The User Experience Team of One

by Leah Buley

  • Modular: These are the opposite of 100-page documents that require constant updating. These practices are deliberate and modular, so you can mix and match them to tailor your process to the needs of your organization.

  From start-to-finish, these practices constitute a complete and robust blueprint for a UX team of one to work from. You can follow Part II from beginning to end, or pick and choose practices to match your need and time available. A detailed reference chart with all the methods in Part II is provided in the appendix.

  NOTE GOOD LIFE LABS CASE STUDY

  Most of the methods in Part II aren’t just activities; they also result in some form of documentation. To show how these outputs build upon one another, most of the work samples that are shown center around a common case study: the fictitious software company Good Life Labs, makers of software to help people work less and play more. In our scenario, Good Life Labs wants to take their successful business-to-business software and adapt it to sell directly to consumers.

  CHAPTER 5

  Planning and Discovery Methods

  METHOD 1

  UX Questionnaire

  METHOD 2

  UX Project Plan

  METHOD 3

  Listening Tour

  METHOD 4

  Opportunity Workshop

  METHOD 5

  Project Brief

  METHOD 6

  Strategy Workshop

  If You Only Do One Thing...

  The practice of user experience begins with planning and discovery. Planning and discovery methods focus and guide your work, and, in the end, set you up for long-term success. This is the point in the process where you get focused, get organized, and get agreement with others on priorities and goals before jumping in and overhauling the product. All of those things not only give you more confidence as you work, but they also give others confidence that there is rigor and predictability in this practice—in short, that it’s good business.

  The practices and methods in this chapter will help you ask yourself these questions: What do you plan to fix or improve through user experience design? What is the high-level vision for the resulting experience? What is the opportunity here, relative to the market and to your organization’s own standards for a quality outcome? Finally, what are the nuts and bolts of the work you’ll be doing? What’s the plan, and how will UX work integrate with the other parts of the product development effort?

  In this chapter, we’ll cover the following methods and answer the questions they provoke:

  • UX Questionnaire. What do you know about your product and the user experience that it’s intended to provide, and what do you need to know?

  • UX Project Plan. What UX practices will you employ to design a great user experience?

  • Listening Tour. What are the team’s priorities, and how much awareness and support for UX currently exists?

  • Opportunity Workshop. What areas of the product are most in need of improvement from a UX perspective?

  • Project Brief. What are the expected outcomes for this user-centered design project?

  • Strategy Workshop. What is your team’s vision for the ideal user experience, and what do you need to focus on to bring that unique experience to life?

  METHOD 1

  UX Questionnaire

  How much do you know about your product and the user experience that it’s intended to provide? What else do you need to know?

  A user experience questionnaire is deceptively simple: it’s just a standard list of questions for you to ask yourself about a product or user experience at the start of any engagement. Why not just start working on the user experience and see where things go? In theory, if a product has a clear purpose and a specific audience, and you have some good ideas for how to improve the user experience, then you’re all set. Of course, product design can go off track for any number of reasons. UX work, in particular, often is brought in as a silver bullet to solve what can be a dizzying set of challenges, ranging from lack of product strategy to issues with the organizational structure. The user interface is often where these problems become visible.

  A good user experience questionnaire can help you spot issues early on, which puts you in a better position to point out all those red flags and prevent them from putting the design at risk. On a more practical level, a user experience questionnaire can also help you make sure that the goals are clear and that you know what you’re designing and why. A good user experience questionnaire will also get you thinking about what work still needs to be done and how you might want to proceed. This then feeds into the “UX Project Plan” (described later in this chapter).

  You can create a template like the one shown in Figure 5.1 to make it an easily repeatable process. As you can see, the final document doesn’t have to be too polished. Mostly, it’s a scratch pad for you to help yourself think through specific questions.

  Average Time

  1–2 hours total

  • 1 hour to put together

  • (Optional) 1 hour for follow-up questions with colleagues

  Use When

  • You’re about to start work on a new project and have questions about whether you’re set up for a successful engagement. You wonder if there is more planning, positioning, or strategic thinking that needs to be done before the user experience design can be improved.

  • At any point to help you assess your own understanding of the product

  FIGURE 5.1

  A sample UX questionnaire.

  Try It Out

  1. Ask yourself some key questions.

  Set aside an hour at the start of a project to answer the following questions.

