The User Experience Team of One

09 Aug 2023

Book	The User Experience Team of One: A Research and Design Survival Guide
Author	Leah Buley
Published	July 9, 2013

User research vs user experience (UX)

User research is about understanding users and their needs, and user experience design is about designing a user’s interactions with a product from moment to moment.

Goal of UX design = user happiness

When the point of contact between the product and the people becomes a point of friction, then the designer has failed. On the other hand, if people are made safer, more comfortable, more eager to purchase, more efficient-—or just plain happier—-by contact with the product, then the designer has succeeded.

Importance of market/ customer segmentation

Marketing segmentation is one of the most useful forms of secondary user research for UX professionals to review, so if your organization has done segmentation work, definitely start there.

Don’t present not doing UX research as an option

Sales pros have a clever technique called the “alternative close.” Instead of asking permission to close the deal (or, in this case, to do the work), they provide two alternatives for how to go about it. Not, “Can I ring you up?” but rather, “Will that be cash or charge?” In UX, an equivalent would be not “Can we do some research,” but rather “We could do a large research study, or we could do a small informal evaluation to get some quick feedback.” Then the negotiation becomes not if, but how.

Expectations of design

People may not say it directly, but there’s usually an expectation that having someone who will focus on UX will result in changes to the product that will immediately wow everyone. This can be a tricky expectation to manage, since design improvements often happen gradually, over time.

“Listening tour” technique

A listening tour is time set up to gather information and learn what matters to your colleagues. Especially for teams of one, knowing the priorities of others will help you identify where there are opportunities and problems to solve, and where user-centered design practices might be a good fit.

If you only have time to do one method, focus on the one that best lays bare other people’s ideas and hopes for the product: the “Listening Tour.” Even if you do nothing else, the “Listening Tour” will give you valuable background on team dynamics, and will help you discover the assumptions and conditions you’ll be working with as you set out to change and improve the user experience.

“Press release” technique (see “Working Backwards”)

Ask people to imagine that the future is now. The design of the product is complete, and it’s out in the world. What does the press release say? Or what does a blog post say about it? Ask people to share their artifacts to understand their vision, and then discuss what still needs to be built, what kind of personality the product will need to have, and how it will fit into their customers’ lives for this vision to be realized.

Storyboards

Storyboards are usually a tool for later in the process, once you start developing product concepts and transitioning into a detailed design. But in a strategy workshop, they can be an interesting activity to get the whole team (even stakeholders whom you might think of as too high up to be participating in detailed design) to start thinking about the user experience. Often, it’s good to do a storyboard exercise after spending some time thinking about customer needs. Then the storyboard becomes a fun, visual way to explain how an offering can address those customer needs.

Mood boards

Mood boards are essentially large collages where visual inspiration is carefully assembled to represent the feeling, appearance, and impression that the finished product should make (see Figure 5.17). The mood board typically brings together colors, photos, catch phrases, and other visual stimuli to create visceral impressions that the team agrees will be the direction the product should aspire to.

Kano model

The Kano Model helps you identify three categories of product features: those that are considered “basics” (think of these as tables stakes), those that are considered “performance” attributes (you’ve got to do at least some of them to remain competitive with the market), and those that are considered “delight” attributes (people don’t expect them, but they love you for having them).

Spend time with users!

A surprisingly large number of people claim to practice user-centered design, but fail to ever actually speak with or spend time with users. Don’t be like them. One of the core tenets of a user-centered philosophy is that you respect and learn from your users’ sometimes-unpredictable lives.

“Heuristic evaluation” technique: basically a product walk-through/ review

A heuristic evaluation is a fancy term for a review of a product to see how well it complies with recognized usability principles. In a typical heuristic evaluation, a user experience professional audits a product and identifies any parts that don’t conform to established standards and best practices. A heuristic markup is conceptually similar to a heuristic evaluation, but it places less emphasis on recognized standards and more emphasis on your own gut reactions and responses as you move through the product. A heuristic markup helps you tell the story of how a user might experience the product from start to finish (see Figure 6.8). In a heuristic markup, you start at the beginning of the product and record your thought process as you move through the experience.

