The User Experience Team of One

by Leah Buley

  FIGURE 6.8

  An example of a screen from a heuristic markup.

  Average Time

  4–6 hours to conduct and document the review

  Use When

  • You want to assess the basic quality of the product and spot potential opportunities for improvement.

  • In the design process, if you want to check your work as new designs are under way.

  Try It Out

  1. Block off a good amount of time.

  Set aside some time to really use the product, from start to finish. Plan more time than you think you need. This gives you enough time to take notes and capture your observations.

  2. Begin at the beginning.

  Think about where a typical user starts with your product. Is it with a Web search? A trip to the app store? If your product includes a physical device, does their experience begin with the process of opening the product box? Whatever it is, try to approach your offering from the same angle that first-timers would. Take screenshots or pictures and record your thoughts as you move from screen to screen or step to step. A PowerPoint document is a great place to store your images and observations. At each step or screen in the process, paste a screenshot on a new slide and add a note (or several) about what you are noticing and thinking about in your user’s mindset. Or use a screen recorder that also records sound (Silver-back works well) and record your stream of consciousness as you move through the product, thinking aloud as you go.

  3. Pay attention to your reactions.

  As you progress through the product, be alert to the subtle responses and questions that you find yourself having. Often, we encounter these thoughts so quickly that we may not be fully conscious that we’ve had them. They can still influence our perceptions of the quality of the product, though. Try to go slowly and be attentive to what your inner voice is saying.

  4. Go from beginning to end.

  Continue moving through the product, recording images and observations as you go.

  5. Share what you find.

  When you’re done, you’ll have a candid and easy-to-share narrative that illustrates potential areas for improvement within the product. Keep in mind that you may be critiquing someone else’s hard work here, so be sure to soften any overly sharp or critical language before you share it with others. Capture the feeling, but leave the expletives out. At the end, include a summary of the key takeaways—the small handful of things that you believe are most critical.

  Tips and Tricks for Heuristic Markups

  • Adopt a persona. If you have some sense of who your users are, it can be helpful to create a backstory of your motivations and what you’re trying to accomplish to guide your thinking as you move through the product. (Use your proto-personas if you have them.)

  • Record emotions. Along with your thought process, it can be illuminating to record your emotional responses to each step or screen (see Figure 6.9). Did it make you feel happy? Surprised? Confused? Frustrated? Make an emotional graph of the entire experience to help you pinpoint the most critical areas to improve or, alternately, to preserve. Think in terms of the seven universal human emotions: anger, joy, sadness, disgust, fear, contempt, and surprise.

  FIGURE 6.9

  An example of a journey line that shows the highs and lows of the experience.

  • Gather additional evidence. If people question the process because it’s not “expert” enough, connect your observations to recognized standards or patterns, such as those described here:

  • Jakob Nielsen’s 10 usability heuristics: www.useit.com/papers/heuristic/heuristic_list.html

  • Bruce “Tog” Tognazzi’s basic principles of interaction design: www.asktog.com/basics/firstPrinciples.html

  • Yahoo! Design Pattern Library: http://developer.yahoo.com/ypatterns/

  • Share the experience. Invite your colleagues to go through the process as well. Ask them to bring their beginner’s mind as they move through the process. Experiencing this type of walkthrough firsthand helps people see what you’re talking about and provokes empathy and curiosity about how real users will experience the product.

  • Think in terms of tasks. You can structure your heuristic markup from start to finish or, alternately, according to common tasks. To do a task-based markup, identify a handful of core use cases or scenarios that the product should support, and then follow the path for each one as you complete your review.

  • If you work remotely... The process itself is easy to conduct remotely, but sharing what you find may take a bit more coordination. Try showing your walkthrough to a colleague whose perspective you trust first to get a second opinion on whether anything seems sensitive or incendiary. Once you’ve gotten confirmation that it seems good to share, set up time for a share-out with a larger group. Use screen-sharing software and walk the team through your notes.

  METHOD 11

  Comparative Assessment

  What are the standards and best practices that customers are likely to expect in a product like yours?

  A comparative assessment is a slight variation on the competitive assessment. In a competitive assessment, you evaluate your direct competitors. In a comparative assessment, you look at products and services that your customers are likely to encounter and use, although they may not necessarily be your direct competitors. The idea behind a comparative assessment is that people develop their expectations from the products and services that they use every day. They may be benchmarking the experience you provide not against your direct competitors, but against eBay, Amazon, iTunes, and so on. A comparative assessment is a good way to start thinking about and discussing what an optimal experience looks like, even before you’ve begun creating any designs.

