaviors, the environments in which they work, and how they define success. In many ways it follows the standard scientific process.

Many different techniques can be employed to gather data. In some cases, simple surveys may be sufficient and in other cases user interviews or focus groups may be needed. Of course product development timelines and budgets are also an important consideration.

I have experience in many methods of user research.

Information Architecture (IA) Design

The presentation of Information Architecture can take many form based on the type of information and the purpose of the application. Websites often have ‘site maps’, but within pages of a site there may be highly interactive elements that perform various processes. There is no general rule, except that the IA starts from the general and gets more specific using whatever mapping of the information or process is most appropriate.

An IA can be very simple in the example of a ‘lookup your weather’ website or extremely complex in the case of a ‘heads-up display’ for a fighter aircraft.

Interaction Design

Interaction Design is the process of taking the tasks and workflows composing the user’s ‘mental model’ and transforming them into structured interactive elements defining the product’s user interface.

Creating a great user interface requires understanding the target users and applying well-established principles of user cognition – all within a framework of creative exploration.

Often ‘user interaction design’ is confused with ‘visual design’. While great visual design is critical to users’ emotive response, it is the interaction design that guarantees user satisfaction once their interest is captured.

Visual Design

Visual design is the use of layout, color, imagery, shapes, and typography, to enhance affective aspects of the application and thereby improve the user experience. A beautiful interface attracts people and thereby give the application the change to prove its overall value.

Usability Testing

Usability testing is a means of evaluating a product by testing it with a statistically significant set of representative users. During a test, users will try to complete scenarios composed of one or more tasks while observer(s) watch, listen and takes notes.

Depending on the nature of the product and the test scenarios, testing may in some cases be done remotely using video based collaboration tools.

The goal is to identify any usability problems, collect qualitative and quantitative data and determine the participant's satisfaction with the product.

There are two distinctly different scenarios in which User Testing takes place:

Design Verification — In this scenario, usability testing occurs during the UX design and implementation process. Ideally, both the design and implementation take place in an iterative process where prototypes and implementation can be tested, allowing for issues to be resolved prior to product deployment.

Product Validation — Products do not always achieve their TUX objectives once deployed. In this situation, Usability Testing is key to determining the key issues and best approaches to problem resolution.

Prototyping

Prototyping is the UX context is creating a representation of an application that reflects the current vision which incorporates the products of user research. The purpose of a prototype is to learn how well the vision is received by users. Prototypes can be as simple as a series of hand drawn sketches or sophisticated applications requiring some level of programming. Often it is best for prototypes to have a 'imperfect look' as it encourages users to offer insightful suggestions for improvement.

Expert Reviews

An Expert Review is where a usability researcher goes through a product looking for usability and experience problems by evaluating against best practices, a set of established usability heuristics, and sometimes user scenarios. The result is a list of prioritized actionable issues and at least one proposal for addressing the issue.

Why an Expert Review instead of User Testing?

An expert review is never a replacement for user testing, but user testing can be expensive. It is often possible to get the most out of user testing by first performing an Expert Review that addresses the obvious issues.