With an increasing barrage of conferences, bootcamps, meetups, and mentoring, it became easier than ever for new designers to learn the trade. Prominent designers pushed for inclusivity, not just in our products but in the organizations that design them.

These advances are worth celebrating. The more mainstream and inclusive experience design becomes, the better experiences we’ll produce.

But as a design leader, a Springboard mentor, and a teacher of several Skillshare classes, I’ve seen firsthand that UX education isn’t doing enough to prepare new designers for their first jobs.

Too often, new designers enter the job market bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, only to become disillusioned. Landing their first job is more difficult than they imagined, and once they do, the reality of designing real-life products rarely matches their expectations.

Let’s take a look at 5 opportunities for improving UX education in 2019:

1. Give More Context

Most UX curriculums start with a basic definition of user experience, move on to user-centered design, and sprinkle in a few lessons on UI design and working with stakeholders.

This approach is understandable. UX is, by definition, a cross-disciplinary field. There’s a ton for new designers to learn, and focusing on the user-centered design process provides a framework for the entire curriculum.

But what’s missing from this approach is context.

One of the things I see new designers struggle with repeatedly is the reasoning behind user-centered design. Why is user research so important? Why do we do it this way? What are we trying to solve?

I can’t oversell the benefits of explaining the history of user experience, the various ways companies design and build products today, and the differences between waterfall, agile, lean, and UCD.

When students understand the successes and pitfalls of various approaches to product development, they start to realize why design thinking is so important. They get comfortable with the idea of user research. They stop jumping to solutions before understanding users and their problems.

UX curriculums should start with this context.

2. Focus on Design in the Real World

UX design is a messy field. Users are complex and capricious; their motivations are subtle and varied.

To make matters worse, design isn’t a universally accepted good in most organizations. Executives from other fields often despise user research as a “navel-gazing” exercise. Stakeholders will fixate on particular “solutions” rather than explaining the problems they want solved.

But most ux curriculums fail to convey the reality on the ground.

Following a user-centered design process is a struggle, not a given, because it requires significant evangelization and education. New designers should know this before they land their first job, and we should prepare them for the task of generating buy-in.

The most common question I hear from students is what it’s really like as UX designer. We should provide the answer and prepare them for it.

3. Teach Practical Skills

I can’t count the number of new designers I’ve met—from bootcampers to graduates of prominent design schools—who lack basic practical skills.

Most ux courses emphasize understanding users, but few place any serious emphasis on actually ensuring your designs solve their problems. Yes, students learn basic design principles, but what about product thinking? What about ux analytics and testing?

Most designers are better off begging, borrowing, and stealing from designs solving comparable problems, but we rarely teach that skill anymore. Yesterday’s design leaders created pattern libraries as a means of helping other designers see how others had solved similar problems. While today’s design systems help companies maintain consistency across products, we’ve stopped thinking of pattern libraries as resources for the design community as a whole.

And, while organizations are desperate to hire UX engineers and designers who code, there’s persistent backlash against teaching designers coding skills.

We can do better here.

Increased interest in UX engineering means basic coding skills are now table stakes. The pressure for design to drive product performance means the same for analytics and testing.

This isn’t just a tangential issue for the design community. Designers have a stake in how the entire team collaborates to create prototypes and finished products. The design of the codebase itself can have as fundamental and profound an impact on the end-user experience as the design of the product’s interactions.

The truth is that new designers are hungry for these skills. In 2018 I noticed a subtle shift in the questions new designers asked. Designers were increasingly interested in the data around various design patterns; they found sites like GoodUI particularly fascinating. “Should I learn to code?” became “how and when should I learn to code?”.

UX curriculums should provide more resources and guidance in these areas. Failing to do so means churning out candidates unprepared for the demands the workplace will place on them.

4. Emphasize Results

I’ve written about data-driven design before, but I’ll say it again. The best designers tie their work back to real business results. If design is about solving problems, then data can show how well we’ve solved them.

Too many young designers think ux is about obsessing over interactions and getting every little piece of the product perfect. Too few understand that good designers choose which problems to focus on and which to ignore.

Understanding the business is as important to design as understanding the user.

If we want tomorrow’s design leaders to operate on an equal footing with marketing, sales, and engineering, then we need to teach them these lessons today.

5. Help New Designers Evaluate Jobs

Not all junior design positions are created equal.

It’s especially important for new designers to have the benefits a mature design organization provides. Mentorship from experienced designers, good design process, and at least a modicum of buy-in from the rest of the organization are key elements that help new designers thrive.

New designers have little business working at companies without this support. But even a quick glance at job listings on sites like AngelList or company reviews on Glassdoor makes it clear that many companies aren’t prepared to provide them.

Many of us have seen a poor first job choice scuttle the careers of more than one junior designer. We’ve developed informal advice for the designers we mentor to help them avoid this. It’s time to make that advice part of the curriculum.

The vast majority of companies are bad places for designers to start their careers. We need to teach new designers to recognize the difference.

Conclusion

The progress the design community made in 2018 was a fantastic step in the right direction. It’s time to take the next one.

We should design UX courses the way we design every other product.

Increasing the number and depth of discussions with brand new designers—and those who’ve been in the field for one to two years—will improve the process of learning design for everyone. As a community, we owe it to ourselves and our users to make this investment.

The post How We Can Improve UX Education in 2019 appeared first on Speckyboy Design Magazine.

With bottom lines hanging in the balance, savvy designers and marketers keep a watchful eye on conversion rates. But even the best landing pages typically convert less than 40% of visitors. With so much riding on conversion rates, you’d think analytics tools would do a better job helping designers improve landing page performance. Yet, out of the box, tools like Google Analytics are completely inadequate for understanding why pages are converting poorly.

