Human-Centered Design (HCD or Design Thinking) is the guiding framework of modern approach to design and innovation. Its core element is ruthless focus on the user above all else.
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| Time | N/A |
| Category | Design |
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| Participants | User Exp, Design |
| Keywords | Design, Concept |
This is “the inspiration phase” where you dive deep into the topic of your research. Given your budget and timeline, you’re going to use one or more research methods. The goal is not just to understand the technical context of the problem, but most importantly - to develop true empathy for the user and their struggles. This empathy will give you knowledge, energy and motivation to use all your creative abilities to find the right solution.
Once you’ve immersed yourself into the design problem, you will inevitably discover a few key insights and some early solution ideas will start brewing up. At this phase you’re to syndicate all your knowledge and insights to generate as many solution ideas as possible. Don’t judge them yet - the best way to have a good idea is to have a lot of ideas!
Now you’re to test your most promising ideas by creating prototypes of these ideas and showing them to users for feedback. Even once you’ve picked your idea for the development of Minimum Viable Product and launched it to the market - it will still be just a test. User’s feedback will be used for future learnings and iterations. Congrats, this is (almost) all there is to the world’s most powerful design framework!
The framework of JTBD allows thinking beyond products’ mere functional aspects. By considering the context of usage, as well as the customers’ social and emotional goals, it will force you to re-think your customers, your product and your markets. Extremely powerful.
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| Time | N/A |
| Category | Explore |
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| Participants | User Exp, Design, Leadership |
| Keywords | Strategy |
To truly understand the functional, emotional and social needs of your users, you need to really get under their skin. The deeper forms of ethnographic research you use, the better your understanding will be.
Gather your research team to generate common themes (see Affinity Mapping) about your customers’ context and goals.
Use JTBD canvas to discuss and summarize findings of your research. Do the findings make sense? Are there any surprising discoveries?
Set up a workshop with the leadership to share and discuss findings of your research.
Discuss what impact your findings have on the strategy, marketing, customer support and product roadmap? How do we organize the company and position our offering from here?
Systematically defining and testing hypotheses (also sometimes called Lean UX) is at the heart of every design process. It’s important to be disciplined and methodical about it.
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| Time | N/A |
| Category | Design |
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| Participants | User Exp, Design |
| Keywords | Design, Concept |
What are the most important things you need to know on which everything else depends on? In the beginning it’s usually assumptions about the problem you’re solving and the customers. Later it’s more about your solution, details of your solution, marketing, etc. Identify what is the most important assumption that you’re making today. Use UX Kanban board to guide you.
Explicitly state your assumption (hypothesis) as well as how you will test it. Then go ahead and execute the test. What have you learned? Use the Hypothesis Testing canvas to guide you.
Have you been able to properly test your hypothesis? What else have you learned? Reflect your learnings by rearranging the UX Kanban Board. Then repeat the process.
This method is about more than just creating a comfortable workspace for your design team. Done right, your design space can boost your creativity and be your best internal marketing and communication tool.
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| Time | N/A |
| Category | Design |
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| Participants | User Exp, Leadership |
| Keywords | Design, Environment |
One wall should be a place to capture all your learnings and inspiration. That’s where you’ll put results of your interviews, photos from contextual inquiry and cut-outs from your desk research.
Your ideas wall will be across your exploration wall. That’s where you imagine new concepts and solutions. Together with your Exploration wall, it should be highly visible to people outside the room. The idea is that they can drop by at any moment just to have a look at what you’re working on. Photos, post-its and sketches attract a lot of attention.
This is where you’ll keep track of what you need to do, as well as your hypotheses (see “Hypothesis-Driven Design” method).
One wall should be empty for discussions. By spending enough time in the room with each other and surrounded by design artifacts, your team will start to develop a common spatial understanding of the design problem which can boost creativity.
Larger projects typically have numerous stakeholders that all want to have a say in what your product should do. For the sake of harmony and your own mental sanity, it could be helpful to map these stakeholders to know how to manage them.
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| Time | 1-5 hours |
| Category | Imagine |
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| Participants | User Exp, Product Owners |
| Keywords | Strategy |
Survey your organization to identify all potential teams and individuals that could influence your work.
Plan interviews with all the parties to talk about the project and what they expect their role and involvement to be.
Map your stakeholders on Stakeholder Map canvas by influence and involvement. This is best done with the project leadership team as a group exercise.
Set expectations about when and how you will engage each group of stakeholders and get feedback. Control for random input.
You’ll notice that over time the role of some stakeholders will change. Ensure that your Stakeholder Map is up-to-date and reflects this.
Individual interviews can be useful for exploring attitudes, beliefs and past experiences of (potential) users during the exploration phase.
