by Leah Buley
Use When
• You’re new to a company or team.
• You’re trying to transition your responsibilities to include more UX and want to make a case.
• You’re starting out a big project.
Try It Out
1. Ask yourself what you want to learn.
This could be as broad as understanding the overall priorities of the company, or as specific as learning what each person on this project sees as your role. Having a few clearly stated learning objectives in mind will drive who you talk to and what questions you ask. To determine your key learning objectives, ask yourself, “If I learn nothing else, what are the two or three things I must understand better after talking with people?”
2. Next, put together your list of interviewees.
Ask colleagues or a supervisor whom they would recommend that you speak to. Leverage their knowledge of the organization. Or think in terms of roles and then attach names to those roles. For example, who has the budget for this project? Who will be engineering the product? Who is marketing it? Who has ultimate veto power over the design? In any case, aim to speak to a cross-functional team so you can see the project or product from a variety of angles.
3. Write down your questions.
Basically, an interview guide is just a list of questions you want to ask. These questions should ultimately roll up to your learning objectives, but you may find that you need to ask them in different ways, depending on the role of the person you’re talking with. Here are some good generic questions to start with:
• What’s your role in the organization, and how does it relate to the product?
• What are your goals and objectives in your role? What are your top priorities? How do you know if you’re successful? How do you measure success?
• How does your work impact customers? Who do you consider to be your primary customers? Can you describe them? What are their priorities and goals? Why do they use your products? What prevents them from using your products, if anything? What questions do you have about your users that you don’t currently have answers to?
• Who are your competitors, and how well are you doing compared to them? What do you do well? What could be improved? What differentiates your company and your products in the market?
• [If there’s a specific project underway that you’re involved in...] What are your goals for this project? What is your vision for how this project will improve our product? Do you see any risks or red flags?
4. Start listening.
Schedule one-on-ones and ask your questions. Each conversation will probably be different, but try to refer back to your learning objectives in each one, so you can compare answers and spot interesting differences in points of view. If you’re the shy type, or you feel like it will be awkward to ask for people’s time and start interviewing them in this way, here are a couple of things that may help:
• Offer to keep it short. Even 30 minutes of someone’s time is better than nothing, and it’s a lot harder for people to turn you down. You might even offer to take them out to coffee for this meeting, which tends to make conversation more natural and friendly.
• Explain (either beforehand, by email, or at the start of the interview) what you’re trying to accomplish. Let them know that this is a big help to you. Even if you think they could care less about the potential improvements to the user experience, explain that this will help you improve the way you work. And, of course, be gracious and appreciative.
5. Figure out what you heard.
After you have finished all your interviews, review your notes and tease out the big themes. Pay particular attention to:
• Expectations people have of you or of user experience.
• Assumptions and working knowledge about users. What do you absolutely know to be true, what things are merely hunches, and are there any gaping holes in your knowledge?
• Problems or concerns with the existing product.
• Things that have been tried in the past that haven’t worked well and why.
• Questions to follow up at a later date.
• Who wants to be actively involved with UX and in what ways?
These interviews should help you see what parts of the product you should be focusing on, and what sacred cows are truly sacred (versus those that can be challenged). They may also help you see what technical and practical constraints you will need to work within. Without a doubt, they will give you a sense of formal and softer measures by which success will be judged. Finally, they will help you gauge how much support and enthusiasm there is for user-centered improvements. The art of the listening tour, and interviewing in general, is to accept and believe what your interviewee is telling you, but also to ask probing questions to try to understand what’s really underneath their beliefs. When in doubt, keep asking “why?”
Tips and Tricks for Listening Tours
• Share what you learn. It’s courteous to offer to share your findings with your interviewees. Send a heartfelt thank-you and a summary of the themes that you heard from your interviews to build goodwill for the next time you need to do a listening tour.
• Take good notes. If you are a competent touch-typist, take along a laptop for note-taking and type your notes as you go. If you’re more of a hunt-and-peck kind of typist, consider taking along a buddy to take notes, so you can focus on the conversation. While it’s common to record interviews with users, it’s probably best to put the recorder away for your listening tour. Part of what you’re trying to accomplish here is to build rapport. Being recorded can make people a little cautious. If you’re a truly terrible note-taker, leave a few minutes at the end of each conversation just for summarizing and ask your interviewee to sum up the most important things from his point of view. During this time, you can jot down just the high-level things as he rattles them off.
