Research is essential to the success of any design solution, to know the user and their challenges. Like users, projects come in many sizes – time, budget or team may influence the approach.

My research & design process…

Stakeholder Interviews

The discovery stage of all projects involve conversations with the key contacts in the client organisation funding, selling, or driving the product. I have experience liaising with stakeholders ranging from operational staff to high-level product, divisional and organisation management, including CTO and CEO.

User Interviews

User interviews are a key activity for understanding the tasks and motivations of the user group for being designed for. Interviews may be formally scheduled, or informal chats in a suitable location where the target demographic are present. With projects impacting various business functions I will interview operational staff potentially impacted by system changes.

Contextual Enquiry

Where possible, user interviewing in the location they will use the app or service can enable a greater understanding their tasks, context, environment and challenges.

Competitor Analysis

Almost all projects will involve an audit/review of competing or complementary apps or services, where appropriate including a report summarising the competitive landscape. Large projects may enable user testing of competing services to illicit deeper understanding and competitor benchmarking for later comparison.

Analytics Review

Where applicable for existing services, analytics data may yield useful insights and recommendations. All analytics packages provide key reports, such as most frequently visited pages, visitor demographics, bounce rate and more that may help identify customer pain points, or other opportunities for improvement or change.

Surveys

With sufficient lead time online and in-person surveys may be employed to solicit feedback from current (or potential) users. Surveys may be used to assess existing business/service operational experiences to evaluating potential solutions ahead of more extensive design activity.

Heuristic Review

Any project involving changes to an existing service or application will include heuristic evaluation against recognised usability principlesand best practice, with usability flaws and other areas for improvement documented for additional analysis, prioritisation and planning activities.

Affinity Diagramming

In workshops and brainstorming sessions related content or concepts will be sorted into groups, based on natural relationships, for review and further analysis. It is also frequently used in contextual inquiry to organise notes and insights from field interviews or for organising other freeform comments, such as open-ended survey responses, user feedback, support calls, or other qualitative data.

Customer Journey Map

An experience map, customer journey map or user flow, provides a holistic, visual representation of users interactions with the organisation, service or application being designed and is a core element of my process, building understanding of the problem space, and enabling communication within teams about pain points and possible solutions.

Workflow Diagram

A workflow, or activity diagram, is a graphical representation of activities and actions conducted by users of a system and is another core element of my design process when considering the finer details of direct user/system touch points.

Content Audit & Sitemap

Content heavy solutions, such as web sites will generally involve a content audit to catalogue existing content, hierarchy and information architecture ahead of additional analysis or redesign. A sitemap maybe produced to represent all pages/content sections available on a website or app.

Use Cases

A use case list of interactions between a user and a system is often developed as requirements for software development projects, with defined actors and roles.

Sketching

All ideation starts with rough sketches exploring functional opportunities, potential interaction models and design direction.

Wireframe

Wireframes outlining and documenting the layout and user interaction of a product or service are a core element of all UX projects I undertake.

Mockup

High fidelity visual designs exploring branding and aesthetic direction are a key element of most digital projects I under take. All ideation starts with rough sketches exploring functional opportunities, potential interaction models and design direction.

Prototype

Low and high fidelity interactive prototypes are often developed to communicate dynamic, animation-based user interaction. Prototypes may be employed to achieve buy-in on a visual/interaction concept and convey interaction nuances to developers for implementation, along with documentation.

Personas

In early stage design activities personas representing 'typical users' may be developed from qualitative and quantitative data from analytics, surveys, interviews, user testing, and other research. These personas are assigned names, photographs, motivations, goals, and a believable backstory based on the backgrounds of real people using the app or service.

Scenarios

In early stage design activities and ideation, a scenario narrative may be produced, describing “a day in the life of” a persona, indicating how the service fits into their lives.

Storyboards

In early stage design activities and ideation a visual sequence of events may be produced to capture a user’s interactions with a product. Storyboard are often a design artefact like rough sketches to assist design activities, generally not shared with wider project stakeholders. In some circumstances where appropriate polished versions may be used to communicate sequences of events to key stakeholders in order to achieve buy-in for a concept.

A/B Testing

Comparative evaluation of multiple design solutions may be undertaken to measure the performance of each and select the more successful approach.

User Testing

Depending on project timing and resources, informal or formal, lab-based user testing may be undertaken to evaluate the usability and performance of a design solution, and to inform design direction and future iterations.