Bringing Holistic Awareness to Your Design - Boxes and Arrows: T. Gone, thankfully, are the days when the user experience and the user interface were an afterthought in the website design process, to be added on when programming was nearing completion. As our profession has increasingly gained importance, it also become increasingly specialized: information design, user experience design, interaction design, user research, persona development, ethnographic user research, usability testing—the list goes on and on. Increased specialization, however, doesn’t always translate to increased user satisfaction.
My company conducted a best practice study to examine the development practices of in-house teams designing web applications—across multiple industries, in companies large and small. Some teams were large and highly specialized, while others were small and required a single team member to perform multiple roles. Fig. 1 — Teams tend to organize in similar patterns in response to the information domains they need to explore and understand 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. Six tips for team communication in human-centered design. Personas are NOT a Document. Joshua Porter (formerly of UIE, but now doing great work on his own at Bokardo Design) recently described much of the latest online debate about the need to develop personas when designing.
Josh got a lot of things right, but he got one thing very, very wrong. And, unfortunately, he bases a lot of his argument on that one thing. Josh said this: Definition, please? But while all of this arguing is going on, nobody is really defining what personas are. This, of course, is a big part of the problem. Personas are not a document.
Here’s the way to think of it: Personas are to Persona Descriptions as Vacations are to Souvenir Picture Albums. While people who didn’t go on the vacation can look through the album and think, “Boy, that must’ve been fun,” they’ll never get the full experience of what the actual vacation experience was. In the UX community, many folks are now saying, “I’ve looked at these documents and they just don’t do anything for me. Stuart Karten’s ModeMapping deliverables. Quick Turnaround Usability Testing - Boxes and Arrows: The desig. It starts with any number of scenarios: Design and development have taken too long to produce a prototype, you need to release in three weeks, and you suspect there may be design flaws.
You are trying to incorporate usability testing into an Agile development process. Or maybe you simply want to pare down your process to make it shorter and less expensive. Completing usability testing quickly is a challenge anywhere but especially in consultancies, which have to overcome additional challenges, such as learning a new application. To assure success on these projects, I’ve developed a quick turnaround usability testing methodology (QTUT) that minimizes the time needed to complete testing. In Part I of this article, I discuss how to make the first three steps of QTUT—Sales & Kickoff, Recruitment, and Preparation—as short and efficient as possible. Steps in the QTUT Process Step 1: Sales & KickoffStep 2: RecruitmentStep 3: PreparationStep 4: TestingStep 5: Analysis & Reporting Sales & Kickoff. The Grove.