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| Time | 30-60 minutes |
| Category | Evaluate |
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| Participants | User Exp, Users |
| Keywords | Research, Qualitative |
Outline what you want to learn and start planning how you’re going to attract participants. Make your learning goals as specific as possible. Use the Interview Plan.
Make a draft of your questions with Interview Script Planner, using 1 sheet per question. Then test your draft with 3 colleagues, revising content and order after each round.
Carefully consider interviewee profile and screening methods. Since interviews can be conducted in-person, by phone or using live video, consider remote recruiting options.
Introduce yourself and explain the interview process as much as possible without biasing the interviewee. Then go through your tested interview script, listening carefully, probing and recording each answer.
Identify common themes between answers using an Affinity Map. For quantitative research you can use a variety of statistical methods. Analyze your findings with the team.
Unobtrusively observe users in their own environments, occasionally asking clarifying questions. Use this method to discover how context influences users’ actual behaviors.
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| Time | 30-120 minutes |
| Category | Evaluate |
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| Participants | User Exp, Users |
| Keywords | Research, Qualitative |
Outline what you want to learn in Contextual Inquiry Plan and start planning how, where and who you’re going to observe, as well as what permissions you might need.
Get approvals from participants and (if needed) their managers to conduct the Contextual Inquiry. Clarify the expectations in advance.
Observe the participants and take notes of interactions with other people, tools, equipment and space. Ask clarifying questions as long as they don’t obtrude the activity. Use Contextual Inquiry Report as template.
At the end of the session, check your notes with participants by communicating to them what you’ve noticed and learned. Beware of discrepancies between your observations and their comments.
Summarize your findings in Contextual Inquiry Report immediately after the session. After finishing all sessions, discuss your findings with the team and summarize the conclusion in Contextual Inquiry Plan.
One of the more advanced methods for deeper user research, mobile diaries enable understanding of details about users’ daily lives and help to uncover insights that would not be available with other methods.
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| Time | 2-4 weeks |
| Category | Evaluate |
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| Participants | User Exp, Users |
| Keywords | Research, Qualitative |
Fill out Mobile Diary Planning Canvas (Included) to decide on the goal, timelines, recruiting methods and methodology (mobile vs. paper diary).
Create a list of questions to ask participants by filling out the Mobile Diary Questionnaire.
Recruit participants that maximally resemble your Personas. Then give detailed instructions to the participants. For mobile surveys - use Tumblr. For paper surveys - use mobile diary day report template.
Be available for any help or questions while participants are conducting the study. Monitor their reporting for early signs of disengagement or technical problems.
Carefully analyze participants’ reports, making note of new findings on post-it notes. Then cluster the notes with photographs and other artifacts. Try Affinity Mapping technique.
It may be essential for you to start your exploration with some reading and research to better understand the context of your design problem.
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| Time | 1-10 days |
| Category | Evaluate |
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| Participants | User Exp |
| Keywords | Research, Qualitative |
Before you dive into the world of books and academic papers, gather what you already know and identify your knowledge gaps. Be as specific as possible (e.g. research “disposable income of millennials in New York City” vs. “money and young people”).
Information can be ranked by quality. Information of the highest quality can be found in peer-reviewed academic journals (search for those at your local library or at scholar.google.com). Information of the lowest quality can be found inside tabloid magazines and on random pages of the internet, or on resources of organizations with vested interest (e.g. lobby groups). Consider various perspectives.
Once you’ve done your research, have you been able to answer your original question? Do you now have any new questions that you need answered? Why not get experts to answer them (see Expert Interview)?
To better understand your research problem - especially if it’s a complex, nuanced and specialize one - it might help to talk to some of the experts in the field.
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| Time | 30-60 minutes each |
| Category | Evaluate |
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| Participants | User Exp, Experts |
| Keywords | Research, Qualitative |
Experts are usually busy people and their time is highly valuable. Don’t waste it asking something you can read on the first page of Google. Come prepared and make sure your questions are smart and well-researched.
Reach out to the experts and ask them for their time. Provide them with brief background of your research and be specific about how much time you would like to request. You might need to follow-up a few times to reach them.
Be your best - listen, probe, ask why and take notes. Ideally, record the interview for future analysis. After all the interviews - what did you learn? What perspectives are out there? How can you use the results for your research?
Simple and effective research method that involves immersing yourself in online communities dedicated to the topic of choice.
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| Time | 3 days |
| Category | Evaluate |
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| Participants | User Exp |
| Keywords | Research, Qualitative |
An established tactic for evaluating service quality and learning about competing products. It can also be highly effective for creating empathy for the user.
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| Time | N/A |
| Category | Evaluate |
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| Participants | User Exp |
| Keywords | Research, Qualitative |
In the early stages of design you can ask users to create and describe a mood board consisting of text, quotes, images etc. to describe their relationship to the topic at hand.
