OKRs, AI v Designers,Adobe's terrible signup, how to tell stories

Howdy! Welcome to this week’s Whiteboard Roundup.

I spent some time cheering on my wife at the Seville Marathon last weekend (if you’re wondering, she smashed her target for a time of 4h 16m and I am very proud). Seville is a gorgeous city.

Every little street seems to have been taken from a painting, and there are so many orange trees - we saw an orange fall and smash into the table of a couple eating their lunch. They didn’t seem to mind, it felt like they were expecting it.

It made me reflect on cultural normality and the things we expect just because of where we live or how we’re brought up, and how we should design the world to cater for both parts of that particular Venn diagram. Anyway, something I’m sure I’ll write a pointless article about soon.

Cheers.

Tom HaczewskiDirector, The User Story

News

Using OKRs in product design

We use Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) both for our own goals at The User Story, but also for our partners too. But it’s a bit of a fine art - knowing how to write achievable goals, written in a way that everyone can understand, but are still ambitious enough to drive product growth.

At The User Story we’ve seen all sorts of very badly written documentation (don’t even get me started on the dreadful user stories - more on that one another time I’m sure) so having a nice guide on how to write them well is always a good thing. This article is a great start if you’re interested in OKRs or struggling to get people engaged with them.

Give it a look.

AI won’t replace designers

Whilst I’m not actually convinced that quite a few designers won’t lose their jobs to robots, this article comes at an understandably worrying time for the industry as AI can now replace content writing, image creation, and now even short-form videos (b-roll mainly, but still) and designers, illustrators, authors and videographers are beginning to wonder about their place in the world.

This article might not completely assuage everyone’s worries but it goes a long way to explaining the possible lay of the land and what to expect over the next few years.

I’m not sure I agree with it all, because while it seeks to explain the technical implications, one thing it downplays is the greed and lean working nature of founders that need to save money in every way possible - often reducing quality to do it - but hey, we can be optimistic I guess.

Have a read.

How Adobe should redesign their free trials

We’ve all been suckered in by trials in the past and Adobe is no stranger to them.

The ever-popular team at growth.design have tackled their free trial in a brutal teardown of the conversion journey that is well worth a click-through. I’ve been caught out by negative patterns with Adobe before, signing myself up for a 12 month contract that I didn’t want and couldn’t get out of, so it’s nice to see that it’s not just me.

Enjoy it here.

Learning from musicians

This beautifully illustrated article from Google seems to mirror the call-to-action by Brad Frost of Atomic Design fame that I shared a few weeks back. It equates the design landscape to the shifting world of music and instruments a few centuries ago, and seems to be calling for a consistent design system that designers can pick from to create better experiences, lifting us from recreating the basic building blocks every time, to just making music.

It’s a little more artistic and narrow that Brad’s article but worth a read nonetheless, even if just for the illustrations.

Check it out.

Storytelling for designers

I’ve always maintained that design skills are not necessarily the main requirements for good UX designers. Encouraging collaboration, effective communication, making sense of problems and articulating solutions, and empathy are some of the most important and valuable traits that UX designers can have.

One underrated skill is that of storytelling - not just for presenting and communicating ideas but in the creation of meaningful and relatable journeys for users, too.

This article describes storytelling in an accessible and easy-to-read format, for creating stories about data. If you work with data and you’re trying to create more compelling interfaces around it, this is a must-read.

Have a look.

What we’re up to.

🚑 The STD* Clinic14 March, 4pmWe’re back again for some new website teardowns - want to get your site looked at? Join us here and put your URL in the chat, and we’ll have a look.*Suboptimal Tech DesignSign up here

Thanks for reading.

I like the cut of your jib today.

As you’re here to the end, here’s my thought for the week to leave you on:

See you next time, friends!

Brought to you by Tom Haczewski, director of The User Story. We’re a product strategy, research and UX agency based in Norwich, working with SaaS teams and startups.