YS Workshops: UX veteran Jim Nieters on building products with great user experience!

Earlier this week, we announced that we'd be hosting Jim Nieters at YourStory office for a design and user experience workshop. Jim is one of the pioneers in the field of design and is a Global Director of User Experience at HP.

The rate at which the registrations filled up, we knew that we had our jobs cut out for the weekend. YourStory office was filled to the brim, with people from all walks of the world of technology, geared up to indulge in the mystic world of user experience of technology products.

And Jim didn't disappoint. What ensued in the next couple of hours was one of the most interactive sessions that I had ever been a witness to. Each slide that Jim spoke about lasted at least a few minutes more than what it was intended for, as the audience fired question after question at him. Jim patiently answered them all.

Here are some interesting and important excerpts from the talk -

Empathy 

Jim doesn't have design major. At college he majored in cognitive psychology, because of which he says that he could empathize with people. "Design is all about empathizing with your users. And good design is about solving a problem for your users in the most effective manner," he says.

Jim shared that empathy is everything for a designer - "Skills are important to have, but without empathy it really doesn't amount to much. Unfortunately, you cannot teach empathy. You either have it, or you don't."

From design to code in a day - Be rapid 

Jim says that it is essential to go from design to code as soon as possible. "If you're going to take things the conventional way, it could take many months to get a working prototype. Typically, I like to go from design to code in a day and from thereon iterate until we feel the product is ready to roll out."

For this, Jim advises that the designer and the front end coders should work very closely. He says, "Not only does this improve the speed of development, you ensure that the design has been replicated pixel for pixel in code."

He also urged non front end resources to be aware of what the user needs. He says, "I think it would be a great thing for a back end programmer to be a little user centric. Also, if business analysts thought user first, we'd be great!"

What is good design? 

When asked about how to tackle the subjective nature of design, Jim says, "There are about 50 ways to solve a problem of which 5 ways are amazing. Any of those 5 ways can be called great design. Now, what is good design to someone might not be such a great design for someone else, and you need a guy to be able to look at it from a pure problem solving point of view. To an extent, I play that role at HP."

When asked of the importance of UI while pushing out an early version of a product, he says, "I think people are willing to forgive some shortcomings of a product if it is solving a real problem. We are not in the business of creating UIs anymore, we need to create UXs.

On user delight

According to Jim, user delight happens when a product solves a problem for a user that they didn't think they had. He takes the example of iTunes - "They were the first to introduce playlists, which solved a problem that many users didn't think they had. Before playlists, you'd have to use CDs, but with iTunes, you could just pull up a playlist and listen to."

"Also, Amazon, is one of those companies that I don't want to like, but I think they're really wonderful. They recently sent me a message saying that I could download digital copies of all the songs that I had purchased from them over the past 5 years. I had lost some of the CDs, but now I could download them again. Now that is user delight!"

Jim rates content aggregation app Flipboard very highly in terms of design, user experience and its ability to delight users.

There was a lot more that Jim shared during the talk, and we will bring you the video of the talk shortly. Stay tuned!