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| Time | 3-5 days |
| Category | Design |
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| Participants | User Exp, Users |
| Keywords | Design |
Ask your participants to create a mood board for you which would describe a certain concept (e.g. money) and what it means to them. Encourage participants to include everything that directly or indirectly relates to that concept. Give them a fixed deadline and a medium of your choice (e.g. Pinterest).
When the mood boards are ready, ask the participants to explain them to you. As they explain, watch out for clues about hidden motivations and other insights. Probe and ask why over and over again!
After learning about the mood boards of all participants, are there any insights that stand out for you? Any common themes? Usually at this stage you’ll be full of ideas for further research. Make sure to save the mood boards for later.
Use this fast and easy method of organizing cards to generate insights on what’s important to your users as well as how they think about the problem.
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| Time | 30 minutes |
| Category | Explore |
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| Participants | User Exp, Users |
| Keywords | Research, Qualitative |
Create a deck of 10+ cards. Each should describe a concept or a theme in one word or a picture. The deck could work with specific, abstract or mixed concepts.
Now ask the participants to rank the cards on a certain parameter (e.g. attractiveness) or to group the cards as they see fit. After they’re finished, ask them to elaborate on their chosen ranking/grouping. Listen carefully for what considerations they mention. Those could reveal deeper insights about their hidden motivations.
Finally, you can ask the participants to rank/group the cards under different conditions (e.g. at work vs. at home) to discover deeper insights about them.
Personas are representations of archetypes of users that share similar knowledge, goals and behaviors. Good Personas are a result of thorough user research and help to keep design process connected to real people.
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| Time | 3-8 hours |
| Category | Explore |
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| Participants | User Exp, Product Owners |
| Keywords | Research, Qualitative, Design, Empathy |
Start by gathering all relevant information about users from your own research and from around the company. Consider talking to marketing, customer service and analytics teams.
Invite 2-10 people for an hour-long workshop. Make sure to include team members, as well as people with direct customer knowledge. Ensure the room has space, markers and flipcharts.
During the workshop, briefly explain the overall design challenge and the benefits of a Persona. Then split the group into pairs and ask them use their knowledge to create their own Personas by filling out the Persona Template.
Find similarities between Personas from the Workshop and your previous user research. Then create a new Persona to summarize everything the team currently knows about the target user.
Make sure to make the Persona visible for the entire product team - especially in areas where product decisions are made. Be creative (e.g. consider cutting out full-height personas out of cardboard)!
Creation of an Empathy Map is a collaborative exercise that helps to enhance an emotional picture of your users, as well as to create a shared empathy for them among team members.
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| Time | 30-90 minutes |
| Category | Explore |
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| Participants | User Exp, Design |
| Keywords | Research, Qualitative, Empathy |
Gather together all existing user research (if available). It could be a result of Individual Interviews, contextual inquiries or other UX research methods.
Invite team members to attend a 30 minute workshop. Book a room with plenty of room and free wall space (we’ll need it to hang empathy maps during presentations later).
Present the goals of the workshop. Then run an energizer to get participants to start thinking as users. Finally, split the group into pairs or groups of 4 or less to create their own Empathy Maps.
After approximately 15 minutes, each group presents their canvas to the rest. Limit presentations to 2 minutes or less. Bonus: get participants to present from the first person, as if they’re talking about themselves.
After the workshop, find commonalities between groups’ Empathy Maps and create one common Map. Make sure to actively share the map everywhere where decisions about users are made.
Visualization of the total experience, including actions, thoughts and feelings, that users have to go through to accomplish a particular goal.
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| Time | 3-8 hours |
| Category | Explore |
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| Participants | User Exp, Design, Stakeholders, Product Owners, Experts, Leadership, Users, Project Mgmt. |
| Keywords | Research, Qualitative, Empathy |
Emotional Journey Mapping and creation of Personas follow in-depth user research. They are then used to syndicate, visualize and communicate the findings.
Each emotional journey map needs to correspond to a certain persona. The Journeys can look very differently for different Personas.
Create a draft visualization of your insights. Emotional Journey map template (included) will help you to document Persona’s steps, actions, thoughts and feelings. You can also use Storyboarding Canvas.
Group parts of the Journey into stages. Feel free to use graphics (tip: emojis) until a more visual picture of the total experience starts to emerge.
Since Emotional User Journeys frequently summarize preliminary user research, schedule 1 hour meeting to discuss your findings with the team. Ensure attendance of all relevant (especially senior) stakeholders.
Mind maps help to organize information by association and provide a bird's-eye view of the design problem.
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| Time | 1 hour |
| Category | Imagine |
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| Participants | User Exp, Design |
| Keywords | Research, Qualitative, Design |
Create the first version. Start with making the most important decision of the exercise - what’s in the center of your mind map? What’s the central concept that will connect your entire mind map together? Do not immediately write down the first thing that comes to your mind. What’s the goal?
