The field of UX and Design has come a long way since I started. We went from designing responsive websites to The UX of creating conversational bots. There has been so much research done on most of the aspects that are important for designers to craft wonderful experiences. It is so easy to find out how to learn basic design principles, understand how to approach a UX project, empathize with users and learn about accessibility, make the burden of filling out form go away by designing user friendly web forms or see what common misconceptions about our field are wrong. The abundance of research has lowered the bar for entry but also has raised the bar for professionals on what is expected of us. So, in this post I wanted to share some of the tools and processes I like to use when working on projects.
Each project is unique and for the most part, you don’t have enough time to do huge research studies that could answer all of the questions you might want to ask. But if you know how much time you have, you can pick research methods that fit into the schedule with little to no cost. As they say, any research is better than no research at all.
I like to split the design process into 6 phases but each method can be used in almost any phase. And the first phase is..
Discovery
This is where you are in the very beginning of a project and are trying to understand the challenges ahead. Uncovering the unknowns and figuring the outcomes.
Propose a hypothesis. I usually start by compiling a list of assumptions about user needs, user behaviour and functionality. The anatomy of a hypothesis is as follows: We believe [this business outcome] will be achieved if [these users] successfully achieve [this user outcome] with [this feature]. Starting from this point gives you a more focused view on the challenges ahead.
Define user outcomes. The goal is to understand both what the user is doing with your products and why they are doing it.
“How does the user want to feel during and after this process?” Example: I want to feel like I got the phone I need at a good price and that I’m keeping up technologically with my peers (i.e., I want to feel cool).
“How does our product or service get the user closer to a life goal or dream?” Example: I want to feel tech-savvy and respected for it.”
Create Proto Personas. It’s useful to take a little bit of time to create 2 to 4 different proto personas based on your assumptions. Similar to hypothesis, these need to be validated through research and help the team focus. It’s guaranteed that actual personas will be very different and that is the wonderful process of learning who your users really are. The benefits are:
Helps the team to get on the same page.
Is the basis of hypothesis to then test with users
A proto-persona exercise puts the focus on external users, pushing the team further away from their personal preferences for the product.
Keep re-iterating on proto-personas once new information is acquired
Research
Once you have an initial understand of what questions need answering, it’s time to validate them. To accomplish this, there is a wide variety of methods you can use but I will focus on the ones that I use most often.
Usability testing will help you get an initial idea of what might be the points of failure in your current product. Following usability heuristics will help you streamline the process. When doing so, always keep in mind the hypothesis on which you are basing your research for a more focused approach.
Competitive research. If you’re creating functionality that already exists in the world, it can be valuable to see how your competitors have accomplished this or even look into industries outside your field to find even different ways of accomplishing a similar task.
Survey’s are one of the easier ways to get feedback from existing users to the questions you have. Note that this is a useful tool to understand your current situation but might fail for everything new because users often don’t know what they want.
User interview’s are wonderful as you meet actual people that use your product and you can ask them questions about their expectations, they can walk you through their thought process, you can ask what is bothering them in the existing version of the product and in general dive in deeper.
Concept sketching is used to create a mockup of a user outcome that then can be tested with real users or stakeholders. Approaching research in a visual way lowers the barrier of understanding. A picture is worth a thousand words, you know?
Red routes are the moments when people fail using your product. It’s a moment of confusion where something isn’t clear. You can gather this information from analytics to understand the initial points of frustration but only after speaking with real people, you will learn why they fail at this certain point. Analytics can answer you what is failing but without understanding the why, you lack the proper insight.
Card sorting is a wonderful tool for understanding how your users make associations with different words. This tool is mainly used for understanding information architecture problems from the perspective of the user. But can be useful in other instances as well.
Identifying human needs. Each design is a proposed business solution—a hypothesis. Your goal is to validate the proposed solution as efficiently as possible by using customer feedback. The smallest thing you can build to test each hypothesis is your MVP.
User journey’s will help your team to visualize the different flows that users can take to achieve their goals. If possible, a proposed user flow should be tested with real users because that will help you to identify any obstacles or impediments that stop users from reaching their (and often your) goals.
Low-fidelity wireframes can be used to test user journey’s, specific functionality or anything else you deem worthy for quick testing. This will show you early on if a chosen design direction works or needs another iteration.
Guerrilla testing is one of my favourite quick and cheap ways of validating your assumptions. Take your low-fidelity wireframes, go to a public space where people are just minding their own business and ask them to participate in a product test. It’s fun for people, useful for you and costs nothing but the insights you gain can be very valuable.
