Site: http://bradfrost.com/blog/post/interface-inventory/ Many are familiar with the concept of a content inventory.Content audits are usually performed in the early stages of a website redesign process to take stock of all a site’s content. It’s a tedious process involving spreadsheets and caffeine, but the hard work pays off. You end up all your content laid out on the table, which gives you a new perspective on what your content is and how to tackle it. Enter the interface inventory. An interface inventory is similar to a content inventory, only instead of sifting through and categorizing content, you’re taking stock and categorizing the components making up your website, app, intranet, hoobadyboop, or whatever (it doesn’t matter). An interface inventory is a comprehensive collection of the bits and pieces that make up your interface. Conducting an Interface AuditHere are the steps to creating an interface inventory:
Benefits of an Interface InventoryWhy go through all the trouble of deconstructing and cataloging an interface? It’s certainly a tedious process, but the results are extremely beneficial. Here are just some of the benefits of an interface inventory:
Interface Inventories In ActionI went through just a few pages of my bank’s website and screen grabbed all the various button variations I could find. Here’s the result: As you can see, their button styles are all over the place and are about the furthest thing from consistent and cohesive. Looking closer at the buttons reveal incredible inconsistency in gradient, arrow, border and more: Now contrast these styles with a button interface inventory for Etsy, a company who maintains a robust styleguide and pattern library: Speech Video https://vimeo.com/67476280
link: https://hbr.org/2015/09/design-thinking-comes-of-age There’s a shift under way in large organizations, one that puts design much closer to the center of the enterprise. But the shift isn’t about aesthetics. It’s about applying the principles of design to the way people work. This new approach is in large part a response to the increasing complexity of modern technology and modern business. That complexity takes many forms. Sometimes software is at the center of a product and needs to be integrated with hardware (itself a complex task) and made intuitive and simple from the user’s point of view (another difficult challenge). Sometimes the problem being tackled is itself multi-faceted: Think about how much tougher it is to reinvent a health care delivery system than to design a shoe. And sometimes the business environment is so volatile that a company must experiment with multiple paths in order to survive. I could list a dozen other types of complexity that businesses grapple with every day. But here’s what they all have in common: People need help making sense of them. Specifically, people need their interactions with technologies and other complex systems to be simple, intuitive, and pleasurable. A set of principles collectively known as design thinking—empathy with users, a discipline of prototyping, and tolerance for failure chief among them—is the best tool we have for creating those kinds of interactions and developing a responsive, flexible organizational culture. What Is a Design-Centric Culture?If you were around during the late-1990s dot-com craze, you may think of designers as 20-somethings shooting Nerf darts across an office that looks more like a bar. Because design has historically been equated with aesthetics and craft, designers have been celebrated as artistic savants. But a design-centric culture transcends design as a role, imparting a set of principles to all people who help bring ideas to life. Let’s consider those principles. Focus on users’ experiences, especially their emotional ones.To build empathy with users, a design-centric organization empowers employees to observe behavior and draw conclusions about what people want and need. Those conclusions are tremendously hard to express in quantitative language. Instead, organizations that “get” design use emotional language (words that concern desires, aspirations, engagement, and experience) to describe products and users. Team members discuss the emotional resonance of a value proposition as much as they discuss utility and product requirements. A traditional value proposition is a promise of utility: If you buy a Lexus, the automaker promises that you will receive safe and comfortable transportation in a well-designed high-performance vehicle. An emotional value proposition is a promise of feeling: If you buy a Lexus, the automaker promises that you will feel pampered, luxurious, and affluent. In design-centric organizations, emotionally charged language isn’t denigrated as thin, silly, or biased. Strategic conversations in those companies frequently address how a business decision or a market trajectory will positively influence users’ experiences and often acknowledge only implicitly that well-designed offerings contribute to financial success. The focus on great experiences isn’t limited to product designers, marketers, and strategists—it infuses every customer-facing function. Take finance. Typically, its only contact with users is through invoices and payment systems, which are designed for internal business optimization or predetermined “customer requirements.” But those systems are touch points that shape a customer’s impression of the company. In a culture focused on customer experience, financial touch points are designed around users’ needs rather than internal operational efficiencies. Create