Schibsted Media Group launched their UX principles at Reboot in September and next week VP of UX, Lidia Oshlyanski are presenting them at Oslo Innovation Week. Lidia has given us insight in how the development process has involved Schibsted companies across boarders and titles and why the principles are so important for further development of products.
Why did you start the journey of developing the User Experience Principles?
It was important for us as a UX organization in Schibsted to have a common foundation and basis for producing our UX principles and it gives us a way to evaluate if we are doing a good enough job for our users. This is a foundation and we expect that each local team will built on top of the principles and even add one or two on top of these that are more specific for their cultural or product needs. In this way the principles will give added value for our users.
How did you start the process of developing the UX principles?
We started off with having local teams submit ideas and areas of potential problems. We then brought together UX leadership from all over Schibsted to workshop these ideas to what has now become the basis of the UX principles. After the first draft we started to circulate them around our local teams and workshoped them further; took suggestions and feedback from these workshops and widened the circulations to iterate and fine-tune the principles into what we have today. Once the principles had been seen by most of our Schibsted community and we had gone through several iterations we went live with them at the Reboot event in Barcelona in September.
Was there an immediate response at Reboot?
Of course the UX people were really excited to see their collaborative work featured in such a way and to be viewed by the community as a whole. The people outside the UX community had a lot of great questions on how we would use them and what we would do next so that tells us that they are interested and that the principles in some way engages people.
So, how are you using the principles and what are you doing with them at the moment?
There are lots of different teams across the group that are using them in lots of different ways, which is interesting – they are alive somehow. One example is; a team has created heuristic guidelines based on the principles. This means that we have a set of guidelines or questions that we can use to evaluate any UX design. For example, the “get to know me” principle has the following questions / guidelines;
- Does the input given by the user contribute to a better experience?
- Is any of the output personalized?
And here they are – the seven UX principles:
– Get to know me
– Make me say WOW
– Earn my trust and make things safe for me
– Anticipate my needs
– Understand why I’m doing this
If you would like to know more about UX and the principles or just get to know Lidia better, come meet us at the Company Crawl during Oslo Innovation Week, Tuesday the 18th and check out the UX principles in depth.