Bounce rates and demographic data tell us almost nothing about what a user is actually doing when they visit your landing page. Instead, we need real, actionable insights.

Dwell time-the amount of time a user spends on your page-is the key to unlocking this information and increasing your conversion rates.

Why Dwell Time Matters

When most visitors to your landing page bounce, the obvious question is: why?

Are there issues with your website’s performance? Do your traffic sources stink? What about relevance and trust? Are you providing all the information your users need to convert?

Dwell time is a critical metric because it can indicate user intent and help you narrow down the root cause of your page’s poor performance.

If users bounce almost immediately, it’s highly likely that your traffic sources or site performance are to blame. When users scroll and read the site, only to bounce a few minutes later, it can indicate that users are interested in your offer, but aren’t comfortable moving forward without more information.

In fact, Google takes this indication of user intent so seriously that it actually uses it as a search ranking factor.

Why Current Tools Don’t Work

Given the importance of dwell time, you’d assume that most analytics tools would measure it out of the box. Unfortunately, this isn’t the case.

Most analytics packages-including Google Analytics-calculate session duration by measuring the time between pageviews.

This means that session duration stats never include the time a user spends on the final page they view. If a user hits your landing page and never views a secondary page, their session duration will read as 00:00:00, even though they may have spent minutes reading and interacting with your page.

This is a huge problem. Luckily, it’s easy to fix.

How to Measure Dwell Time

We knew that measuring dwell time was important when building the landing pages at Swish, so we wrote a simple JavaScript snippet to measure it in Google Analytics.

Add this script to your page somewhere before your Google Analytics Tracking code:

(function (global) {
    
    function trackDwellTime() {
        var intervalInMilliseconds = 1000;
        var timelimit = 3 * 60 * 1000;
        var label;

        var timeSpentInSeconds;
        var timeSpent;

        if (typeof arguments[0] === 'string') {
            label = arguments[0];
            timeSpent = intervalInMilliseconds;
        } else {
            timeSpent = arguments[0];
        }
        timeSpent = typeof timeSpent === 'undefined' ? intervalInMilliseconds : timeSpent;
        timeSpentInSeconds = timeSpent / 1000;
        setTimeout(function () {
            if (typeof gtag === 'function') {
                gtag('event', 'Dwell Time', {
                'event_label': label,
                'event_category': 'engagement',
                'value': 2
                });
            } else if (typeof ga === 'function') {
                ga('send', {
                    hitType: 'event',
                    eventAction: 'Dwell Time',
                    eventLabel: label,
                    eventCategory: 'engagement',
                    eventValue: timeSpentInSeconds
                });
            } else {
                console.log("No Google Analytics Code Found");
            }

            if (timeSpent < timelimit) {
                trackDwellTime(timeSpent + intervalInMilliseconds);
            }
        }, intervalInMilliseconds);
    }
    
    global.trackDwellTime = trackDwellTime;

})(window);

This code will fire a "Dwell Time" google analytics event every second for the first 3 minutes a user is on your page, but you can easily modify it to fire at a different interval or for a different duration.

To fire the tracking script, add the following right after your Google Analytics Tracking code on pages you want to track, replacing "label" with the name of your page or some unique identifier you'd like to see in Google Analytics:

trackDwellTime('label');

This code will work with the newer gtag.js version of Google Analytics, as well as the older analytics.js version.

Analyzing Dwell Time Results

Once you've got your code installed, you can verify that it's working by navigating to your page and opening up the "Real-Time" section of Google Analytics and navigating to the Events report.

Assuming that's working, it's time to create some user segments so you can analyze user behavior based on dwell time.

I like to segment dwell time into the following buckets:

Under 2 Seconds - A high percentage of users with dwell times under 2 seconds can indicate page performance issues or poor traffic sources, since these visitors are bouncing so quickly that they're likely not really reading anything at all.

2 - 10 Seconds - Users who spend between 2 and 10 seconds on your page are likely reading above-the-fold content, but not much else. This may indicate that they believe the page isn't relevant or trustworthy and bounce as a result.

11 - 30 Seconds - Users who spend between 11 and 30 seconds but still don't convert are likely reading your landing page, scrolling, and interacting. There's good news and bad news here. The time they're spending on your page indicates clear interest. The bad news is that your page likely isn't answering important questions or addressing key concerns.

31+ Seconds - Users who spend more than 31 seconds without moving on could be slow readers, but many of them simply got distracted and left the tab open. It's helpful to segment this group out; if you find lots of users in this group, consider breaking it into multiple sub-groups.

These buckets serve as general guidelines; you can and should segment based on your own intuition and unique business situation.

Once you've decided on your segments, you can create them in Google Analytics by using the Segment Builder. From the top of most reports, you can click Add Segment, then New Segment:

Once you're in the Segment Builder, select the Conditions segment type. You'll want to add filters for the "Dwell Time" event action, as well as the event values, in seconds, you're trying to match:

Repeat this setup for each of your segments. Once you've saved your segments, you can break down any report based on them:

Looking at the breakdown of users and which segments they fall into can help direct your thinking about what to change for the next iteration of your landing page. I've personally used this tactic to gain insights that resulted in doubling my original conversion rates.

Beyond Dwell Time

If you need even more insight into what's driving your landing page performance, usability tests, user interviews, and session replay tools like FullStory can be incredibly valuable. These approaches require a bit more investment, but when you're really stuck, they can definitely be worth the time and money.

If you're just starting to iterate, however, dwell time is a quick, cheap, and easy way to analyze your landing page bounces and pinpoint areas for improvement.

The post How to Use Dwell Time to Unlock Better Conversion Rates appeared first on Speckyboy Design Magazine.