Getting started with User Experience Design
This is meant to be a post for beginners on how to actually get started with UX Design for your product. Through this series of blog posts I intend to share with you a set of tool kits that guide you through step by step best practices in UX research and design.
Begin with a quick and dirty survey that gets you into the motion, provides you with data to crunch on and fuels you with curiosity to keep going.
This “UX kick-off” tool kit is a combination of industry standard methods, my past experience and interactions with various founders/product managers for developing an initial survey for UX research. Please share your feedback and I am happy to update the post.
- start with 5 questions
Yes just 5 questions. This is where you should spend sometime – coming up with questions that are most relevant to your product and the problem you are trying to solve. Ask yourself what assumptions do I need to validate or what information can help me bridge the current data gap. Questions should help you understand how users follow a related process or conduct an activity today (since your game changing product is not yet available). Are there any anecdotes they can share with you that brings out emotional pointers? For every question that you have come up with ask your self if the answers will really aid you in validating your assumptions or gathering further insights. Eliminate anything that’s not pushing you closer to your goals. Basically your survey should help you arrive at a “Point of View”. Check out this simple POV template from Stanford’s d.school.
- the 3 Whys” rule
The 5 Whys is a time tested method used to explore the cause/effect relationships underlying a particular problem. Generally used for determining the root cause of a problem, it can also be used to understand key drivers or motivations behind user behavior and patterns. A simple rule to follow will be to ensure there are at least 3 whys in your questionnaire. It’s the ‘whys’ that help you dig deeper into the user’s mental modes, motivations, behavior patterns etc. After every question that you ask remember to add a why. Simple! Here’s a sample of 5 Whysin action at Ideo.
HBR recently published a video on the 5Whys technique being used in design research. Watch the video here - Eric Ries, entrepreneur-in-residence at Harvard Business School, explains how to find the human causes of technical problems.
- designing the survey
Why this is important? A well-designed survey will make it easier for anyone (even high school students or average users) to follow the process and capture/provide the right information. If I haven’t said it enough already, keep the survey very simple – 5 questions to the max and add at least 3 whys. Create a layout that is easy to read and provide lots of space for anyone to scribble information quickly. Use check boxes to make it easier to respond to pre-determined options and arrows to demonstrate the flow of the survey.
You could create a survey like this – UX Survey Design within minutes by hand or in powerpoint / other prototyping tools. Take a few print outs and hit the street.
- extending your reach
You can extend your UX research program to phone interviews and online surveys. The template shown above proved to be very useful for phone interviews as well. This can be translated into a simple online questionnaire in Google docs or Survey Monkey. Most of these tools capture data in spreadsheets, which makes it easy to analyze. And I am sure all you cool hacks out there can turn out a neat page on your own website as well.
Was this post helpful? What would you like to see in the next post in this series?
