5 minutes a day with a UX practitioner
Answers to most common questions
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via UX Magazine
Demographics are temptingly easy to collect from various sources in an organization, but persona work yields a much deeper understanding of why customers do the things they do and what they expect from an organization within any given context. This knowledge about customers’ motivations (the why) makes it possible to create innovative solutions, products, ad campaigns, and customer support (the what) that cater to customers on a personal level.
Insightful read on persona development, though $80,000-120,000 budget mentioned could be a show stopper for most.
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From Smashing Magazine on advantages of the lean UX process:
Inspired by Lean and Agile development theories, Lean UX is the practice of bringing the true nature of our work to light faster, with less emphasis on deliverables and greater focus on the actual experience being designed.
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Quote reblogged from Knewton User Experiencea UX vision is the articulation of what a company expects to do to make money, from the perspective of the people they expect to use, experience, or purchase it.Leo Frishberg (via knewtonux)
(Source: uxmatters.com)
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What is the typical UX process like?
Of course, everyone has their own preferred way of doing things and no two projects are ever alike, but here is my most typical approach: I start with initial stakeholders’ interviews to define the scope and depth of project, conduct competitive analysis and deep study of any available usability tests/data as well as web metrics (google analytics, chartbeat, woopra, kissmetrics, etc - anything and everything available).
Based on findings, creating or re-defining personas, clarifying feature set, providing recommendations and developing new as well as improving old scenarios and use cases, creating flow diagrams, schematics and wireframes for new features or screens that will need to be redesigned.
Sometimes I start with paper prototypes and other times move directly to interactive ones to be able to test a certain process/feature faster under closer to reality conditions. Then, testing them with users and evaluating the results.
Once we get the repeatable/predictable/desired outcomes on the prototypes, it’s time for hands-on Photoshop & HTML/CSS coding iterations, to be implemented on the testing server. Once all coding bugs have been ironed out, moving latest changes to staging server and inviting select users to test new features (while watching metrics for any bottlenecks) and asking for feedback.
After things have been smoothed out once more, it’s time for code sign-off to the live production server and - sometimes - to start the process over on the next feature set :)
