Process of how I work

The discovery stage is when you try to illuminate what you don’t know and better understand what people need. It’s especially important to do discovery activities before making a new product or feature, so you can find out whether it makes sense to do the project at all.

An important goal at this stage is to validate and discard assumptions, and then bring the data and insights to the team. Ideally this research should be done before effort is wasted on building the wrong things or on building things for the wrong people, but it can also be used to get back on track when you’re working with an existing product or service.

- Conduct field/ethnographic studies and user interviews.
- Run diary studies to understand your users’ information needs and behaviors.
- User interview to gain knowledge on user problems.
- Interview stakeholders to gather and understand business requirements and constraints.
- Identify mental models and create empathy maps.
- Interview sales, support, and training staff. What are the most frequent problems and questions they hear from users? What are the worst problems people have? What makes people angry?
- Listen to sales and support calls. What do people ask about? What do they have problems understanding? How do the sales and support staff explain and help? What is the vocabulary mismatch between users and staff?
- Do competitive testing. Find the strengths and weaknesses in your competitors’ products. Discover what users like best.

Exploration methods are for understanding the problem space and design scope and addressing user needs appropriately.

- Compare features against competitors.
- Do design reviews.
- Use research to build user personas and write user stories.
- Analyze user tasks to find ways to save people time and effort.
- Show stakeholders the user journey and where the risky areas are for losing customers along the way. Decide together what an ideal user journey would look like.
- Explore design possibilities by imagining many different approaches, brainstorming, and testing the best ideas in order to identify best-of-breed design components to retain.
- Obtain feedback on early-stage task flows by walking through designs with stakeholders and subject-matter experts. Ask for written reactions and questions (silent brainstorming), to avoid group think and to enable people who might not speak up in a group to tell you what concerns them.
- Iterate designs by testing paper prototypes with target users, and then test interactive prototypes by watching people use them. Don’t gather opinions. Instead, note how well designs work to help people complete tasks and avoid errors. Let people show you where the problem areas are, then redesign and test again.
- Use card sorting and tree testing to find out how people group your information, to help inform your navigation and information organization scheme.

Testing and validation methods are for checking designs during development and beyond, to make sure systems work well for the people who use them.

- Do qualitative usability testing. Testing early and often with a diverse range of people, alone and in groups. Conduct an accessibility evaluation to ensure universal access.
- Ask people to self-report their interactions and any interesting incidents while using the system over time, for example with diary studies.
- Audit training classes and note the topics, questions people ask, and answers given. Test instructions and help systems.
- Talk with user groups.
- Create Affinity Diagrams.
- Do Preference testing.
- Staff social-media accounts and talk with users online. Monitor social media for kudos and complaints.
- Analyze user-forum posts. User forums are sources for important questions to address and answers that solve problems. Bring that learning back to the design and development team.
- Do benchmark testing: If you’re planning a major redesign or measuring improvement, test to determine time on task, task completion, and error rates of your current system, so you can gauge progress over time.

Listen throughout the research and design cycle to help understand existing problems and to look for new issues. Analyze gathered data and monitor incoming information for patterns and trends.

- Survey customers and prospective users.
- Monitor analytics and metrics to discover trends and anomalies and to gauge your progress.
- Analyze search queries: What do people look for and what do they call it? Search logs are often overlooked, but they contain important information.
- Make it easy to send in comments, bug reports, and questions. Analyze incoming feedback channels periodically for top usability issues and trouble areas. Look for clues about what people can’t find, their misunderstandings, and any unintended effects.
- Collect frequently asked questions and try to solve the problems they represent.
- Give talks and demos: capture questions and concerns.