WUD promo: 50% off our sustainable design book and webinar
The theme of this year’s World Usability Day, which takes place on November 12, is “Designing for a Sustainable World”. WUD is a truly global event, and sustainable design is certainly a global issue. It’s also a personal issue for UX people; whether you’re testing a web site or designing a new mobile device, your work will have an impact on people, the environment, and economic systems. What can you do to ensure your solutions leave the smallest possible footprint on our planet, promote social justice, and contribute to stable, sustainable economies?
How to plan your first lean user research project
It’s one thing to announce you’ll start conducting lean user research and another thing to do it. How do you start when you’re a tiny four-person team juggling three unique lines of business?
We poured our energy into drafting a research roadmap. It was ambitious and read like a thick, spiral-bound menu from the Cheesecake Factory. A buffet of enticing research techniques. Mental models, ethnographic studies, journey maps, interviews, surveys and Big Data. But face it: small businesses like ours don’t have the resources to apply them all. So Lou and Elaine suggested we tap our deep bench of consultants for advice. Cut out the cheesecake, go straight to the meat.
We asked our experts a question: how can we glean insights without investing a lot of time or money? Here are quick takeaways I gained from the six who answered the call.
1. Know the research question before you start.
Curb the temptation to tackle everything at once. Choose the one burning question you most want to answer then plan a short sprint no longer than 2-3 weeks long. By keeping your sprints short and focused, you obtain quick, actionable insights. You avoid burnout and enable repeatable research.
– From Caroline Jarrett, form design and survey guru
2. Don’t fish with a hammer.
Tools can be shiny and sexy but choose the one(s) that will help you answer the research question. For example, mental models are most useful when you plan to pivot strategies or have a known blind spot.
– From Indi Young, author of Mental Models and Practical Empathy
3. Tap asynchronous tools. Or a few volunteers.
Asynchronous tools. Small teams can extend their capacity by using asynchronous tools to gather customer input. Be sure to pick the right tool for the job. For example, a service like Usertesting.com can help you validate usability of task-based actions.
Volunteers. Find interns or volunteers within your organization (or even your customer base) who are passionate about the topic to add brains and elbow grease to your research project.
– From Leah Buley, author of UX Team of One
4. Develop an efficient and effective interview plan.
Interviews. You don’t necessarily need to interview a lot of people. Once you start to hear a pattern in people’s answers, you can stop.
Synthesis. Immediately after each interview, jot down your top 5 takeaways. Iterate your hypothesis as you go. When it’s time to synthesize listen to recordings or pay a transcription service.
– From Steve Portigal, author of Interviewing Users
5. Make a quick and dirty customer story with what you know.
Traditional personas can take weeks or months to research and develop. Meanwhile a customer story, like a Buyer Legend, takes a few hours. It’s written from what you already know about your users and revised as you collect insights. This post shows you how to write your own.
– From Jeff Eisenberg, co-author of Buyer Legends: The Executive’s Storytelling Guide
6. Segment around behavior, not demographics.
Indi Young and Jeff Eisenberg took issue with our audience segments because they focused on demographics. Forget job titles, years of UX experience, gender, they said. Instead, try building segments around a commonly shared behavior or intention.
7. Tell an insights story.
After you gather insights, consider crafting a compelling story, rather than a report about what you learned from your audience. Stories build a foundation of insight that is easier to remember than a report. It also helps build connections with users as people, not numbers.
– From Boon Sheridan, content strategist and IA provocateur
With plenty of food for thought, it’s time to adjust our approach. Stay tuned for our next post, where we’ll reveal the burning question we chose, and cover the highs and lows of conducting our first People Project sprint.
What lean methods have worked well for you? What are we missing?
Upcoming author events (and discounts)
We’ve just updated our calendar; looks like Rosenfeld Media authors will be mostly in North America during the rest of 2009, with stops in Boston (Donna Spencer at UIE 14), Toronto and the Bay Area (Nathan Shedroff, who apparently lives on a plane), and Savannah (Kevin Cheng).
We also have some discounts to share: use code ‘AEALOU’ for $100 off An Event Apart in San Francisco (where Luke Wroblewski will present), and 20% at the UX Conference in Lugano (use code ‘RMuxCH’).
New packages, new pricing coming October 20
Starting next Wednesday, October 20, we’ll simplify how we bundle our books’ various formats (and, yes, we’ll change—slightly—our pricing). In a nutshell, we’ll offer two bundles:
Our first book in EPUB format…
…is now available! Donna Spencer’s Card Sorting can now be read on your iPhone, Sony Reader, Android, or… who knows what else! These ebook sands seem to shift hourly! In any case, we optimized the design for Stanza, and checked on Bookworm and ADE, so it should work fine in most cases.
And best of all, you can’t beat the price: US$5. So download a copy now, and please comment here on how this first effort might be improved.
(Kindle owners, why are we leaving you out? Well, our books have full color interiors and complex layouts; the Kindle isn’t good at presenting that kind of content, at least not yet. But Amazon recently purchased the company that developed Stanza, the primary EPUB reader, so perhaps that’ll change soon.)
Our authors at SXSW 2010
Heading to Austin in March? We’re hoping to as well. Three of our authors have proposals for panels at SXSW 2010, and you can help them get on the program by voting for their panels via SXSW’s panel picker:
- Marko Hurst: Site Search Analytics
- Nathan Shedroff: Made It So (Interface Makers in Movies)
- Nate Bolt: FAIL: When User Research Goes Horribly, Horribly Wrong
- Lou Rosenfeld: The Book is Dead. Long Live the Book!
Please vote early and often; thanks for your help!
IDEA 2009
Rosenfeld Media is a silver sponsor of this year’s IDEA conference. It takes place in Toronto, Canada, September 15-16 (with a September 14 pre-conference). Our own Luke Wroblewski, author of Web Form Design, will speak on “The Impact of Social Models”. Hope to see you in September!
Delve: 3 authors and a discount (NYC, August 5-6)
Rosenfeld Media is proud to be a sponsor of the first Delve:UI—two days of master classes that take place in Brooklyn, NY August 5-6. RM authors Todd Zaki Warfel, Anders Ramsay, and Lou Rosenfeld are on the program; other presenters include Josh Porter, Robert Hoekman, Jason Santa Maria, and RM board member Liz Danzico. Even better, the first 15 people who contact the Delve folks will receive a 20% discount off the event.
Meet Indi Young at Interaccion 2009 (Barcelona)
Mental Models author Indi Young will be presenting and teaching a workshop at Interaccion 2009, which takes place in Barcelona September 7-9. We’ve secured a 20% discount off the standard registration rate for friends of Rosenfeld Media; use code “ROSENFELD”.
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Future Practice Interview: John Ferrara
As part of our Future Practice webinar series, we’re interviewing presenters to give you a preview of what they’ll cover. Next up is John Ferrara on
Extending Game Design to Business Applications. An information architect at The Vanguard Group, John has been published in Boxes & Arrows, Interactions, and presented at venues including the IA Summit and EuroIA. His work is featured in the upcoming Rosenfeld Media book, Search Analytics.