models to examine complex problems.Design thinking, first used to make physical objects, is increasingly being applied to complex, intangible issues, such as how a customer experiences a service. Regardless of the context, design thinkers tend to use physical models, also known as design artifacts, to explore, define, and communicate. Those models—primarily diagrams and sketches—supplement and in some cases replace the spreadsheets, specifications, and other documents that have come to define the traditional organizational environment. They add a fluid dimension to the exploration of complexity, allowing for nonlinear thought when tackling nonlinear problems. For example, the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs’ Center for Innovation has used a design artifact called a customer journey map to understand veterans’ emotional highs and lows in their interactions with the VA. “This form of artifact helped us better tell a story to various stakeholders,” says Melissa Chapman, a designer who worked at the Center for Innovation. Even more important, she adds, it “helped us develop a strategic way to think about changing the entire organization and to communicate that emergent strategy.” The customer journey map and other design models are tools for understanding. They present alternative ways of looking at a problem. Use prototypes to explore potential solutions.In design-centric organizations, you’ll typically see prototypes of new ideas, new products, and new services scattered throughout offices and meeting rooms. Whereas diagrams such as customer journey maps explore the problem space, prototypes explore the solution space. They may be digital, physical, or diagrammatic, but in all cases they are a way to communicate ideas. The habit of publicly displaying rough prototypes hints at an open-minded culture, one that values exploration and experimentation over rule following. The MIT Media Lab formalizes this in its motto, “Demo or die,” which recognizes that only the act of prototyping can transform an idea into something truly valuable—on their own, ideas are a dime a dozen. Design-centric companies aren’t shy about tinkering with ideas in a public forum and tend to iterate quickly on prototypes—an activity that the innovation expert Michael Schrage refers to as “serious play.” In his book of that title, he writes that innovation is “more social than personal.” He adds, “Prototyping is probably the single most pragmatic behavior the innovative firm can practice.” Tolerate failure.A design culture is nurturing. It doesn’t encourage failure, but the iterative nature of the design process recognizes that it’s rare to get things right the first time. Apple is celebrated for its successes, but a little digging uncovers the Newton tablet, the Pippin gaming system, and the Copland operating system—products that didn’t fare so well. (Pippin and Copland were discontinued after only two years.) The company leverages failure as learning, viewing it as part of the cost of innovation. Greg Petroff, the chief experience officer at GE Software, explains how the iterative process works at GE: “GE is moving away from a model of exhaustive product requirements. Teams learn what to do in the process of doing it, iterating, and pivoting.” Employees in every aspect of the business must realize that they can take social risks—putting forth half-baked ideas, for instance—without losing face or experiencing punitive repercussions.
Exhibit thoughtful restraint.Many products built on an emotional value proposition are simpler than competitors’ offerings. This restraint grows out of deliberate decisions about what the product should do and, just as important, what it should not do. By removing features, a company offers customers a clear, simple experience. The thermostat Nest—inside, a complex piece of technology—provides fewer outward-facing functions than other thermostats, thus delivering an emotional experience that reflects the design culture of the company. As CEO Tony Fadell said in an interview published in Inc., “At the end of the day you have to espouse a feeling—in your advertisements, in your products. And that feeling comes from your gut.” Square’s mobile app Cash lets you do one thing: send money to a friend. “I think I’m just an editor, and I think every CEO is an editor,” wrote Jack Dorsey, Square’s CEO. “We have all these inputs, we have all these places that we could go…but we need to present one cohesive story to the world.” In organizations like Square, you’ll find product leaders saying no much more than they say yes. Rather than chase the market with follow-on features, they lead the market with a constrained focus. What Types of Companies Are Making This Change?As industry giants such as IBM and GE realize that software is a fundamental part of their businesses, they are also recognizing the extraordinary levels of complexity they must manage. Design thinking is an essential tool for simplifying and humanizing. It can’t be extra; it needs to be a core competence. “There’s no longer any real distinction between business strategy and the design of the user experience,” said Bridget van Kralingen, the senior vice president of IBM Global Business Services, in a statement to the press. In November 2013 IBM opened a design studio in Austin, Texas—part of the company’s $100 million investment in building a massive design organization. As Phil Gilbert, the general manager of the effort, explained in a press release, “Quite simply, our goal—on a scale unmatched in the industry—is to modernize