  Average Time

  4–8 hours total

  • 4–6 hours to pick comparators and review them

  • Plus an optional 1–2 hours to document in a guidelines document

  Use When

  • You’re trying to establish vision and expectations for a new user experience.

  • The team seems to be focusing on feature-by-feature comparison against competitors and not aiming to create a simple, holistic user experience.

  • You keep hearing comparisons like “it should be the Apple of ______,” but nothing more specific.

  Try It Out

  1. Pick which products to evaluate.

  Create a list of the products you want to include in your assessment. This should be a small, manageable number. Five is about right. Ten is probably too many.

  2. Create a list of areas to evaluate.

  Next, determine the framework that you will use to evaluate each product. A framework can be as simple as a spreadsheet with a column for each key question in your evaluation and a row for each product. The areas you focus on may be influenced by the domain you are evaluating and your goals for the project, but here are some common areas to focus on in your framework:

  • Content

  • Design

  • Features and functionality

  • Continuity or flow

  • Intuitiveness

  • Strengths, weaknesses, opportunities

  3. Walk through each product.

  Now, with these focus areas in mind, begin to assess each product. Imagine that you have never encountered this product before and try to see it with fresh eyes. Take screenshots as you go and note your assessment of each product, as shown in Figure 6.10.

  FIGURE 6.10

  This spreadsheet is a simple way to capture what’s special about the comparators that you’re researching.

  4. Answer your questions.

  Once you’ve assessed each product or offering, fill in your framework, so you can easily compare across offerings.

  5. Summarize findings or guidelines.

  Finally, consider documenting key insights from the assessment in a “guidelines” document that you can refer to as you proceed through the process of user-centered design, as shown in Figure 6.11. (These ca
n be used in conjunction with “Design Principles,” described in Chapter 7, “Design Methods.”) Your guidelines can serve as a cheat sheet for fundamental design standards that you’ll want to meet or exceed. This really doesn’t take a lot of time, and helps teams understand important best practices and start using a common language.

  FIGURE 6.11

  One way to make your most important findings a little more visual and memorable is to take a few screenshots and assemble them into a series of guidelines or best practices that you’ve observed through the competitive or comparative review.

  Tips and Tricks for Comparative Assessments

  • Go beyond mere features. Sometimes, these types of assessments are used to create feature comparison lists. This is dangerous. It encourages you to compete on feature parity, which can lead to user experience that is bloated with features and functionality. Instead, focus the assessment on the overall quality of the experience offered. Think not just about creating an inventory of features, but instead, what is the product’s overall flow? How harmonious and consistent is the design? How readable, relatable, and human is the content? How intuitive are the categories in the navigation? What are important interaction patterns and conventions that would appear to be emerging standards? How well does the experience flow from device to device? Asking these kinds of questions can help you get a sense of the quality of the overall experience.

  • Plan it like a report. One technique for determining your question framework is to design the report that you want to share at the end—but design it prior to starting the assessment. For example, if you want to report on the voice and tone of content in all of the offerings in your assessment, you know that you’ll need to examine voice and tone of content specifically. First, decide on the key elements you want to be able to compare and how you’d like to report them. From there, you can determine what questions you will need to ask, and whether you’ll want to track them in an open-ended way, on a numeric scale, through screenshots, in a yes/no fashion, and so on.

  • Share what you learn. A comparative assessment can be helpful for simply familiarizing yourself with trends in the field, but it’s even better if you can use it to discuss those trends with a cross-functional team. A summary document like the one in Figure 6.11 can be the starting point for an informed discussion about what matters most for your product.

  • Make it a group exercise. This can also be useful when done as a group exercise. Ask the participants to bring in sites that they think are relevant comparators, and then, as a group, review those sites and discuss significant trends.

  • If you work remotely... This is a great activity for a remote team of one. Have at it!

  METHOD 12

  Content Patterns

  What content and capabilities do users have access to in your products, how is it structured, and what is the overall quality?

  In a content inventory, you sit down with the product or service and attempt to create a representative sampling of all the types of information, assets, and functionality that it includes—sort of an index of the world. If that sounds painstaking, it is. You can get many of the same benefits (intimate understanding of structure, deeper familiarity with the content, etc.) with a lot less effort. Content patterns are less comprehensive than a traditional content inventory, but they do show the recurring patterns of content and functionality that exist and how they are they structured.