Break down your mind map into clear and mutually exclusive categories. There should be no overlaps. Keep on iterating on your mind map until you achieve that clear structure. The more clear your mind map - the better you’ll be able to think about the problem at hand.
What’s the use of keeping your mind map to yourself? Share it with your colleagues and get their input. Are we missing anything? If we are - add it to the mind map. It’s important to capture the whole picture, even if we’re not yet sure about some of the “branches”.
One of the popular frameworks to bring structure to field research by helping to organize the context of inquiry. AEIOU stands for Activities, Environments, Interactions, Objects and Users.
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| Effectiveness | |
| Time | 30-120 minutes |
| Category | Explore |
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| Participants | User Exp, Users |
| Keywords | Research, Qualitative, Framework, Empathy |
One of the popular frameworks to bring structure to field research by helping to organize the context of inquiry. POEMS stands for People, Objects, Environments, Messages and Services.
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| Effectiveness | |
| Time | 30-120 minutes |
| Category | Explore |
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| Participants | User Exp, Users |
| Keywords | Research, Qualitative, Framework, Empathy |
Content Audit is an exercise of making a big list of all available content and information on a site or in an application.
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| Time | 5-10 days |
| Category | Explore |
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| Participants | User Exp |
| Keywords | Research, Qualitative |
Start your audit by listing top-level parts of the site.
Then get deeper into each section. What are that section’s key sub-parts?
Dive deep into each individual part filling out the content audit worksheet as you go. For complex projects it’s recommended to use a spreadsheet.
Now methodically repeat the process for each sub-part of the site. Be patient and make sure to properly capture all content and relationships.
Create an overall visual representation of the site and share it with the design team. It will drive your future redesign work.
Design Thinking Workshops are great for kick-starting projects and demonstrating to stakeholders how Human-Centered Design works.
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| Time | 4-16 hours |
| Category | Imagine |
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| Participants | User Exp, Stakeholders |
| Keywords | Brainstorming, Workshop |
It’s crucial to properly plan the workshop. Book a big room with lots of wall-space, invite stakeholders (use Stakeholder Map) and align on the preliminary problem statement.
Start with an energizer - get the group get familiar with each other. Then explain the HCD process and inspire them to believe in the power of Design Thinking. Tip: show a few trailers from “Disruptors” by InVision.
Break the group into pairs or groups of no more than four. Ask each group to create their own Persona (use Persona template) and to fill out the Emotional Journey Maps for the current state. The groups then make quick presentations.
Now that the group feels pains of the current process, ask them to imagine what an ideal future process could look like. Ask to fill out a new Emotional Journey Map. Keep all artifacts on the walls.
Ask the group to sketch, act or otherwise prototype what their solution could look like. Afterwards ask each participant to vote for 2 solutions that they liked the most. Tip: “upgrade” and share the main prototypes after the workshop.
A fun and exciting way to understand how users feel about the products they use, in which you simply ask them to write either a love letter or a break-up letter to their product, listing all the reasons for doing so.
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| Time | 15-30 minutes each |
| Category | Evaluate |
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| Participants | User Exp, Users |
| Keywords | Research, Qualitative |
Analyzing key tasks that users are trying to accomplish with your system. Together with Analytics and Content Audit, it is a powerful and a necessary step for any site (re-)design projects.
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| Time | N/A |
| Category | Evaluate |
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| Participants | User Exp |
| Keywords | Research, Qualitative |
Looking at web analytics will give you lots of information on everything from underperforming pages to most popular sections. It’s especially valuable for funnel-based websites.
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| Time | N/A |
| Category | Evaluate |
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| Participants | User Exp, Product Owners, Quality Assurance, Development |
| Keywords | Research, Quantitative |
Define what success looks like for your site. Is it the number of downloads? Sales? Returning visitors per month? Define your Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) and measure them religiously at equal intervals (e.g. every Friday). Make sure that your analytics tool enables you to easily measure your KPIs.
What can you do to affect your KPIs? At this point you probably want to think of all the steps that the user has to get there. Create a funnel and measure % of users that go through each step. Where do they fall off? What can you do to fix that? If you’re a designer, some of these changes will be outside your direct control (e.g. marketing), but whatever happens on the site - that’s on you!
Has your redesign resulted in any KPI improvements? If so - congratulations! What will you fix next?
Insights generated during initial research are best summarized in the form of “How might we…”. It’s constructive, as it implies that there’s a solution without suggesting what the solution might be.
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| Time | 30 minutes |
| Category | Imagine |
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| Participants | User Exp, Design |
| Keywords | Brainstorming |
Together with the design team look at all the insights, quotes, pictures, Personas and Emotional User Journeys that you’ve generated during the research phase. What do you see? What insights emerge?
Using “How Might We…” canvas, for each insight generate multiple versions of “How might we…” questions. This is the moment when you shift from Inspiration to Ideation (steps of Human-Centered Design framework).
