As this project lasts all semester, I feel it’s important for me to manage my time and use design process techniques properly to ensure a good project. To help me do this, I’m going to take some time to explore some concepts around this to make sure my project goes well.
UX strategy is a plan of action to follow which helps designers achieve improvements and goals within a project in a given time frame. UX Strategy is generally broken down into 3 steps; Vision, Goals, and Plan.
The project Vision is the statement of intent, basically what you want to achieve and why. Realising this early on allows projects to be more focused on key areas.
The Goal of a project is the understanding of what measures the success of a project. This should relate to both the user and business side of the project, to ensure that both sides are benefitting from it.
The Plan is the steps which you’ll take to complete the project and the approximate time frame of each step. While you should allocate time for each step of the process, it’s important to keep timings as approximates rather than fixed periods, as you should be taking the time that is actually needed for each step.
Due to the open nature of this module’s brief, I was somewhat nervous about approaching the project, as it felt difficult to pick a direction to start in. However, having now looked at UX Strategy it’s helped me to understand how to properly plan a project for success. I think this will be particularly helpful to consider when I’m writing the actual version of my brief, as what I’ve learned here will allow me to properly plan and structure my project rather than just launch into without a plan.
UX Strategy: Definition and Components
For this project, I wanted to challenge myself to do some actual user interviews during the discovery phase. Previously, I’ve based my research on online findings with occasional uses of real people, but I think actually talking to people will be really important for this project. While I have a general idea about user interviews, I wanted to find out more specifically about the types of questions to ask and how to ask them. I found this article from the Interaction Design Foundation particularly useful for this.
One of the points I found particularly useful was when preparing interview questions, to prepare more than you’ll actually need. This helps to be able to navigate the interview down certain paths and pursue specific issues that your user is comfortable talking about. I hadn’t thought about this before but can see how having a wide variety of questions could be really helpful in keeping an interview going and exploring certain areas more thoroughly. This is something I’ll make sure to do when interviewing users for my project.
Another point I found really useful was to not ask leading questions, as user interviews are the chance to get qualitative data rather than simple yes or no’s. I had been aware that leading questions are bad practice already, but this article helped to understand why. While user interviews primarily help you find issues to solve in the design phase, they can also help you to back up quantitative data from wider research and contextualise you’re finding. Knowing this will help me to select the questions I want to ask and also create questions that will give me more expansive knowledge of the issues I want to solve.
How to Conduct User Interviews
While I’ve used User Personas before, the concept of Persona Spectrums came up this week and I wanted to explore it further to see what else I can learn about using User Personas. This article from UX Booth was a really useful guide to the concept.
Persona Spectrums are a different way of creating multiple personas for a project. Rather than creating a persona for one demographic based on age/sex/location and creating another for a different demographic, the concept of persona spectrums divides different personas into groups based on whether their exposure to the problem or issue being solved is Permanent, Temporary, or Situational. For example, if you were creating personas for people using a government form, a permanent personas would be someone with a reading disability trying to read it, a temporary persona would be someone who doesn’t speak the language trying to read it, and a situation persona would be an adult who doesn’t understand all the technicalities reading it. By creating personas in this way, you get a more cohesive array of users and it helps you think about how different people will experience the product better.
I can really see the benefit of using a Persona Spectrum as it helps to make the personas feel more connected and be a wider display of user needs, rather than just the wants of specific people. I also can see how this helps to make personas less personal, and make them more about being any user. This is something I’ve struggled with understanding, as on the one hand you need to stay connected to what your users want, but you also don’t want to connect a persona to a specific person, and I think using a person spectrum would help me with that.