enterprise software for today’s user, who demands great design everywhere, at home and at work.” The company intends to hire 1,000 designers. When I was at the company frog design, GE hired us to help formalize and disseminate language, tools, and success metrics to support its emergent design practice. Dave Cronin, GE’s executive design director for industrial internet applications, describes how the company came to realize that it was not just in the business of making physical products but had become one of the largest software providers in the world. The complexity of this software was overwhelming, so his team turned to design. “Our mandate was to create products, but also to enable nimble innovation,” Cronin says. “That’s a pretty tall order—we were asked to perform design at scale and along the way create cultural change.” Design thinking is an essential tool for simplifying and humanizing. IBM and GE are hardly alone. Every established company that has moved from products to services, from hardware to software, or from physical to digital products needs to focus anew on user experience. Every established company that intends to globalize its business must invent processes that can adjust to different cultural contexts. And every established company that chooses to compete on innovation rather than efficiency must be able to define problems artfully and experiment its way to solutions. (For more on the last shift, see “How Samsung Became a Design Powerhouse” in this issue.) The pursuit of design isn’t limited to large brand-name corporations; the big strategy-consulting firms are also gearing up for this new world, often by acquiring leading providers of design services. In the past few years, Deloitte acquired Doblin, Accenture acquired Fjord, and McKinsey acquired Lunar. Olof Schybergson, the founder of Fjord, views design thinking’s empathetic stance as fundamental to business success. As he told an interviewer, “Going direct to consumers is a big disruptor….There are new opportunities to gather data and insights about consumer behavior, likes, dislikes….Those who have data and an appetite for innovation will prevail.” These acquisitions suggest that design is becoming table stakes for high-value corporate consulting—an expected part of a portfolio of business services. What Are the Challenges?Several years ago, I consulted for a large entertainment company that had tucked design away in a select group of “creatives.” The company was excited about introducing technology into its theme parks and recognized that a successful visitor experience would hinge on good design. And so it became apparent that the entire organization needed to embrace design as a core competence. This shift is never an easy one. Like many organizations with entrenched cultures that have been successful for many years, the company faced several hurdles. Accepting more ambiguity.The entertainment company operates globally, so it values repeatable, predictable operational efficiency in support of quarterly profit reporting. Because the introduction of technology into the parks represented a massive capital expenditure, there was pressure for a guarantee of a healthy return. Design, however, doesn’t conform easily to estimates. It’s difficult if not impossible to understand how much value will be delivered through a better experience or to calculate the return on an investment in creativity. Embracing risk.Transformative innovation is inherently risky. It involves inferences and leaps of faith; if something hasn’t been done before, there’s no way to guarantee its outcome. The philosopher Charles Peirce said that insights come to us “like a flash”—in an epiphany—making them difficult to rationalize or defend. Leaders need to create a culture that allows people to take chances and move forward without a complete, logical understanding of a problem. Our partners at the entertainment company were empowered to hire a design consultancy, and the organization recognized that the undertaking was no sure thing. Resetting expectations.As corporate leaders become aware of the power of design, many view design thinking as a solution to all their woes. Designers, enjoying their new level of strategic influence, often reinforce that impression. When I worked with the entertainment company, I was part of that problem, primarily because my livelihood depended on selling design consulting. But design doesn’t solve all problems. It helps people and organizations cut through complexity. It’s great for innovation. It works extremely well for imagining the future. But it’s not the right set of tools for optimizing, streamlining, or otherwise operating a stable business. Additionally, even if expectations are set appropriately, they must be aligned around a realistic timeline—culture changes slowly in large organizations. An organizational focus on design offers unique opportunities for humanizing technology and for developing emotionally resonant products and services. Adopting this perspective isn’t easy. But doing so helps create a workplace where people want to be, one that responds quickly to changing business dynamics and empowers individual contributors. And because design is empathetic, it implicitly drives a more thoughtful, human approach to business. 10 Must-Read UX BooksShare on Facebook Share on TwitterThere are a lot of great books on UX and Usability these days. So many, in fact, that it’s hard to narrow it down to the very best ones! Here are 10 that every UX designer will be able to glean some useful information from.