Make sure that the questions are neither too narrow (as in they don’t suggest any solutions), nor too broad (where you don’t even know where to start). Best statements include other significant design considerations that you’ve identified during the research.
Simple ideation method for capturing a wide range of diverse ideas. Could be done individually or in a group.
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| Time | 30 minutes |
| Category | Imagine |
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| Participants | User Exp, Design, Stakeholders, Product Owners, Experts, Leadership, Users, Project Mgmt. |
| Keywords | Brainstorming |
Prepare the problem statement in “How Might We…“ format. Decide which part of User Journey you’ll be focusing on. Then set up a 30 minute workshop with all key team members and project stakeholders.
At the beginning of the workshop, present the problem statement, ensure that the problem is well-scoped and that all participants have the same understanding.
Instruct participants to use the Crazy 8s Canvas to sketch out 8 different solution ideas in 8 minutes. Make sure they use thick markers (no fine tipped pens) and feel at ease sketching (tell them that anybody can sketch).
Participants have 2 minutes each to present their 8 ideas to the rest of the team. Make sure to hard-stop participants at the end of 2 minutes.
Team votes with voting dots (2 dots per participant) for their favorite ideas. Count the votes and make a summary of most promising ideas after the workshop.
One of the simplest and most universal techniques for generating and synthesizing ideas into common themes and insights. Affinity mapping is a collaborative brainstorming exercise.
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| Time | 15 minutes |
| Category | Imagine |
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| Participants | User Exp |
| Keywords | Brainstorming |
Brainstorming and Affinity Mapping can be used separately. Brainstorming is used for generation of ideas and Affinity Mapping helps to organize them into themes.
Ideas are best generated first in small groups of 2-4 people. Set as little time as possible to encourage creativity and discourage excessive discussion. Set a bottom limit (e.g. at least 8 ideas). One post-it note per idea.
Each small group then presents ideas to the rest of the group, placing a post-it note with the idea on the wall as it’s being presented.
The group then tries to find commonalities between ideas and cluster them into common themes. Some themes will be immediately obvious. Give names to those themes. Consider grouping across various dimensions.
After the workshop, take pictures of the “idea wall” and send participants a summary with the key identified themes.
Dead-simple and powerful technique for making decisions quickly and transparently without excessive discussions, politics and power struggles.
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| Effectiveness | |
| Time | 5 minutes |
| Category | Explore |
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| Participants | User Exp, Design, Stakeholders, Product Owners, Experts, Leadership, Users, Project Mgmt. |
| Keywords | Research, Qualitative |
You need options before starting to make decisions about which ones make most sense. Thus Dot Voting is usually most effective after ideation exercises such as Brainstorming.
Give each participant 2 voting dots. Then ask the participants to place one dot on each of the ideas that they like the most. They can put both dots on one idea as well. Consider giving top stakeholders one extra dot.
The results will become obvious after the exercise, but it’s still a good idea to explicitly state which ideas got the most votes to summarize the group’s sentiment.
Concept Monsters is a fun ideation exercise where you push yourself to think of radical new ideas by combining two or more concepts from unrelated fields (e.g. what could the LinkedIn of animals look like)?
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| Effectiveness | |
| Time | 30-60 minutes |
| Category | Imagine |
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| Participants | User Exp, Design, Product Owners |
| Keywords | Brainstorming |
What is the key adjective or quality that your desired solution should have? Is it speed, convenience, low price? Agree on whatever it is with your team and write it down.
With your team think of other services that embrace this quality (e.g. inspiring -> Pinterest, social -> Facebook, fast -> Ferrari etc.)
Now try combining these unrelated services together to imagine novel solutions. E.g. what could be the Facebook of healthcare, “The Burning Man” of diabetics or “Planet Earth” of US Politics?
Sketches are easy to produce and allow for quick visualization, testing and de-risking of ideas with users and the team before development starts and resources are committed.
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| Effectiveness | |
| Time | 30 minutes |
| Category | Explore |
|---|---|
| Participants | User Exp, Design, Product Owners |
| Keywords | Design, Brainstorming |
Print out Sketching Templates and prepare thick markers (no fine tipped pens). Feel free to invite your team members to capture more ideas.
Quickly and rapidly capture the essential elements of your ideas without focusing too much on the details. Time box the sketching exercise.
Select a few ideas that you find the most interesting. It may help to involve a technical member of the team to help with assessing feasibility.
Force yourself to create 5-10 versions of your most promising ideas. This will ensure that you will cover many different approaches and don’t just settle on the first idea.
Present your sketches to the rest of the team and/or users for early feedback. It may be necessary to go through several iterations to arrive at the feasible solution that users like.
