What is the best way to spend a very limited budget on UX design?

Question

We might be starting development of a web product in a couple of weeks. This being a startup, we have a limited budget. It's not zero though, we might spend a couple of grand on UX design.

I would really appreciate your advice on how to best spend that money? What can we do ourselves? We are prepared to learn and work hard, but I am not sure where to start and how to best invest our time and money.

Answer 1

Unless you predict that your UX budget will grow in the near future, I would hold it off until you have a prototype that you can test, and then running usability tests and an expert review, if you can squeeze that in. That would give you the most bang for your buck.

In terms of things you can do yourselves to prepare - take a basic workshop and read books.

Answer 2

I'd also consider doing some market research and talking to some users before you start designing anything.

Answer 3

I'd send a good bit of the budget on testing. Try reading Benefits of Extremely Low-Budget User Testing from Jacob Nielsen. He has more details in his linked article: Why You Only Need to Test with 5 Users.

Answer 4

The first step you should take i actually free: Attitude...

Rule no. 1: Know the user
Work yourself into a mindset where you know the user and can imagine how the users think.

Rule no. 2: Focus on the task
A lot of people think that the graphics and look'n'feel is the primary focus when working towards UX. They're wrong. The look is indeed important (don't get me wrong), but it is the work flow and the fact that that the user can get their job done that is important. You should always ask yourself "what is the propose of this product?" and the one liner answer you get should always be with you when you design you product.

Answer 5

You can do a lot on a limited budget. The main change I think is cultural, you have to get everyone considering the user. You can help embed this with personas, user flows etc.

What you could realistically spend the budget on is making sure you prototype and user test (and of course actually having budget to implement changes).

Answer 6

I'd spend at least some of your time, if not the budget on things other than testing. The best way to avoid having to spend a lot on testing is to make it right the first time, which means knowing the best practices (by means of reading the literature), looking for possible issues with a design beforehand, and then iterating that until it's as nice to use as you can get it.

Answer 7

You're creating a new product to simplify peoples' life. So first of all you need to learn who your typical user is. Their average skill level, typical workflow and so on. Your decisions should revolve around your target users.

Having a small budget is actually a good thing. That way you will have to do most of the user experience work. Steve Krug's books are a good start.

Do not let topics like information architecture, personas, wire-framing etc. get in the way. Use whatever feels most natural. Research your intended users, research your competitors and common complaints on their forums. Use pen and paper to sketch block diagrams of your user interface, and create numbered sequences of them to represent workflows. Use rough sketching. The point is to visualise and discuss ideas.

Once you have all these in place start coding and fleshing out the real product. Then start using it internally. When you feel quite confident target a beta of the product to get real feedback from users. User feedback is invaluable.

Finally, as you are approaching the end of your beta period, I would suggest using your budget on a service like usertesting.com to get people fitting your target to try out the product and get more valuable feedback.

Answer 8

Echoing sagacious advice from above, I would always start from user research as this drives everything that follows; get it wrong and everything else falls to bits. I have worked on some big projects where not enough research was conducted in the first place and this came back to haunt the application later on.....

Depending on the complexity of the product I dare say you could get away with 10-20 1 hour interviews with potential users of your product. If you have more persona types then you may want to add more users.

Next step would be to build cheap prototypes: paper or simple html click throughs, and then test them test with a few users.

After this you keep refining the prototypes until you feel confident that you want to begin the more expensive 'built' version.

summary

do your research!

build basic version

test

refine

test

refine if needed

build fancy pants version

test

refine

get rich

Answer 9

You might spend a couple grand on usability? Usability is as essential as developers, servers, management, or accounting. The interface is the product. Usability engineering is about making something cognitively simple, which no one who is familiar with the product will know how to accomplish by just guessing.

Start with paper prototypes and random people (get out of the office), then iterate as much as humanly possible. There are mountains of research going back decades that show how effective paper prototyping is -you will get through 5x the number of iterations than you normally would.

If done correctly, you will very likely have to change fundamental programming decisions. It's better to learn what those changes are now instead of having to rebuild it from scratch.

Also read The Humane Interface by Raskin, it gives a good intro to the relevant cognitive psychology.