UX research. Making every minute count
Facilitating ‘face to face’ interviews with your clients’ customers is central to UX research. It’s also one of the most difficult of all UX skills to develop.
Valuable insights can be generated and captured during each session but you’re often having to cover a lot of ground in the time allocated.
After hundreds of these sessions I [...]
Skype takes the hassle out of remote usability
Remote research brings cultural relevance to usability findings, providing the kinds of insights which can only be gained by being there…virtually at least.
I recently ran some remote website usability sessions for a Kiwi startup whose main customer is in the U.S.A. … sure, ‘isolation breeds innovation’ and all that, but when your customers are on [...]
Keeping it ‘old school’ with Diary Studies
I’m always looking for better ways to understand customer behaviour and the experiences customers have in their own context, out in the wild.
There are some interesting ‘digital ethnography’ tools on the market, using web and mobile channels to capture, collate and filter all this stuff as it occurs in the field.
http://www.myservicefellow.com
http://www.thethinkingshed.co.uk
http://www.7daysinmylife.com
Impressive technology, but ‘whizz-bang’ isn’t [...]
User Centred Design, for the long haul.
During a 9 month project with IDEO, Air New Zealand took a user centred approach to improve seating design for their long haul services. They built full scale prototypes of cabin interiors to carry out design research, evaluating seating and service concepts with real passengers.
The project began in 2007 with a goal of understanding passenger [...]
When less is less and more is too much.
This Honda trunk-lid has been simplified and streamlined so much that the owner has crudely screwed on a ‘hardware store’ handle to make it easier to use.
This Mazda door entry has gone the other way by adding complexity; a key-code entry, which looked to me like it had never been touched, whereas the standard key-hole [...]
Picture, or thousand words?
Outcomes of UX research projects can be difficult to put in a nutshell, and a bullet pointed list sometimes just does not cut it.
As well as the usual deliverables emerging from a brief, I sometimes add a rich picture as a visual summary. These often originate from doodles generated while I’m trying to figure out [...]