  • Team: Who is responsible for the product? Who is in charge? Who sponsors changes or new work (for example, whose budget does it come out of)? Who has approval power? Who knows about the history of the product and why certain decisions are made? (These individuals would be good to talk to.) Who determines the strategic direction for the product? Who specifies what the features and functions should be? Who currently designs them? Who builds them? Who should you keep in the loop with regular project updates? Who maintains it?

  • Goals: What are the project goals? Ideally, you can summarize this as a short list of things you aim to achieve with this project. If you have three to five items in this list, you’re probably in good shape. If the project has dozens of goals, expectations may be overly broad or ambitious. Ask around to figure out which ones are top priority and which are less critical, if push comes to shove.

  • Users: Who are the target users? Describe the main categories of users who will use the product in as much detail as possible. Why do they use the product? What are their primary motivators, passions, and goals? If the answer is “our users are everybody,” this is a red flag. Talk to colleagues to try to define your target users with more specificity.

  • Strategy: What is the value proposition of the product? Why do people use it? Why do they choose to use it over competitors’ products? What does the product stand for? What is the product vision?

  • Tasks and scenarios: What are the primary tasks and scenarios that the design should support?

  • Success measures: How does the product make money? Which levers influence whether the product is profitable or not? What user behaviors translate to profit? What key performance indicators are tracked? Are there any other numbers that people track to determine if the product is performing well or poorly?

  • Key dates and milestones: Are there any significant deadlines that you should be aware of, either related to one-off projects or regular production or milestones?

  • Risks: Are there any significant red flags that you see up front?

  2. If you don’t know, ask.

  If you encounter a question you don’t know the answer to, ask a co-worker—or even a few of them. Different people may give you different perspectives on the situation.

  Tips and Tricks for UX Questionnaires

  • Feed into t
he project brief. If you fill out a user experience questionnaire in relation to a specific project or initiative, the answers you provide here can become the foundation of your “Project Brief” (described later in this chapter).

  • If you work remotely... It’s even more important for you to ask yourself these kinds of questions, to ensure that being at a distance isn’t creating any blind spots for you. Using a template like the one shown in Figure 5.1 can help you spot any areas that you may be overlooking.

  METHOD 2

  UX Project Plan

  What UX practices will you employ to design a great user experience?

  A UX project plan shouldn’t be confused with the overall project plan, which is usually owned by a project manager and includes such things as engineering and quality assurance. The UX project plan may help you think about how UX work will integrate with the broader project timeline, but it is primarily your plan for how you’re going to conduct UX activities. Sometimes, the work you are asked to do as a UX team of one doesn’t warrant a full-blown plan. Fix a Web page. Do a heuristic assessment. Such activities may just take a day or two. However, if your involvement is likely to span more than a few weeks, a plan is important. Mainly, a UX project plan forces you to be honest with yourself about how you are going to tackle the work. This can be especially helpful if you are not really sure how you’re going to tackle work—which, let’s face it, happens every now and again. Sitting down to craft a plan helps you figure out what your process should be.

  Even if no one has directly asked you for a UX project plan, it’s probably a good idea to put one together. There may come a time in the project when someone does ask you. When they do, you’ll be ready. Because UX processes are sometimes unfamiliar and new, your non-UX colleagues may not know what to expect as far as a process or deliverables. A clear and jargon-free UX plan can help set their expectations. It’s even better if you can include work samples. If you don’t have examples from your own portfolio yet, borrowing examples from books or online works, too.

  Average Time

  2–3 hours, plus ongoing maintenance thereafter

  • 1 hour to put together

  • 1–2 hours to share and revise

  Use When

  • You start your first step in planning a UX project.

  • Or, after doing some preliminary research, when talking to stakeholders, and once you’re confident that you understand project goals.

  Try It Out

  1. First, make sure you understand the goals of the project.

  Try to summarize them in a few short statements. The goals should speak to the business or behavioral change that you hope to create through your work. (If you’ve completed a “Project Brief,” described later in this chapter, it will satisfy this step.)

  2. Brainstorm relevant methods.

  Start free-listing activities that you think will help you achieve your goal. Sometimes, it helps to start by working backward. For example, if the project goal is to produce more inbound sales leads, you’ll need to make it easier for customers to understand and be excited by your services and request more information. To do that, you’ll need to redesign your landing pages. But before that, you’ll need to understand users’ perceptions of the landing pages now, why they’re going there, and in what ways the site does and doesn’t currently meet their needs.

  3. Estimate duration.

  Once you’ve got a solid list of activities that you think will help achieve the project goal, estimate the time you think each activity will take. (For help with time estimates, refer to the average time estimates throughout Part II of this book, and be sure to check out the tip on estimating complexity later in this chapter.)