1. Don’t Make Me ThinkThis book has a great way of approaching human-centered design thinking and Steve Krug is one of the foremost experts in the field. 2. Rocket Surgery Made EasyAlso by Steve Krug, this book is an essential one to read for designers doing usability testing. It is one of the best resources for learning how to plan and conduct user tests on your product. 3. Usable Usability: Simple Steps for Making Stuff BetterThis is the perfect intro and in-depth examination of what usability is. It discusses why usability is important and provides an overview of different usability concepts. It’s an invaluable tool for anyone performing usability testing. 4. Smashing UX Design: Foundations for Designing Online User ExperiencesThis book is the UX Bible. It discusses the basics of user-centered design and the philosophies it is based upon, and it walks you through the how-tos of everything from user research to wireframing, providing case studies for each. 5. Quantifying the User Experience: Practical Statistics for User ResearchThis book is a great tool to aid in understanding the role of statistics in UX. It breaks the information down in an easy-to-understand manner and helps to elucidate the usefulness of statistics in UX. 6. Service Design: From Insight to ImplementationThis presents a very hands on approach to UX. Designing services that work for people is exactly what UX aims to do and this book offers excellent case studies, insights, and methods to help do exactly that. 7. The User Experience Team of One: A Research and Design Survival GuideThis book describes a number of unique approaches to UX that don’t take a lot of time and resources, yet still have a big impact. Readers can benefit from the tools and insights it offers. 8. Lean UX: Applying Lean Principles to Improve User ExperienceThis book discusses important UX principles and techniques, how to experiment with design ideas, and how to continually adjust your designs based on research and testing. It has received many awards and is a valuable resource for UX designers who want to keep getting leaner. 9. Mobile UsabilityOne of the few books devoted to mobile UX, this book discusses some of the difficulties involved in designing for mobile. It also offers a number of solutions for improving mobile design techniques. 10. 100 Things Every Designer Needs to Know About PeopleDesigners might be great at designing beautiful work, but if they don’t understand people, their work won’t have the impact they want. This book helps users learn about consumer behavior and needs, and how to tap into those elements through design. The starting point: Don't Make Me Think: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability A mandatory reading for anyone who works in a digital company, covering basic principles that helps you to take the day-to-day design decision. Pervasive Information Architecture: Designing Cross-Channel User Experiences The user experience is not limited to the screen, neither is our job. Designing any interaction requires a deep understading of the user behavior online and offline and how to explore the opportunities in all enviroments. Designing for Interaction: Creating Innovative Applications and Devices This book offers a fresh look in the interaction design field, with the new challenges of designing the world around us. The Elements of User Experience: User-Centered Design for the Web Jesse James Garret explores the basic elements of user experience design for the web in this classic reading. Smashing UX Design: Foundations for Designing Online User Experiences The popular website Smashing Magazine has compiled guides and resources for UX designers in a pratical and easy-to-read book. Information Architecture for the World Wide Web: Designing Large-Scale Web Sites The fundamental concepts of information architecture and how to apply it for complex web systems. The bear on the cover has inspired our site design. Usability & Interaction Design Books: Designing Interactions What makes this book unique is that it puts together 40 brilliant minds in interviews about interaction design. About Face 3: The Essentials of Interaction Design As the subtitle says, this book has the essentials of interaction design, being a mandatory reading for everyone who works in the field. Microinteractions: Designing with Details Dan Saffer explains and illustrates the rules and structure of micro-interactions in this easy-to-read book. Designing Interfaces: Patterns for Effective Interaction Design A great reading for those who are looking for a reference book to refresh the basic interaction design concepts and principles. Seductive Interaction Design: Creating Playful, Fun, and Effective User Experiences Understanding the stages of seduction is a key resource to leverage the user experience by exploring the user motivation in interacting with your interface. Search Patterns: Design for Discovery Search is a great interaction when it's well done, but the thing is: that is not easy at all. This book explains in depth the search experience and design approaches to it, so you can go beyond a cop out solution. Books on Methods & Processes: The UX Book: Process and Guidelines for Ensuring a Quality User Experience A time-tested, process-and-guidelines approach that provides you with actionable methods and techniques while retaining a firm grounding in human-computer interaction concepts and theory. Gamestorming: A Playbook for Innovators, Rule-breakers, and Changemakers Great things don't happen in a vacuum, but in a healthy environment for creative thinking and innovation. This book includes more than 80 games to help you break down barriers and learn about new ways of collaborating with your team. The User Experience Team of One: A Research and Design Survival Guide Do more with less: a range of approaches that have big impact and take less time and fewer resources than the standard lineup of UX deliverables. Lean UX: Applying Lean Principles to Improve User Experience Lean UX lets you focus on the actual experience being designed, rather than deliverables. In the book you can learn how to rapidly experiment with design ideas, validate them with real users, and continually adjust your design based on what you learn. Designing for the Digital Age: How to Create Human-Centered Products and Services A hands-on guide to designing web sites, software, handhelds, and all other interactive products from start to finish – including creating personas, evolving the visual