Posts

When we’re creating an information architecture, we don’t just use it to build our navigation menus. There are so many other parts of the interface that can benefit from an informed approach to how users perceive the content space as well.

Spend 20 minutes learning how scenarios and storyboards fit in to the user centered design process. Scenarios and storyboarding provide a reality check for your designs, allowing you to see how the interaction will play out in a real environment.

Ideation is the process of generating a lot of different ideas in a short amount of time. And in UX design, a broad set of ideas is more likely to lead to a more creative, more satisfactory solution for your users.

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.

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, […]

We often overlook one of the biggest benefits to following user centered design techniques. Good user centered design is great at turning empathy-based concepts like users’ thoughts, feelings, frustrations, and desires into something systematic that development team members can use to build products.

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.

My book, Evil by Design is now on sale! Initial reviews are very positive, with people like Alan Cooper (“The Inmates are Running the Asylum“) and Don Norman (“The Design of Everyday Things“) both saying how much they like it. You can find out more at evilbydesign.info. You can download a sample chapter FREE (2.5Mb PDF) – all I ask in return […]

LinkedIn Learning have released the UX Foundations: Usability Testing course I recorded with them earlier in the year. The course takes you through all the aspects of planning, running, and reporting on a typical usability test. In the course, I talk about how to recruit participants, design suitable tasks, moderate and observe a session, and […]

My new course “User Experience for Web Design” is now live. I’m really happy with the high production quality that LinkedIn Learning brings to their classes, and I’m excited that they are committed to the user experience training space.

Rapid Iterative Testing and Evaluation – the RITE method – is a way to run lab-based studies that identify and fix as many issues as possible and then verify the effectiveness of those fixes in the shortest possible time. Testing and fixing happens in near real-time, so the whole team feels more involved in the […]

Sometimes you can’t do all the usability work yourself. Either there’s too much work, it’s highly boring work, it’s highly specialist work, or the whole project is being outsourced. Here are some tips for choosing and working with vendors.

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.

Clients often believe that you have to have a polished interface to show to users before you can get good feedback. Nothing is further from the truth. The most valuable feedback happens before you’ve even touched a computer.

People on development teams tend to be great systemizers, but less well developed as empathizers. User research – if you present it the right way – can help systemizing individuals to empathize with the people for whom they are building products.

Tablet User Experience is not the same as mobile phone user experience – the devices are used in different situations and in different ways. This presentation provides a framework for thinking about common tablet task types and suggestions for how to build useful and usable tablet apps. In the talk, I cover searching, tracking, transacting […]

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.

On the internet, nobody knows you’re a dog. Or in this case, that all you want is a dog. A cautionary tale about believing what people tell you in online surveys…

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. 

Even with a good content management system it can be hard to re-arrange stuff after you’ve gone live. Take the time to test out your proposed navigation with a reverse card sort to quickly iterate to a working model.

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.

There are times when “ecological validity” is important, and there are other times when you just want to know whether users can make their way through your interface. Save money by choosing the right location to run each type of study.

Mobile usability is hard to perform well – dragging people into the lab and wiring them up with cameras detracts from the experience. This slide deck has some suggestions for how to quickly and cheaply get product feedback for mobile device apps.

Incremental research aggregates data from frequent small, fast studies to check you’re on track. Running large numbers of participants during any one study is a waste of time and money.

User research is a lean-forward activity: you have to remain actively engaged. It’s very different from watching TV: a lean-back, passive activity. 

UX books have to serve many purposes. Here are three lists aimed at making people enthusiastic, giving them practical how-to advice, and teaching them the research skills they will need.

Online testing can give you fast feedback for very little financial outlay. The results might be less trustworthy than face-to-face sessions, but the technique fits well as a complementary tool. 

Cost-effective, quick research techniques don’t always inspire confidence in your data. Perform many small incremental studies to build reliability over time. 

Don’t be shy – run studies of your competitors’ products to learn how well their software supports users’ tasks.

You kicked off the project with a Design Thinking session. Now that you’ve started development, run fast and cheap tests to stay user-focused.

Your team decides they need to “run a study.” They don’t know what that means, and they are relying on you to set it up. That’s a good problem to have. Use this cheat sheet to help you out.

Stepping through your UI and asking two deceptively simple questions at each stage can give you great insights into the problems your users will face.

Check your product is following simple rules of interface design. It’s fast and finds potential UI issues before your users do. 

Spend just one week to get the information you need to build your product right first time. Use these techniques to plan your sprints or even to work out what product to bring to market.

Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain. He’s working frantically to find the next sketch to show to the study participant. He might even be drawing it as we wait.  

The cheapest, fastest way to mock up your interfaces is with pen and paper. The creation process involves the whole team, and the unfinished feel means you’re less attached to any one idea.

It’s hard to create a good survey. Even if you can write non-biased questions, it is the ones that you don’t think of that will get you into trouble. Make survey results actionable by focusing on behavior, not speculation.

Design validation is not a phase, it’s a continuous part of the process. Testing your designs tests your assumptions and lets you make quick course corrections.

It’s hard to uncover behavioral qualities during a focus group session, so the technique suffers from “what I say isn’t what I do” syndrome. 

“The user” is a nebulous term. Everyone on the team has a different picture in their head when they say those words. Thumbnail personas use site visit data to focus the whole team on the same key individuals.

“Turn that frown upside-down” – Take the pain points that you discovered in your user research and re-write them as positive experiences for your customers. These scenarios provide you with new product ideas.

Get everyone on the team involved in interface design and be prepared to be surprised with the creativity you unleash. You are guaranteed to uncover better design ideas than if you did it all yourself.  

Quickly turn a pile of site visit observations into a visual story about users’ tasks and pain points. Use experience maps – affinity diagrams on steroids.  

Users will make lots of feature requests during research sessions. Listen, Probe and Validate to make sure you solve the underlying issue.

The way to create good study questions is to work out what you want to be able to say before you even think about the methods you’ll use to find the answer.

Recruiting sucks. If you can afford it, hire a recruiting company. If not, here are some tips to make it hurt less. Big lesson: make sure participant fidelity is proportionate to prototype fidelity.

To improve how people use your product, watch the tasks they perform. To get people to love your product, find and fix the small annoyances.