  4. Place milestones.

  Talk to your colleagues—especially those who are responsible for specific milestones relating to the product—and find out if there are key milestones or firm deadlines that you need to be aware of. Often, these will influence how much time you have for each step and, in turn, what type of activity you choose. For example, do you need to have a functioning prototype ready in four weeks? If so, maybe you don’t have time for extensive in-the-field contextual research. Maybe aim for a day of “Guerrilla User Research” instead (see Chapter 6, “Research Methods”).

  5. Create a simple document.

  Put your plan together in a simple document that lays out activity, duration, inputs, outputs, and who needs to be involved. You can also show points of overlap or dependencies with the broader project plan. Avoid the tendency to spend too much time on this document overly finessing its design. Figure 5.2 shows a simple Project Plan formatted as a table. Figure 5.3 shows how you can lay out a Project Plan to visualize dependencies. This can be accomplished by simply coloring in cells in Excel. Figure 5.4 shows that your plan doesn’t even have to be digitized. A large white board can be all you need.

  FIGURE 5.2

  This project plan is simply a table with some estimates and assumptions spelled out.

  FIGURE 5.3

  Alternately, if you need to visualize the work over time, you can use a format like this (which is known as a Gantt Chart) to see duration and dependencies.

  FIGURE 5.4

  Of course, a white board works just fine as well, especially if you have a dedicated workspace where the whole team can pop in and check on the plan as needed.

  Tips and Tricks for UX Project Plans

  • Scope and re-scope. Often, your first pass at a UX project plan is luxuriously paced and, alas, unrealistic, given the time available. It’s common to have to do another pass through the plan, to reduce it down to a manageable minimum.

  • Estimate complexity. While reducing is often necessary, be careful not to shortchange yourself in the process. Use a complexity index like the one shown in Figure 5.5 to figure out which pieces are most likely to require extra time. Here is how a complexity index works: give each task or step a number to indicate how hard or complex it seems. One equals not hard at all. Three equals pretty complex and unpredictable. Two would be somewhere in between. For the most complex items, pad the calendar with extra time. Alternately, you can ask yourself whether these need to be done as planned, or whether they can be simplified or reduced.

  • Use checklists. Make sure that you are considering all the standard parts of the UX process and assessing whether and if each part applies. Use a simple checklist like the one shown in Figure 5.6 to mentally go over each part of a standard process and determine which should be included in your work.

  FIGURE 5.5

  The key to the complexity index is the rating given in the third column (how complex?).

  • Plan for triage periods. In every project, there are rough patches and smooth patches. Usually, the rough patches correspond to important transition points. This is natural. Those are the moments when groups of people are working together to determine how to move forward. That inevitably requires some extra time for communication, thinking, and getting aligned. Being caught unaware inevitably makes it feel like the project is in trouble, but you can plan ahead for it by adding triage buffer zones into your project plan. There are a few places where triage padding is advisable:

  • Use after research, around the time that you are socializing the research findings and deciding what to do about them.

  • Use once the designs start to transition to higher fidelity (for example, moving from sketches into wireframes). Seeing the designs become more “real” triggers all kinds of reactions and often a need to adjust based on those reactions.

  • If you work remotely... Find ways to make your plan easy for others to see and access. This doesn’t necessarily have to mean heavy documentation: a Google Spreadsheet or an Excel document on a shared drive is probably all you need. It can also be helpful to set up a physical reminder of the plan (such as a printout or a white board) to help keep yourself on track.

  FIGURE 5.6

  Your checklist should be customized to the parts of the process that you typica
lly include in your work.

  METHOD 3

  Listening Tour

  What are the team’s priorities, and how much awareness and support for UX currently exists?

  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. Sometimes, UX practitioners describe this as stakeholder interviews, and they usually take the format shown in Figure 5.7, just you and a colleague chatting in an office or conference room. Whatever the label, the goal is the same: to learn about your colleagues’ priorities and goals, and to formulate a point of view on the role of UX in helping them accomplish those goals. If you’re lucky on your listening tour, you’ll be pleasantly surprised by how much people already value human-centered products (as evidenced by code words like “user-friendly,” “intuitive,” and inevitably, “Apple”). If you’re less lucky, you might find that people have a wary and seasoned caution about what can and cannot be done. But that’s valuable information, too.

  FIGURE 5.7

  A listening tour.

  Average Time

  5–8 hours total

  • 1 hour to plan and schedule

  • 3–5 hours to interview people

  • 1–2 hours to synthesize your notes