design, collaborating within and outwith the design team, and understanding potential users and customers. Sketching User Experiences: Getting the Design Right and the Right Design The book talks about an interesting process with up-front investment in sketching and ideation to build the notion of informed design: molding emerging technologies into a form that serves our society and reflects its values. User Research & Strategy Books: Quantifying the User Experience: Practical Statistics for User Research One of the biggest challenge for UXers is to use numbers to measure the user experience and set perfomance indicators for the business. This books is a great introduction of the topic of UX designers and product managers. Mental Models: Aligning Design Strategy with Human Behavior Using mental models allows designers to create a tangible and realistic design approach based on the users context, motivations and abilities. Interviewing Users: How to Uncover Compelling Insights Interviewing users can be tricky. This book is a great tool for newcomers and seasoned designers to refresh some techniques before planning a user interview. The User is Always Right: A Practical Guide to Creating and Using Personas for the Web Creating personas requires methodology and research. This book serves as an easy checklist of what you need to develop when using personas for your product. Measuring the User Experience: Collecting, Analyzing, and Presenting Usability Metrics A great reference book to define what the key metrics are for your needs - from site performance to desired user behavior. Handbook of Usability Testing: How to Plan, Design, and Conduct Effective Tests A step-by-step guide for user research and usability testing. A handful resource for those who needs to plan and conduct tests and surveys on the go. Mobile & Responsive Design Books: Mobile Usability The master of usability, Jakob Nielsen, brings his thoughts, strategies and interaction principles to the mobile universe. Designing Gestural Interfaces: Touchscreens and Interactive Devices This book serves as an introductory guide for gestural interfaces, showing all the possibilites of mobile and sensorial technology. Mobile First (A Book Apart #6) In the sixth book of the "A Book Apart" series, Luke W. sintethizes his blog posts, case studies and thoughts on the mobile firt approach. Responsive Web Design (A Book Apart #4) Think beyond the desktop and craft beautiful designs that anticipate and respond to your users’ needs, from all the increasing array of devices and browsers they are accessing your website from. Mobile Interaction Design The authors brings the key concepts of usability to the mobile interaction context. With exercises and case studies, this books is a great tool for students and new designers. Designing the Mobile User Experience A broader vision about mobile design and development makes this book a good read even with the fast pace of new mobile technologies. UX-Related Business Books: Business Model Generation The book features a template that helps explain the most common Business Model patterns, based on concepts from leading business thinkers, and helps you reinterpret them for your own context. Building Design Strategy Top-name contributors share their experience and insights on how design can be used to solve business problems. Topics explore the full range of issues today, including adapting to challenges, developing tangible strategies and using design to create fiercely loyal customers. This is Service Design Thinking Besides becoming a buzzword these days, "Service Design" reflects an inevitable reality: the boundaries between products and services are blurring and it is time for a different way of thinking. The book introduces service design thinking in a manner accessible to both beginners and experienced design professionals. The Connected Company To keep pace with today’s connected customers, your company must deeply engage with workers, partners, and customers to change how work is done, how you measure success, and how performance is rewarded. Connected companies have the advantage, because they learn and move faster than their competitors. Designing Services with Innovative Methods Service design is a tool for designing a more sustainable society. Design practioners from several companies share their service design thinking and the benefits of the service design process for both companies and for the public sector. A lot of detailed case studies form different industries. Intertwingled Peter Morville reflects about the role of Information Architects in the current world and how the field has become more important than ever. Bringing cases and tales from his successful career as one of our "founding fathers", Morville shows how the complexity of our connected world requires us to think systems, categories, relationships and culture as a whole. Related Concepts: The Design of Everyday Things For anyone who designs anything to be used by humans. The book opens your eyes to the perversity of bad design and the desirability of good design, and raise your expectations about how things should be designed. In the Bubble: Designing in a Complex World In the Bubble is about a world based less on stuff and more on people. At the heart of In the Bubble is a belief, informed by a wealth of real-world examples, that ethics and responsibility can inform design decisions without impeding social and technical innovation. 100 Things Every Designer Needs to Know about People This book combines real science and research with practical examples to deliver a guide for you to design more intuitive and engaging work for print, websites, applications, and products that matches the way people think, work, and play. Emotional Design: Why We Love (or Hate) Everyday Things Emotional Design articulates the profound influence of the feelings that objects evoke, from our willingness to spend thousands of dollars on Gucci bags and Rolex watches, to the impact of emotion on the everyday objects of tomorrow. The Laws of Simplicity: Design, Technology, Business, Life "Simplicity is about subtracting the obvious, and adding the meaningful". MIT professor John Maeda offers ten laws for balancing simplicity and complexity in business, technology, and design--guidelines for needing less and actually getting more. Neuro Web Design: What Makes Them Click? Neuro Web Design applies the research on motivation, decision making, and neuroscience to the design of Web sites. You