Technique used by filmmakers to visualize the experience. Best used in combination with Emotional Journey Map to create empathy for the user, or as a prototype of a new service-based experience.
| Simplicity | |
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| Effectiveness | |
| Time | 30-90 minutes |
| Category | Explore |
|---|---|
| Participants | User Exp, Design, Product Owners |
| Keywords | Brainstorming, Design, Strategy |
Use storyboard for visualization, alignment and understanding of details - not for ideation. Ideally, it would either follow user research phase or ideation exercise.
Although it’s important to capture ideas of as many team members as possible, to control the scope of the discussion, you might want to do this exercise with the design team or alone and communicate the output to the team afterwards.
Decide on a specific scenario - one scenario per Storyboard. Use Storyboarding Canvas or a whiteboard. Sketch only the relevant scenes - the more relevant the scene, the more detail it has to include.
Gather feedback from the product team and the key stakeholders. Control the scope of the discussion and make sure that all team members have the same understanding.
If you plan to actively communicate the Storyboard outside of the product team, you might want to iterate on illustrations and annotations to make the Storyboard understandable for people unfamiliar with the context.
Through role-play, you can rapidly test ideas and interactions to get feedback. Just pretend what it would be like to interact with that branch employee or even that sign up form in real life!
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| Effectiveness | |
| Time | 10 minutes |
| Category | Explore |
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| Participants | User Exp, Design |
| Keywords | Research, Qualitative |
First, you’re going to need a Persona. Then you’d need to decide which interactions you would like to test for that Persona and in which context.
Now the creative part - what could that interaction look like in real life? Are you that impatient stock broker who suddenly needs to update his system in the middle of trading hours? What would the system say? How would the stockbroker react?
Now gather your audience (ideally start with just colleagues first) and play it out! What insights start to emerge? What should we consider when designing for the interaction in that context?
To ensure that you’re designing for the future, get together with your team and immediate stakeholders to identify key future trends that will be driving your industry.
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| Effectiveness | |
| Time | 60-90 minutes |
| Category | Imagine |
|---|---|
| Participants | User Exp, Product Owners, Design |
| Keywords | Research, Qualitative, Workshop |
Set up a workshop with the wider product team including key stakeholders. Then in 3 rounds of 10 minutes each ask participants to ideate which key business (r1), technological (r2) and sociocultural (r3) trends will be dominant in your industry in the next 5 years.
After each round, ask the participants to present their ideas to the group. Ask the group to vote for the most relevant ideas. Each member has 2 voting dots that he/she has to place on the post-it notes with their ideas of choice.
Now split the group in 3 smaller groups and ask each new group to pick one area of trends: business, sociocultural or technological. Using future trends worksheet, each group then takes a closer look at the “winning” trends. After 15 minutes, each group presents their worksheet.
Gather the worksheets and put them into a one-pager. Send this one-pager around to the participants after the workshop, as well as hang it on the “insights” wall in your design space.
Watch, listen and take notes as participants interact with your prototype, trying to complete typical tasks. Testing with just 5 users uncovers 80% of usability problems and it can be done quickly and easily with basic resources.
| Simplicity | |
|---|---|
| Effectiveness | |
| Time | 30-60 minutes |
| Category | Evaluate |
|---|---|
| Participants | User Exp, Users |
| Keywords | Research, Qualitative, Quantitative |
Use Usability Test Plan template to prepare for the interview. Particularly important are the task scenarios which users will be asked to complete. Test those with team members first.
Fidelity of the prototype can range, but test participants should be able to use it independently. The functionality should reflect the specific core assumptions that you’re looking to test.
Testing your designs with just 5 participants will uncover 80% of usability problems. Make sure that the participants reflect skills, knowledge and intentions of your target users as much as possible.
Make sure your prototype works and follow the script you made in Usability Test Plan. During the test, maintain neutral expression and resist temptation to help users if the seem stuck.
Use Usability Report Template to communicate the findings back to your team to inform and drive future product development. Tip: fix critical tasks ASAP and leave minor changes to the last sprint before the release.
An experienced UX practitioner evaluates usability of the product to quickly identify the biggest and most common usability issues.
| Simplicity | |
|---|---|
| Effectiveness | |
| Time | 30-90 minutes |
| Category | Evaluate |
|---|---|
| Participants | User Exp |
| Keywords | Research, Qualitative, Quantitative |
You need at least one experienced UX practitioner and a prototype or a part of a working product to test.
Conduct the review and fill out the Usability Report through the lens of Jakob Nielsen’s 10 Usability Heuristics. Assign severity to each discovered issue.
Score performance of the reviewed designs on the Usability Review Scorecard to highlight relative strengths and weaknesses.
Present the Usability Review Scorecard to the rest of your team. Discuss most significant improvements that can be achieved with minimum resources (“low-hanging fruits”).
To quickly understand the relative usability performance of your solution, consider conducTing Usability Review for competing products as well.