• Plan ahead how you want to share what you learned. Think in advance about how you might like to report, share, or otherwise use your findings. Then structure your questions accordingly. For example, if you’d like to be able to easily compare the top three priorities for all interviewees on one slide, that pretty much means you should ask a question like, “What are your top three priority areas in our product?”
• If you work remotely... Use a video conferencing tool like WebEx, GoToMeeting, or Skype. Up to 80 percent of communication is non-verbal, so being able to take in the visual cues as well as the verbal ones is important.
METHOD 4
Opportunity Workshop
What areas of the product are most in need of improvement from a UX perspective?
An opportunity workshop is a way to quickly assess what work needs to be done to improve the user experience, what’s highest priority from a business perspective, and what will have the most impact from a user perspective.
Average Time
3–4 hours total
• 1 hour to plan and invite people
• 2 hours to conduct workshop
• 1 hour to document what you learned and plan the next steps
Use When
• You find yourself having general discussions about the need for an improved user experience, but there is no clear momentum or sense of how to get there
Try It Out
1. Host a work session.
Block off at least two hours on the calendar and invite together a cross-functional team of people who all work on the product.
2. State the goals of the work session.
• To identify issues and pain points in the current product or process
• To prioritize from a UX point of view
• To help the team decide on the next steps to address or improve any of them.
3. Uncover problem areas.
Guide the team in a pain storm activity on Post-it notes or index cards, as shown in Figure 5.8. Ask everyone to write down as many things they can think of that are:
FIGURE 5.8
Brainstorm opportunity
areas.
• A problem in the current product
• A missed opportunity in the current product
• Just plain important to get right in the product
• One-by-one, ask people to share their Post-it notes, and put them on the wall where others can see them.
4. Discuss strengths.
Next, ask the team to write down the product’s strengths—again, one strength per sticky note, as shown in Figure 5.9. It’s useful to follow problem areas with strengths so that the team ends on a positive note, even if the overall discussion may have been constructively critical.
5. Find themes.
Next, guide the team in an activity to organize the issues that were identified into related groupings. Once some clear groups begin to emerge, ask the team to label each group. Put the label on another sticky note (preferably of a different size or color, so it stands out from the other Post-its) so everyone can easily stand back and see the issues and opportunities as broad themes.
FIGURE 5.9
Brainstorm strengths.
6. Prioritize.
Now, lead the team in a prioritization exercise. This could just be a discussion. Or, to make it more structured, give everyone a certain number of votes, and ask them to put their votes next to the clusters that they think are most urgent to address, improve, or enhance.
7. Discuss.
Once the priorities have been clearly identified, lead the group in a discussion about how urgently these should be addressed, and how you’d like to address them.
Tips and Tricks for Opportunity Workshops
• Use as a foundation for follow-up conversations. Just because the team reaches some clear priorities doesn’t necessarily mean that they will or should all be acted on. You can, however, use them as a starting point for tangible conversations with decision makers about what changes the team is recommending and why.
• Don’t skip user research. An opportunity workshop is a great way to create a dialogue about how to improve the user experience, but it should not be considered a replacement for actually talking to customers. Issues raised here should be considered hypotheses to be validated or disproven through subsequent research and user testing.
• If you work remotely... It’s definitely easier to do this kind of thing in person in a workshop setting. However, if that’s not an option, you can probably gather much of the same information using a survey. (SurveyMonkey and the forms feature in Google Spreadsheets both create easy and free surveys.) Set up your survey to ask people about the perceived strengths and weaknesses of the product. Once you’ve gotten responses from everyone, do your own clustering, and send a follow-up survey asking people to prioritize problem areas and provide thoughts on how urgently they believe these issues need to be addressed.
METHOD 5
Project Brief
What are expected outcomes for this user-centered design project?
Often, when a project is beginning, everyone involved has distinct ideas for what the right outcome looks like. In team discussions, it’s possible for people to express their point of view and think they’re all saying the same thing, but actually have very different ideas of what they expect to see. A project brief states directly what goals or expectations should prevail as the main mandate for the work. The brief, as its name suggests, capitalizes on the cardinal virtue of brevity to distinctly and clearly summarize the overall plan for the project: what you’re doing, why you’re doing it, relevant constraints that will drive your work, and what outcomes you expect. Another bonus of the brief is that by being a short description, it’s more likely that people will actually read it. This creates an opportunity for everyone to agree or, if not agree, at least have a productive conversation about the focus and goals of the project.
Average Time
2–3 hours total
• 1 hour to write the brief
• 1–2 hours to share with people (either in one-on-one conversations or a group meeting)
Use When
• You’re starting a new project.