will learn the unconscious reasons for people's actions, how emotions affect decisions, and how to apply the principles of persuasion to design Web sites that encourage users to click. Want more books?Visit the full list on GoodReads > If you are not only into books, but also into meeting people who share that same passion, you should check this UX Book Clubs list (filtered by country and region). This list was created by Fabricio Teixeira and Caio Braga, and illustrated by Bruno Oyama. This is a personal list and has no intention to be exhaustive in any sense. The bear that appears on the drawings is a reference to the polar bear book - one of the most remarkable pieces in the recent Information Architecture literature. We hope you find it helpful. http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2013/01/effectively-planning-ux-design-projects/ Planning user experience (UX) projects is a balancing act of getting the right amount of user input within the constraints of your project. The trick is to work out the best use of your time. How can you get the most UX goodness for your client’s budget? This article explains how to choose the right mix of tools for the task at hand. Getting Started With UX Planning Link The planning phase is all about understanding what you have been asked to do and working out the best combination of activities that will give you the outcome you need, within the time, budgetary and resource constraints of the project. It is your job as a UX professional to deliver the best user experience within the time and budget available. The planning of projects may take place when you are writing a proposal to do work that is yet to start as well as at the beginning of a “live” project. When planning work for proposal purposes, you can be faced with issues such as lack of information around budgets as well as limited access to clients to ask questions. In many ways the planning of UX projects can become a design challenge in its own right. You have an outcome that you need to get to and it’s up to you which approach you take to get you there. You need to be confident that the tools and techniques you choose will be the right ones to get you the insight you need within the constraints of the project. The budget for the piece of work is always the key piece of information that can be really useful to help with planning, but often this is not always available. This information is useful if you charge by a daily rate, because it then determines the time you will have on a project, which in itself will determine the approach you take. The beauty of UX projects is that there is always something you can do to add value regardless of the budget. A low budget may result in a lighter touch, “guerrilla” approach, whereas a larger budget may allow you to do more extensive user research. If you can, always try to get an idea of budget as it will save both you and your client time by avoiding re-cutting proposals. Your client may not want to share their budget (as they may think you will spend it all for them), so have a few different options to present if they cannot share this information to suit different potential budgets. The key principle for all UX projects is that you must ensure that you involve users in the design process in some way. Challenge yourself to see how you can work within the constraints of the project to involve users as much as possible. User involvement will not only improve the output of the project but will also help to inform decision making which can often delay projects. UX projects typically consist of three main phases: a research phase, a design phase and a further research phase, designed to test and validate the designs.
Project constraints include factors such as budget, time available, delivery deadlines, resource availability, information availability, related projects, access to tools and legal documentation. Regardless of the constraints, you must be able to focus on the objectives of the project and how you can deliver the best user experience that meets those objectives. Often this is the true (and hidden) skill of a great UX professional. Once you have defined the approach you want to take, is much easier to talk to a client about flexing project constraints such as increasing the scope of the project or changing your original plan. All clients have to start with some sort of ballpark budget and approach, and if you can justify why you might need more time and budget, you will clearly be more likely to get it! Later in this chapter, you’ll see a matrix of UX tools and techniques that you can use on your UX projects. These are all fully explained within their corresponding chapters within this book. We also share some case studies of real projects. These examine the clients’ objectives and highlight the approach we took to the project. These are designed to provide you with a template approach, which you can compare and contrast with your own project challenges and proposed approach to tackle them. Selling User-Centered Design To Your Clients LinkDespite the huge growth in the awareness of the importance of user experience over the last 10 years, you may still have to sell the benefits of this approach to your clients and colleagues. Here are some of the many benefits that we have seen from adopting a user-centered design (UCD) approach:
This “departmental” mindset can be detrimental, as UX can become something that is dialed up or down, whereas in reality it should be a component of both the visual design and development work as opposed to being considered as a separate work stream or cost center. A different way of considering this question is to think of UX as a project philosophy as opposed to a set of tools, methods and deliverables. If your client has bought into the principles of UX, then in effect their project becomes a “UX” project so all of their time and budget is dedicated to it. When considering client budgets, you’ll get a feel, with experience, for what is the right amount of time to apportion to the different phases of the project. It isn’t as simple as offering a rule of thumb such as “dedicate 20% of project budgets to UX,” because each project will have its own unique priorities, challenges and objectives that will require different levels of UX input. The matrices shown below will give you an idea of which different tools and techniques you can use to suit different types of projects with differing budgets. In reality, there is always some form of