17
I assume you're referencing this diagram of Garrett's.
If you read Garrett's book about that diagram, you'll find that he has already aligned that diagram with another showing the stage at which strategy occurs:
...so strategy is the first step, occurring when you're determining user needs and laying out objectives.
16
I've only known a few folk who've worked at Apple. These are a few things that seem relevant from what they have said:
They say "no" a lot. New projects, and current projects, get killed. Even if they're fairly far along in development. They don't seem to fall into the sunk cost fallacy.
Design input starts early, and carries on throughout the entire ...
15
In terms of navigation and hierarchy, Open Card Sorting should do the job.
Open Card Sorting: Participants are given cards showing site content with no pre-established groupings. They are asked to sort cards into groups that they feel are appropriate and then describe each group. Open card sorting is useful as input to information structures in new or ...
14
Although I am a staunch supporter of agile and lean methodologies in UX, it's important to remember that they are just methodologies. UX is not about how you create a great user experience, rather it is about what the user experience is.
So there are many different UX methodologies that can achieve good results. Often one methodology is more suited to a ...
11
I agree with Steve Psomas in The Five Competencies of User Experience Design. Visual design is one of the competencies. Still, you shouldn't be perfect in all of those.
10
Similar to: What are good questions to ask when interviewing intranet users for persona development?
I had the same problem and didn't know what to ask users. After some research and thought, I came up with the following:
Guidelines
Use Primarily Open-Ended Questions
Ask Naïve Questions
Ask People to show You, not tell you, when possible
Ask for specific ...
8
User Experience strategy is about taking the information about the user and information about the business and turning that into an approach for the User Experience. It overlaps with the role of a good Business Analysis and will often involve:
Business Strategy
Existing best practice / competitor reviews.
Existing behavior analysis from stats and from one ...
8
Much of the mystery behind Apple’s design process is due to Apple being deliberately secretive, and sometimes even engaging in active deception. I believe this notion that they don’t do user research is part of their disinformation campaign.
Perhaps the clearest publicly-available view of how Apple works is from a study by UIE on what makes a successful ...
7
You might be referring to Google Venture's "Design Sprint" process: http://www.gv.com/lib/the-product-design-sprint-a-five-day-recipe-for-startups.
They've basically created a highly condensed, 5-day "sprint" where they help clients:
Understand a design problem
Develop as many potential solutions as possible
Pick the best solutions and start creating user ...
7
As you already mentioned, even if you might find Wiki entries, the borders of what is included and what not are kind of blurry. I re-ordered the items because of context - this is the consensus that I use for my day-to-day worklife:
Use Cases: A feature- or part-of-the-site- usage scenario. If you take use cases for a shopping cart, these would be: 1) Save ...
6
You can use gamification elements to engage users into filling their profiles. One of the examples is engaging users to complete LinkedIn profile:
Some gamification tricks for user motivation are:
Make form filling meaningful for donors. You could explain why it is so important to fill the form.
Provide some kind of PBL (Points-Badges-Leaderboard) as ...
5
This all depends on what your definition of UX is... which has been a changing beast over the years - from what the experiences is through to a job description for certain kinds of role.
I would personally say that you do need the qualifiers - since you can apply UX practices in many different contexts. For example:
A dedicated UX agency brought in to do a ...
5
If you want empirical method then you need test users, measurable criteria for "better names" and methodology of measuring. Here are some ideas:
Approach 1: If you have a lot of test user you can do use classic prototype-decide approach:
Prepare 2 versions of UI (could be prototypes): One with current technical names, other with simpler alternative names. ...
5
Strategy is the path between vision and execution.
UX Strategy is about defining what kind of experience you want. For example Apple claims that they start with "How they want people to feel" when they start the design.
Strategy then gets into a plan to get to there.. for example doing away with skeumorphic design in favor of a flat design, focussing more ...
5
In the situation you describe, you have to test the whole.
If you have just designed something, you want to know if it works at all. For this, always test the whole. The point of a complex system is that it is more than the sum of its parts. Reactions to parts will not predict reactions to the whole. In many situations, some parts won't even make sense ...