• You’ve inherited an in-progress project or have joined a team that’s already been working together, but you need to get clarity and alignment on what you’re ultimately expected to deliver.
Try It Out
1. Determine the right building blocks for your project brief.
Based on your organization and what you’re working on, here are some key questions to ask yourself (either on paper, or just in your head) when you’re teeing up a project. Note that these questions reflect many of the things you think about when doing a “UX Questionnaire” (described earlier in this chapter), so if you’ve already completed one of those, you can start by pulling your answers from there.
• Business needs. What business needs are driving this project? If this is successful, what will be the impact on business? What is the revenue model for this product? What measurable impact will improving this product have?
• User needs. Who are your customers? What are their primary needs? What do you know about them? What don’t you know about them? What assumptions are you making about them that you need to validate?
• Goals. What are your team’s goals? What are your personal goals? How will you personally know if you are successful? When capturing goals, be careful not to confuse the what with the how. A how might be “redesigning your company website.” The what in this case might be “to produce more inbound sales leads through the company’s website.”
• Key expectations. What are they expecting from you? Are there any discrepancies between their picture of your role and yours? What questions might they have? What things should you address prior to kicking off the work?
Consider also whether there are softer, but no less important, qualities of the work that are relevant to the overall project mandate. For example, what is the product’s value proposition, and what brand characteristics should the work reinforce or activate? If there are known design principles that should be reflected in the output, what are they? (If not, see the “Design Principles” method in Chapter 7, “Design Methods,” for guidance.)
2. Write up what you know, or your best guesses, into a short document.
Ideally, a project brief should fit on one page, so you can print it out and stick it on the wall for an ever-present reminder of the top priorities. The example shown in Figure 5.10 has just a few key sections: what we’re building; who it’s for; and what the user experience should ultimately feel like from a user’s point of view.
FIGURE 5.10
A sample project brief.
3. Circulate the document.
Share it with team members and key project sponsors, and get their agreement or input. If you have a hard time getting feedback by email, turn it into a meeting. Or visit people where they work.
4. Regularly revisit and make sure that you’re on track.
After the team agrees on the brief, revisit it at major milestones of the project and use it as a framework for communicating how the work is progressing toward the overall high-level goals outlined in the brief itself.
Tips and Tricks for Project Briefs
• Make it ceremonial. One way to turn the request for feedback on the brief into a more memorable and significant event is to turn it into a redlining workshop. Put together your best possible draft of the project brief based on everybody’s feedback. Create a large-format poster of the brief that is big enough to put on the wall and see from across the room: 2’ × 3’ is a good size. Then schedule a meeting for the redlining. Invite the core team who will be working with you on the project, plus upper level sponsors. Working within teams or as one big group, facilitate a conversation about how the team would modify or change the project brief to make it the best possible reflection of the project goals. Give everyone big red pens and ask them to work together to make their changes directly on the project brief poster. Afterward, update the brief to reflect the changes and send it around to the group.
• Keep the brief, well, brief. While assembling your brief, consider the rule of threes. Try to avoid turning this into a laundry list of features that must be delivered. For each category, seek to summarize the top three: top three business needs, top three user needs, top three features and functions to be modified, added, implemented, and so on. This will help you in your efforts toward brevity.
• If you work remotely... A redlining workshop would be difficult to pull off remotely, but you can certainly create a brief and set up one-on-one meetings with people to get their feedback. After you’ve had a chance to review material with the key people, compile changes and share them with the broader group. It may also be helpful to pair up with a buddy on this, preferably someone who has responsibility for the overall project success and who has a vested interested in the team having a shared vision. Work with that person to put the first draft together, and then conduct your review sessions together. When you share the brief with others, it may have more weight coming from both of you.
METHOD 6
Strategy Workshop
What is our vision for the ideal user experience, and what do we need to focus on to bring that unique experience to life?
There is a special moment that’s just right for a strategy workshop, and it’s early in the process before design has been kicked off. It’s the time when optimism and interest in “what could be” are at their highest. This stage gets people when they are most likely to engage with an open mind, and times it so that strategic thinking can influence the ultimate work plan.
In a strategy workshop, you’re leveraging the collective wisdom of a cross-functional team to begin to establish a vision and a strategy for your user experience. When people talk about strategy, often they’re using the same word to talk about very different concepts. To one person, strategy is about prioritization and having a timeline. To another, it might mean establishing a vision for the future. Neither is wrong, and a strategy workshop can help you get clarity on both.