Analysis
After the research phase, it’s time to gather all the information and make sense of it. This will be the backbone of most future decisions and will help to focus the team what is important to users.
Design studio is a method where team members and stakeholders come together to brainstorm future design directions. Here you can present your findings and crowdsource possible solutions. This not only gives you more paths forward but also raises the Product IQ of the whole team, bringing everyone up to speed on to a more equal understanding of what really is going on. You never know which member of the team will have the breakthrough idea.
Personas. By this time you might have realized that your proto personas and assumptions about your users might have been a bit off. That’s great because based on your research, you can now craft more meaningful Personas that reflect your users more realistically.
User Stories can now be crafter. Based on your research, you now understand the real user needs and can move forward to think about what the user wants to achieve.
Ideal user journey. You remember how you crafted a user journey? Well now you can create the ideal user journey which has all the obstacles and impediments (hopefully) removed. This will be the basis for your new user flow.
Information architecture is sometimes an overlooked part of a project but becomes increasingly important for more complex projects. With the help of card sorting you understand the associations your users use with certain words which can then be used to develop a site structure that will make sense to your users.
Prioritization is an important aspect of design. By this time, you might have a metric ton of features, flows and ideas to implement but you can’t do everything at once. This is where prioritizing user outcomes and user stories becomes important. Ideally, you would want to start with the most complex, high value outcome and work your way down to least important, low value outcome.
Design
Now that a lot of the leg work is covered, you can sit down, take in all of your findings, insights and requirements and start crafting the visual experience.
High-fidelity wireframes add a lot more details with which people can interact with and get a fuller sense of the picture without having the individual bias of liking one colour over another. Yes, all (or most) of the functionality, all in 50 shades of grey.
Prototyping is basically linking all your high-fidelity wireframes or design mockups together to give a sense of a working product. This adds realism to your ideas and helps stakeholders as well as users to better understand what is going on.
User testing is the bread and butter of the cumulative work you’ve done so far. This is the moment where you will understand if the design direction, functionality and user flow makes sense to the end user. What is great about this method is that you can also talk with the user and re-validate any of the previous questions you had or pose new ones.
A/B testing is a wonderful and usually a low cost method for testing out different design solutions. This is extremely useful in cases where you get conflicting information from user research or just want to see which design works better.
User Interface Design. We finally got here! After all this time of asking questions, validating them, iterating, exploring different concepts, we have finally arrived to the point of adding colours, branding, copy and everything else to our work.
Implementation
Oh, we are not done yet. After creating the final designs, there are a lot of things that you could do before they become an actual product.
Delivering design assets has become so simple. Using InVision or Zeplin this can be done automatically so that developers always have the latest assets to work with.
Adding analytics seems like a no-brainer but often doesn’t get enough attention as deserves. You should focus on metrics, flows and goals. This will help you get quick insights on desired user outcomes. By setting goals in analytics you can measure how successful people are going through the flow you have set up for them.
Implementation validation is a thing that mostly is given to developers nowadays but should be done also by designers to see if the final live (or staging) version is the same as the researched, crowdsourced and agreed upon by stakeholders design.
Evaluate
Once all research, validation, iteration and design has been done, there is one last thing to do - evaluate your results by looking at analytics and doing more research. Yes, it never stops!
Analytics that you have set up in the previous phase will now be your insight into basic user behaviour and if the goals and actions you have set for your users are yielding the desired outcome.
Research in this phase is very useful. Doing interviews with users who are currently using your product, is a valuable way to keep improving through hypothesis driven iteration. Every time something is finished, there are more questions to be asked and more things to tweak, improve and validate.
UX Debt is an often overlooked issue. UX Debt is everything that was out of scope before. You can now re-visit everything with a fresh new look and knowledge to see if some of the things that did not meet the cut, are worth exploring this time around.
“Encourage the team to create a “parking lot” for good ideas that don’t make the cut. This will make it easier to let go of ideas.” — From Lean UX
Rinse & Repeat. No matter how many times you go through this process, each time you will be surprised by insights you get from users and will be able to uncover even better ways of doing things you have already done.
Final Thoughts
Realistically, you won’t be able to fit all research methods within a project and often times it’s not necessary. But by being aware of the tools available to you and knowing when to use them, you can sprinkle a little bit of research even when you don’t have a time for it. As mentioned above, one of my favourite methods is Guerrilla Testing because you create a quick and dirty solution to a question and have instant feedback from random people (who might be your target demographic) and you get out there in the world which is great for us office dwellers!
I hope this gives you an insight on what is in my toolbox and inspires you to sprinkle some research into your own projects as well.