5
The problem with DT definitions is that if you ask two practitioners to define DT you'll get four different answers — see this discussion on the DT LinkedIn group for example ;-)
That said, since the IDEO and d.school approaches to DT have lot of the same folk involved, I'd say that these two are mostly describing the same process with different words.
...
4
I don’t think it will work well to provide the user with a description of each upcoming feature and ask them to rate or sort them. That requires users to try to imagine what the upcoming feature would be like in their life once it’s implemented. That’s much harder than a usability test, where users can try out exactly how a feature is implemented and give ...
4
We use the standard "Primary" "Secondary" "link elsewhere/escape" for our actions and never use red and green. Reason red and green is never used is because they may place un-intentional emphasis on the wrong things.
e.g. We have a button for deleting an item. This is not a common action, yet if we make it red, this is the one thing we're drawn to on the ...
4
Joel is not always right...
The article conflates two different arguments in support of bloat. It makes the case that:
Resource bloat can improve software because (a) it allows developers to ship faster; (b) it allows software to support more features, and (c) bloat is relative, meaning that if computing power grows faster than resource bloat, then in &...
4
Try to find users that are likely to use your product/service and interview them to see their attitudes towards your idea.
You can also survey your target users to gain additional information on their opinions.
You can also try something like an A/B test. Try 2 or 3 variants of your subscription plan/idea, distribute them evenly among subscribers and see ...
4
Do you have the opportunity to create a low-fidelity prototype of the product?
The Wizard of Oz experiment comes to mind as it works very well on unfinished products (specifically low-fidelity prototypes): it mimics a finished product by involving a human actor (usually out of sight) to perform actions on behalf of the system. However, this method requires ...
3
If you are trying to user test a physical product (or anything for that matter) make sure to first and foremost give the user tasks to undergo.
For instance, if you are trying to get a user to test a new hard line office phone you would want to create tasks such as:
Go to your directory and call John Doe
You just received a call from a co-worker, and you ...
3
Simply based on the information in the link you provided, I think the answer is "the sooner the better". Maybe it's something that's decided upon before realizing changes need to be made. i.e.: making the entire company's website more user-friendly > Finding out the shopping cart isn't user-friendly at all and deciding something should be done.
If done ...
3
Asking closed questions is not optimal, for the reasons pointed out by Kristian - they skew the results. I think Adrian has a point too, since getting feature-specific feedback might be a better fit for a survey.
Moderation
It is the interviewer's job to moderate the discussion, to keep the focus. I think this is partly what you wanted/needed to accomplish,...
3
...methods or processes to better manage these clients' priorities...
There's no silver bullet and part of that is the ephemeral nature of priorities. They change over time and what's relevant now may not be as important in 9 months or a year, or whatever the time scale is for your clients.
That said, it's good to at least document things as snapshots of ...
3
I recommend you expand the definition of UX outside interfaces. Start thinking about the physical world, customer service, daily life of the customers, the B2B side, etc. If you think the interface is optimized enough and you are still not seeing results, maybe the issue is not the interface, but other factors such as market saturation, etc. Either way, ...
2
The Nielsen Norman Group cites usability guidelines that have been around since the 70s:
0.1 second is about the limit for having the user feel that the system is reacting instantaneously, meaning that no special feedback is necessary except to display the result.
1.0 second is about the limit for the user's flow of thought to stay uninterrupted, even ...
2
Typical user interviews have two aspects:
Documentation for conducting the research :
This includes, at minimum the Interview Discussion Guide, Consent form, Screener questionnaire and Compensation form.
Documenting the actual user interviews: The fastest method for us has been to convert the entire Google sheet to a Google form (for Quantitative insights) ...
2
In my experience agile development can be antagonistic towards UX, especially if UX is attempted to be made to fit within an agile development frame work. The issues with agile don't relate to how successful then can be for development teams but when either UX concepting is attempted within sprints or if key design is done on the fly with the development ...
2
As you're considering this, also make sure that you clearly state that this will not be used or sold in any way and that you're only using this for informational purposes. A big part of asking for this information is that your users have to trust you. If you give any indication that you're going to break that trust, not only will that keep them from filling ...
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