Recording your emotions as you do a product walk-through is a helpful technique

Record emotions. Along with your thought process, it can be illuminating to record your emotional responses to each step or screen (see Figure 6.9). Did it make you feel happy? Surprised? Confused? Frustrated? Make an emotional graph of the entire experience to help you pinpoint the most critical areas to improve or, alternately, to preserve. Think in terms of the seven universal human emotions: anger, joy, sadness, disgust, fear, contempt, and surprise.

Categories/ dimensions to assess a product on

The areas you focus on may be influenced by the domain you are evaluating and your goals for the project, but here are some common areas to focus on in your framework:

• Content
• Design
• Features and functionality
• Continuity or flow
• Intuitiveness
• Strengths, weaknesses, opportunities

Design briefs

One way to think about a design brief is that it clarifies the constraints that the design solution must obey. These constraints could include features and functionality, value or brand propositions that the solution must reinforce or align with, and customers or users whom the solution should support.

One of the most important purposes of the design brief is to make sure that you know (and maybe can even help determine) what ideas or expectations your non-UX colleagues have for the product. Once you have provided a description of what the end result should look like, you’ve given non-UX-folks something that they can respond and react to.

Design principles and your product’s “personality”

Design principles are a tool to help you clarify what personality is right for your product, and then to ensure as you progress that you are designing an experience with this personality. Because these design principles set a direction for the product design, they are ideally done before beginning a detailed design.

Design principles should be actionable

Design principles should help you make decisions in product design. This means they should be tangible and, to a certain extent, pointed. To test if a statement is specific and evocative enough, ask yourself if that statement could describe any of your competitors’ products. If it could, it probably needs more work.

Sketchboards

A sketchboard is a way to display the sketches that you and the team have created and facilitate a group conversation around them. You can think of a sketchboard as a big poster that you create by assembling your sketches and initial ideas for the design of the system. Sketchboards also help you look beyond individual screens and envision how someone will move among multiple parts of a product or system.

Digital experiences can be messy. Design accordingly

People don’t experience digital products page-by-page or screen-by-screen. They pop in the back door, jump erratically from one part to another, break your forms, and trick your logic. A task flow gets you thinking about how people really use your product. What are the most likely scenarios and sequences that users will follow? And what are some potential side doors that they may use to end up in the same place? Often, the user experience breaks down most at the “moments in between,” when someone moves from one step or screen to another (no matter how carefully each step has been designed). A task flow helps you design an experience that flows smoothly even through the transition points.

Wireframes

Wireframes are the meat and potatoes of user experience design. Many of the methods leading up to this point have all been geared toward enabling you to create smart, appropriate, relevant designs right here. A wireframe is a skeletal depiction of what a product should look like (see Figure 7.23). If that sounds simple, let’s not forget that a skeleton has an awful lot of bones. Like a skeleton, wireframes show you how the whole system hangs together to create a complete, interconnected structure that stands together as a whole.

The importance of prototying

Prototypes are semi-functional models of a product that help you test how it will work and feel. Prototypes can vary widely from the crudest paper-based explorations to highly realistic, functional models. This basic approach—idea first, then prototype, and then further improvement based on what you learn—is a powerful and time-endorsed method for any type of new product development.

Prototyping can save you time, but making a prototype takes time, too. You want to be sure that you’re investing the time to validate something that really needs to be validated. In general, prototypes are ideal for validating new or nonstandard interactions or products, or for testing parts of the product that are simply too important to get wrong.

Multichannel product experiences

Five years ago, it was more common to talk about user experiences as existing within the context of a single channel or touch point. Today, we understand that a digital product is often a full, multichannel experience, and that our job is to give people a seamless product experience even as they jump from PC to mobile to tablet and back again. Even the concept of PC, mobile, and tablet is, ultimately, very 2008. Today, digital experiences are embedded in our homes, in our cars, and in what we wear on our bodies.

Definition of design

Design is the act of creating new solutions under constrained circumstances, whether those constraints are aesthetic, technological, or resource-driven.