Get rapid feedback on various concept ideas by spontaneously finding potential users and presenting to them an approximation of essential features of the final solution.
| Simplicity | |
|---|---|
| Effectiveness | |
| Time | 30-90 minutes |
| Category | Explore |
|---|---|
| Participants | User Exp, Users |
| Keywords | Research, Qualitative |
Resist the temptation to conduct Concept Testing with a random idea you just came up with. Instead, make sure to spend time on in-depth user research to understand user needs and motivations beforehand.
Develop rough prototypes containing just the essential features of the potential solution. At this stage, aim for low-fidelity, hand-drawn prototypes with realistic content.
Although Concept Testing may seem very improvised in terms of participants’ recruitment, fill out Concept Testing Plan to determine what you will test, where, with whom and how.
Approach potential participants when they could spare time to help you (e.g. bus stop, coffee shop, mall). Introduce yourself and give the participants a prototype and simple, clear instructions. Take notes.
Summarize your notes immediately after each participant and then again at the end of the test. Discuss common patterns and the next steps with your team.
There’s a range of prototyping tools available if you’re looking to create a mock-up of a physical product or environment.
| Simplicity | |
|---|---|
| Effectiveness | |
| Time | 15 minutes |
| Category | Explore |
|---|---|
| Participants | User Exp, Design, Product Owners |
| Keywords | Design |
Prototyping is just a way to get answers, but you have to ask a question first. What is the hypothesis that you’re looking to test? Is that about the rough concept of your solution or about it’s details? Use Hypothesis Testing canvas to plan your experiment.
Use quick and cheap low-resolution prototyping techniques for concept prototyping. Get more high-fidelity when you’re thinking about the details. Tip: don’t overthink it - use whatever materials you have and if you need something more technical - visit your local “maker space”.
Consider methods like Concept Testing for testing your protoypes. What have you learned? What further hypotheses can you make?
Value Proposition is a simple statement that reflects the core reason why your customers should chose your product and how it’s different from competition.
| Simplicity | |
|---|---|
| Effectiveness | |
| Time | N/A |
| Category | Design |
|---|---|
| Participants | User Exp, Design, Leadership |
| Keywords | Design, Brainstorming |
Align on the approach with the CEO and organize a 1h-long workshop with all key members of the leadership team, including the CEO and the copywriter.
Ask them to fill in the blanks on the Value Proposition canvas. Each word/expression should be written on a separate post-it note. Then find common themes between words (see Affinity Mapping).
After the workshop, go through numerous iterations to arrive at several versions of your value statement. The main goal is to make them short, simple and concise. If words are difficult for you - invite a professional copywriter to help you out.
Get feedback on your Value Proposition statements from the leadership team. Bonus: also get feedback from the users. Then either let someone make the final decision or use the dot-voting approach to pick the winner.
Make your value proposition statement visible and share it with your customers. TIP: consider other ways to ensure that the Value Proposition is internalized by your company.
If you truly want to stand out from the noise, it’s not enough to just have a good product and a delightful experience. You need to tell a story - it will become the foundation of your brand.
| Simplicity | |
|---|---|
| Effectiveness | |
| Time | 60 minutes |
| Category | Design |
|---|---|
| Participants | User Exp, Design, Product Owners, Leadership |
| Keywords | Design, Brainstorming |
Spend time to really understand the problem and what it is that customers truly want. What’s their actual inner driver? What fears, hopes and aspirations are involved? The framework of Jobs-To-Be-Done can be helpful with highlighting the users’ functional, emotional and social needs. Also consider creating a marketing positioning map to highlight the niche your product will fit in and what competition is currently present.
Since they can drive your entire strategy and communications, Brand Pitch efforts require strong support from the CEO. He/she has to be truly onboard with the pitch and then learn it by heart to inspire customers and employees.
Site maps are useful in demonstrating the overall structure of your site or app, as well as the intended user flows. It’s usually considered to be one of the key design artifacts and is used by business and development.
| Simplicity | |
|---|---|
| Effectiveness | |
| Time | N/A |
| Category | Explore |
|---|---|
| Participants | User Exp, Design, Stakeholders, Product Owners, Experts, Leadership, Users, Project Mgmt. |
| Keywords | Strategy |
Create a site map - a diagram containing all your site’s screens and the interrelationships between them (i.e. if you click here, you will end up here)
If necessary, add analytics to see which pages people use most often. Which ones have high drop-off rates? What’s wrong with them? How complicated are the user flows for key tasks?
Discuss your findings with stakeholders. Make the issues apparent to secure buy-in for future redesign and to justify your design decisions.
