AP UX Week '07: The Problem Solving Power of Stickies

[Live Blogged Notes from Adaptive Path UX Week 2007. The Power of Stickies by Kate Rutter]

She is a stickie ninja.

On a mental model project: Talk to people about what they are trying to get done. From the interview transcripts you pick out the tasks and use that information to visualize what people are trying to do. You match this with services and products and look for gaps.

Lane Becker suggested that instead of using Excel they put the tasks on stickies and put them up on a big wall.

Simple tools + Skilled practitioner = Powerful weapons

They contribute to clarity, decisions that stick, and insights.

[Write one characteristic of a good collaborator and stick it on the person to your left.]

Secret #1: Stickies are the currency of ideas.

Use stickies the same way you use money. Barter ideas.

Why Stickies?

What intrinsic qualities do they have? They are simple. They stick to a variety of things. They are about the right size to hold ONE IDEA.

They are easy to rearrange and move around. They are ubiquitous, cheap, familiar and approachable, and simple.

They have lightness.

It doesn't cost much to write a stickies and to throw it away.

Why do they work so well in groups?

• enable people to externalize their thoughts and ideas
• help a group focus on one thing at a time
• allow a group to visualize patterns
• engage the group in the process
• clearly show relationships and agreements

Techniques

1. You are trying to create information (generate ideas, probe problems, explore attributes)
2. You are trying to reduce information (identify patterns, prioritize, make decisions, create plans)

What goes on a sticky?

• One thought or idea
• Clear as possible
• Keep corners clean in case you need to annotate
• Be specific ("Frequent downtime due to server load" is better than "lots of issue with product")

The joy of lists.

Freelisting	collect information about a topic
Swap-sort	Order items by priority
Dot voting	get agreement on importance

[Slides passing too quickly... Ah, more detail will come later]

Tip

Define what you are there to do. Keep the question open at the start and let it close down in the process.

Write down the objective and display it where everyone can see it and reference it.

Briefly tell people what to expect. Describe the process you plan to use, and ask people if they have questions.

Have enough stickies and markers to go around.

Freelisting

Start with one big idea and ask people to quietly write down everything they can think of. The goal here is quantity.

At AP they use the physical space to host these where people already are.

They did this with video interviews. They watched the tapes and took notes on stickies, one color for each audience.

Don't have a big wall?

Use a rolling whiteboard, a window, or a back of the door. Use a wall in the bathroom. Get a large sheet of gatorboard or foam core. They use these at AP.

Swap Sort

This helps you prioritize from a small list (10 items or fewer).

You need one or no more than two objectives. How must will this one idea get us toward this goal.

You have two post-its. Of these two, which gets us closer to the goal?

Then you do it again with another post-it. Which one gets us closer? (only compare to the first one)

You need clear criteria (which makes more money, etc.). These need to be measurable so people can agree about using them to make decisions.

Super ninja tip: Match the pen and the stickie size. You want a fine point sharpie for the small stickie, the super sharper for the medium size, and the chisel point for the giant stickie.

Dot Voting

This is a way to get consensus in a group. Don't waste time on things you already agree about.

Avery dots work well for this.

Give people a few votes, say... three. You want more than one so you can spread them around and get clustering.

This independent voting is very useful. Don't include no votes. If you don't get a pattern do it again with a new color. Once you get a pattern, go from there.

Stickie ninja tip: Use these anywhere and any time

Loose Cluster

Look at the cluster and silently put things together. It's best to focus on moving stickies around. As groups start to cluster, people get faster.

This is great because this is how the brain works. Once people pick one up and start moving things around, they'll get going.

Consider clustering with zones. Use timeline zones or team responsibility zones, etc. Though this is more of an action map at this point.

Top-down tree

Think about the IDEO card: Ask why five times.

Build a tree from the top down.

Bottom up tree

Put them into patterns and then add new post-its as labels for the group. This builds from the bottom up. This is what they use in task analysis to make mental models.

Information Map

Find out relationships. What means something to something else?

Put the stickies on a whiteboard and draw lines to connect them. Place concepts in a form that you can move forward into an architecture with.

What is importance about the lightness of stickies is that you can use them again and again and again.

Super ninja tip: strategic sticking. Be aware of where you put the sticky stuff. Top for columns, bottom for clustering. Be consistent.

Use this for planning presentations, message, etc. Prioritize what information needs to be represented.

Action Map

Who is going to do what, when are we going to do this? Typed clustering.

[awesome slide with annotated description and now its hands-on time!]

How we can engage our organizations in adopting UX practices?

Think of internal staff as a set of users whose needs must be met. For the exercise today we are doing three methods:

1. freelisting
2. loose clustering
3. labeling