  Average Time

  4–8 hours, depending on how deeply you want to go

  • 2–4 hours to review patterns

  • 1–2 hours to create a content map or spreadsheet

  • 1–2 hours to summarize key findings

  Use When

  • You want to get deeply familiar with the structure, information, and capabilities of your website or product (often this is at the beginning of a project).

  Try It Out

  1. Pick key sections.

  Start by picking a few representative sections to feature in your sampling. Within each of these sections, look for recurring patterns or structures in the way that content is configured and presented. For example, case studies, articles, help files, and so on. This could also apply to features and functionality, which may have their own recurring patterns.

  2. Find the patterns.

  List all the elements that come together to make up a unit of content. (For example, an article is comprised of a title, a byline, date, author, several long form paragraphs, some images, and finally some tags and categories, which are used as metadata for searching and filtering.) Repeat this process for each new type of content that you find.

  3. Document what you find.

  Put the patterns you’ve found into a spreadsheet, or to make it easy to visualize the structure and patterns of your content, make a diagram or a map of the different types of content you find (see Figures 6.12–6.14).

  FIGURE 6.12

  As you identify different types of content, you can track them in a spreadsheet.

  FIGURE 6.13

  An example of a content map.

  FIGURE 6.14

  Even a hand-drawn model can be illuminating for clarifying the different types of content in the system and how they relate to each other.

  4. Summarize key findings.

  Finally, use this analysis to identify significant observations or findings. What are your top observations? What specific recommendations would you make to improve the product?

  5. Share and discuss.

  Optionally, share your findings with the team and discuss what actions you’d like to take, based on what you’ve learned.

  Tips and Tricks for Content Patterns

  • Summarize what you discover. Documenting content patterns can be a fairly technical exercise. This can make it hard to share and present to others. You can try to present a spreadsheet, but you may find people falling asleep in their chairs. To get people to pay attention and appreciate the significance of the findings, just talk through your high-level findings (which you identified in step 4 previously) and leave the spreadsheets at your desk (see Figure 6.15). Also show real, in-product examples to illustrate your points. If you are making specific recommendations for improvement, you can also show examples of this done well in other people’s products to give everyone a vivid picture of what those changes might look like in practice.

  FIGURE 6.15

  An example of a content inventory summary.

  • If you work remotely... This, too, is an exercise that can easily be done remotely. Just be sure to plan time to share your findings with your remote colleagues. A conference call complemented by screen sharing works well. In this type of format, focus more on the summary and the key themes, and show as many examples as possible from the actual content.

  If You Only Do One Thing...

  The methods in this chapter cover a variety of investigative activities for learning more about your product, your users, your competitive landscape, and even what you don’t know now but need to learn more about. At the core, however, these methods are about looking past what’s familiar and known in order to see the product with fresh eyes.

  So if you only have time to do one thing, try the one method that best helps you see the world through your users’ eyes: “Guerilla User Research.” It will enable you not only to see areas for improvement in your product, but it will also give you a better sense of who your users are and what matters to them.

  CHAPTER 7

  Design Methods

  METHOD 13

  Design Brief

  METHOD 14

  Design Principles

  METHOD 15

  Sketching

  METHOD 16

  Sketchboards

  METHOD 17

  Task Flows

  METHOD 18

  Wireframes

  If You Only Do One Thing...

  Designer Damien Newman created the design process illustration in Figure 7.1 to help illustrate a fundamental but little known truth about th
e design process: the path to a clean, complete, well-considered product is messy, messy, messy. You generally have to throw away a lot of work before you get to something that you keep. And often you don’t know what should be kept and what’s headed for the trash until you get other people involved in the process. But showing your colleagues the messy design process can be a bit like making sausage: sometimes it can ruin their appetite for the meal. The trick is to follow an iterative design process that enables you to do your best work, but also brings people along for the ride. The methods described in this chapter are tailor-made to get you through that process. They focus on iterative design coupled with structured, facilitative activities that you can do with your non-UX colleagues to make them partners and co-owners of the UX design process. In this chapter, we’ll cover:

  • Design Brief. At a high level, how would you describe your target design solution? What are the features and personality of the product? Who is it designed for, and what activities is it intended to encourage or enable?

  • Design Principles. What should the experience of using the product feel like to a user?

  • Sketching. What are some different forms the product design could take?

  FIGURE 7.1

  Damien Newman created “the squiggle” to convey the messiness of the design process.

  • Sketchboards. What might the overall system or product look like, and what range of ideas are possible at each point in the process?