To make sure everyone on the project has the same vision of who you’re building for, create a single picture of “the user.” Assumption personas are fast to create and easy to verify later.
Category: methods
How do you turn data from site visits and other user observations into something coherent you can use to guide product development? Create Experience Maps and extract pain points and user goals!
I’m sharing the early-stage user centered design techniques I use with clients in a series of courses on LinkedIn Learning. Each of the quick courses covers a different technique. Taken together, they should give you a solid set of tools for running a design thinking exercise or “iteration zero”. This isn’t Big Design Up Front, […]
My latest LinkedIn Learning online training course “UX Foundations: Information Architecture” is now available. It covers the steps you should follow to create a great information architecture for your site or application, including card sorting and reverse sorting.
Field studies are great for seeing real user behavior and pain points. It’s also important to get out and test your concepts “in the wild” before you get too invested in code. That’s what intercept studies are for.
The video and slides from the updated version of my Fast, Easy Usability Tricks talk are now available online. This version includes a case study to help put the work in context.
If you’re a visual thinker, you’ll enjoy this one-page map that lays out all the important steps in early investigative user experience work, based on my talk at GOTO Copenhagen.
The video from my 2012 GOTO conference presentation is available online. Fast, easy usability tricks for big product improvements
It’s hard to ask questions that don’t suck when you’re running a study, so the best advice is “don’t do it.” But you are going to anyway, so make sure your questions are grounded in what the user has done, not what you want them to do.
Users are happiest when your site’s structure – its information architecture – matches the way they think about the problem space. Get insight into their thoughts using a card sorting task. You’ll be surprised how different their perspective is from yours.