user research you can do even on the smallest budget projects. Choosing UX Tools & Techniques LinkThis table shows all of the tools and techniques that we describe in the book. Use it as a cheat sheet to help you decide which activities best suit your project: th { font-family: “Proxima Nova Bold”, Verdana, sans-serif; } UX ActivityGood forBad for Stakeholder Interviews: Talk to key individuals within your client’s organization to understand business requirements.Clients with lots of people who have something to say about their new project. When you need information about the goals for your project.Making design decisions. Projects that are very short on time. Requirements Workshops: Gather key stakeholders together to discuss the brief and conduct exercises to give you a deeper understanding of the project.Complex design challenges. Complex clients. Disparate teams.Projects with very tight deadlines and small budgets. Guerilla Usability Testing: Very informal user involvement when little or no budget exists for usability testing.Involving users when budgets prevent larger scale user research. Gaining a quick user opinion to help to progress designs.Recruiting participants to a specific brief. Difficult for clients to observe. Lab Usability Testing: Involving end users in the design process to understand their needs, find out how they do things and see if they can use your products in a controlled environment.Involving clients in user research as they can observe tests in real time. The controlled environment allows you to test what you want with the right people.Projects with very tight deadlines and small budgets. An artificial environment may influence user behavior on some projects. Remote Usability Testing: Conducting user research in a different location than where your user is situated.When you need to test geographically dispersed groups of people. When people can’t travel to a lab. When time is tight, as you can run tests in parallel.Involving clients is difficult. You can lose a sense of empathy with people when you’re not meeting them face to face. Competitor Benchmarking: Evaluating competitor products to determine their strengths and weaknesses and opportunities to innovate with your own product.Projects where lots of competitors exist. Clients who work in unfamiliar sectors: a great way to immerse yourself in a new world.Some projects may not allow the time to do this activity. In sectors you are familiar with, this becomes less important. Contextual Research: Conducting research in the environment that users are naturally within.Gaining the most representative insight into how people actually behave in their own environment and the methods they use to overcome the problems they face.Projects with very tight deadlines and small budgets. Analytics: Evaluating quantitative data to understand what people are doing when using a product or service.Identifying interesting user behavior to focus research activities to find out why.Projects with very tight deadlines and small budgets. Clients who have no analytics data! Analytics do not uncover the reasons behind user actions. Surveys: Collecting information from a dispersed set of people by asking them to respond to a predetermined set of questions.Collecting information from dispersed sets of people in a relatively short period of time. Collecting qualitative and quantitative information.Can present issues with data accuracy. Analysis of qualitative data is notoriously time consuming. Expert Reviews: Evaluate an existing product based on a set of usability guidelines, the target users and their tasks.Gathering a quick understanding of a product’s key usability issues.Acquiring a deep understanding of real user issues. Ideation Workshops: A collaborative design method to help you and your client decide on design solutions.Generating a shared vision for the UX design work. Getting early input from different disciplines such as visual designers and developers.Clients who don’t want to be involved in the design work — they want you to go away and do the “magic.” Task Models: Descriptions of the activities users perform in order to reach their goals.Ensuring your product matches user expectations. Providing insight into buying processes and thus helping you design transactional websites that support user needs.Projects with very tight deadlines and small budgets. Customer Experience Maps: A visualization of a process that users follow before, during and after using a product or service.Visualizing the entire customer journey and highlighting the specific areas where a product or service meets and fails to meet user needs.Projects with very tight deadlines and small budgets that don’t allow you to gather the research you’ll need for this approach. Personas: Short, vivid descriptions of fictional characters who represent a product’s users.When production teams need an easy way to understand user needs and core tasks. As a collaborative exercise to get production teams to think about their users.When you can do no research with real users to generate personas from. When the personas are generated externally with no opportunity to integrate them with the teams who will go on to use them User Journeys: Identify how users flow through your product. Design the structure of your product to ensure users can flow through it efficiently.When it’s important to keep steps to complete a task to a minimum. To ensure key tasks are easy to accomplish.Single step tasks. Information Architecture: The process of organizing information to make its retrieval as simple as possible.An essential component of any project, as it provides an information structure and means of navigating that has been designed to reflect the specific user and business needs of a product or service.Some small projects such as designing emails and campaign landing pages will require significantly less IA work than large- scale redesign projects for information-rich and complex products and services. Sketching: Hand-drawn design ideas.Quickly generate and gather feedback on lots of design ideas. Decide which ideas to pursue in higher fidelity.When clients expect higher fidelity work from you as a designer. When clients can’t see beyond the unfinished nature of a sketch. Wireframes: Static diagrams that represent the framework of a product, exploring content, navigation and interactions.Explore design and interaction ideas before they move into graphic design and development. Agree on the direction with the clients. Test