An advanced usability testing technique for identifying where on the page your users are looking while interacting with your service.
| Simplicity | |
|---|---|
| Effectiveness | |
| Time |
| Category | Evaluate |
|---|---|
| Participants | User Exp, Users |
| Keywords | Research, Qualitative, Quantitative |
Net Promoter Score (NPS) is a widespread proxy metric for measuring how your customers feel about your product or service overall.
| Simplicity | |
|---|---|
| Effectiveness | |
| Time |
| Category | Evaluate |
|---|---|
| Participants | User Exp, Users |
| Keywords | Research, Quantitative |
NPS survey asks participants just one question like, “How likely are you to recommend our products and services to a friend or colleague?” See Questionnaire example.
Identify percentages of Detractors and Promoters.
Then detract percentage of detractors from percentage of promoters. The resulting value (between -100 and 100) will be your NPS.
Although NPS results do tell you something, they are usually quite low - even for the top-performing companies. It’s best to compare your NPS to your industry’s average and the one of your competitors.
Decide whether to look deeper into the data and try to better understand the reasoning behind Promoters and Detractors.
Understanding how long something takes is straightforward, which is why Time on Task is one of the core usability metrics.
| Simplicity | |
|---|---|
| Effectiveness | |
| Time | 15 minutes each |
| Category | Evaluate |
|---|---|
| Participants | User Exp, Users |
| Keywords | Research, Quantitative |
A technique for randomly splitting the traffic to your service and showing each stream a slightly different version to determine which one performs better.
| Simplicity | |
|---|---|
| Effectiveness | |
| Time |
| Category | Evaluate |
|---|---|
| Participants | User Exp, Users |
| Keywords | Research, Quantitative |
Look at your web traffic to identify key pages. They could be either high-traffic or high-drop-off areas. Funnels are usually good candidates. Then define what constitutes a “success” on that page (e.g. click “buy”).
Use one of the many A/B tools to create variations of the page you’re looking to test. Simple changes like copy can be made without coding, but for larger redesigns you’d have to work with your developer.
Ensure that you get at least 10k visitors to the testing page during your study. Use one of the off-the-shelf tools to randomly reassign traffic.
Your testing software will show the difference between the two and whether it was statistically significant. If you’re doing the test manually, use the statistical method of “Two Sample Hypothesis Testing”.
If your A/B test resulted in a win - great! You can now implement it and run another test. Keep in mind that A/B testing measures incremental improvements and is generally used for optimization of working funnels.
De-facto format of communicating requirements within agile teams.
| Simplicity | |
|---|---|
| Effectiveness | |
| Time | 2-4 hours |
| Category | Explore |
|---|---|
| Participants | User Exp, Product Owners, Stakeholders, Development, Project Managers |
| Keywords | Strategy |
Detailed descriptions of UI elements for alignment and consistency between product teams.
| Simplicity | |
|---|---|
| Effectiveness | |
| Time | 3-5 days |
| Category | Design |
|---|---|
| Participants | User Exp, Design, Development |
| Keywords | Design |
Use a tool like Sketch or Photoshop to create high quality “final” visual User Interface (UI) designs of your solution.
| Simplicity | |
|---|---|
| Effectiveness | |
| Time | 1-30 days |
| Category | Design |
|---|---|
| Participants | User Exp, Design, Product Owners |
| Keywords | Design |
Before starting with the UI, you need to get the UX part right. That means you need to have some wireframes and key content already in place. The UI phase will then make it visually appealing.
Check out Dribbble, Behance and Pinterest for examples of products with similar screens (e.g. profile, payment checkout). Keep track of what you like and what you don’t.
For simplicity and speed (i.e. for MVP) it’s advisable to use one of the popular UI Kits out there (e.g. Material Design by Google or Twitter Bootstrap).
It would take a lot of tweaking to now apply the UI Kit to your designs. You may decide to create a variation of the popular UI Kit or change it altogether. For many designers, this is the most fun part.
For consistency you should be using the same patterns throughout your product (e.g. back button always in top-left). Ensure that your designs are consistent.
In the age of device proliferation, it is imperative to consider the use-cases and the quality of experience on various devices. Responsive Design is the most common approach.
| Simplicity | |
|---|---|
| Effectiveness | |
| Time | N/A |
| Category | Design |
|---|---|
| Participants | User Exp, Design |
| Keywords | Design, Concept |
Industry standard for quickly and effectively measuring if a system is usable in a general sense.
| Simplicity | |
|---|---|
| Effectiveness | |
| Time | 15 minutes |
| Category | Evaluate |
|---|---|
| Participants | User Exp, Users |
| Keywords | Research, Quantitative |
Using SUS Test, ask the participants to answer 10 questions. The test would also work with small sample sizes of 5 - 10.
Gather the responses and process the answers using SUS Score analyzer. For each odd numbered question, subtract 1 from the score. For each even numbered question, subtract the answer from 5. Then add up all the values and multiply the result by 2.5.
What does the final number mean? If the result is 80.3 or above, your system is doing really well! If it’s under 51, it’s awful. Everything in between is okay, but could be improved.