ideas with users. Refine ideas based on feedback and test results.Highly interactive products that need to be used in order to be understood. Prototypes: Mocking up ideas quickly in an interactive form that brings them to life to elicit feedbackProducing something so that members of a project can have a shared understanding and approval of the direction it is taking. Creating a candidate design for user testing.Projects with very tight deadlines and small budgets. Complicated prototypes can be time consuming to amend.Planning UX: Case Studies LinkThe tools and techniques you select are determined by the design challenge you have been given, as well as the time and budget available. Clearly, a different approach is required for designing a campaign microsite from scratch, compared with making large-scale usability improvements to an existing shopping website. DOING UX ON A SHOE-STRING BUDGET LINKWhen a client or organization is unfamiliar with usability and user-centered design, it can often be difficult to get the budget you want to involve users regularly during the design process. The joy of UX is that there are so many tools and techniques that you can use to suit the specific constraints of your project so you can still involve users in some way. Recently we were asked to provide some UX consultancy on a new website. Our client wanted an expert opinion on how usable it was and how it could be improved. Our client had spent a large amount of their budget on designing and building the website, and had then been told by their boss that they should do some user testing before it went live. The budget was so tight that we had a day in total to do the work. We decided that the best approach was to run an internal workshop and invite a bunch of our consultants along to critique the website as we looked at each of the designs. This identified loads of issues in a short period of time. We also managed some guerrilla user testing. A few of us went to local cafes and asked members of the public to show us how they would use the website to complete some simple tasks. We offered to buy them coffee and cakes in return. Within a few hours we had some great user insights to add to our expert review. All of the issues were documented as a simple bulleted list in an email, which we followed up with a quick call to discuss the biggest problems that we had identified. This demonstrates how you can always do something, no matter how restrictive the project constraints. Any user testing will result in improvements to the product or service that you are designing. SHOE-STRING BUDGET PROJECT OUTLINE LINKConstraints : Tiny budget! UX ActivityTiming Internal workshop0.25 days Guerilla testing0.5 days Summarize findings and feedback to client0.25 days A USER-CENTERD REDESIGN PROJECT LINKWe are lucky in that many clients come to us and ask specifically for user-centered design projects that include specific UX activities such as user research or that deliver specific outputs such as customer journey maps or persona profiles. We were asked by a client to design an online quoting tool. Our client was fully versed in the benefits of involving users throughout the process and requested that we run regular user testing and UX seminars within the business to educate her colleagues. The project began with a large user research exercise that involved benchmarking competitor services. This gave us a unique insight into what the competition were doing, how well they were doing it and also what the specific user requirements were from such a tool. In parallel to the user research, we conducted a wide range of stakeholder interviews as well as a series of workshops with some internal business analysts who had been collecting detailed functional requirements. We presented our findings from the user research exercise to the business. The key part of this presentation involved discussion around some ideas we had had for some features we thought they should offer which would give them a significant competitive advantage. This identifies how user research can be far more than just involving users. Often you will see opportunities for features, content and functionality that will meet some quite unexpected user needs. Once met, these can often result in significant increases in product performance as well as huge financial returns for the service provider. Following the research phase, we developed some early prototypes of the different elements of the quoting process. This involved breaking the required set of data into logical chunks and working out how a user would move between them. Once worked up into rough wireframes, we shared this with the project team, amended it following their feedback and then tested it with users to improve it further before entering the wireframe production phase of the project. Once a set of complete wireframes was produced, these were tested again to further refine them. During the process we met with designers and developers to share our vision for how we should work to ensure that when it was built it retained the features that we deliberately added to meet specific user needs. Later in the project we were involved as a point of sign-off for the final designs that were produced by a third-party agency. Users were also involved at this stage, as we wanted to ensure that the execution of the quoting form was suitable for the target audience. This was also critical once some front-end elements were available to test, as it was important that interactive elements such as error-handling worked as well as possible. Finally, we were asked to conduct a review of the live website six months after launch. This was to evaluate how well the form was working and also to evaluate how users were responding to the new product features that we had helped to identify. USER-CENTERED REDESIGN PROJECT OUTLINE LINKConstraints: Huge complexity, high-profile project but good budget and excellent client buy-in for a UX approach. UX ActivityTiming Kick-off meeting1 day Desk research and document review2 days User research10 days Stakeholder interviews3 days Presentation of findings to board1 day Stakeholder interviews3 days Prototype development10 days Validation testing5 days Wireframes, stakeholder interviews and amends10 days Validation testing5 days Wireframe amends2 days Handover to visual design and development0.5 days Sign-off workshops2 days Post live usability review10 days |
Recommend Blogs• UX Movement Archives
August 2016
Categories |