Dive into UX design topic based on our years of award-winning UX consulting from Experience Dynamics, Founder and Chief Experience Officer, Frank Spillers.
Summary: Many organizations and individuals continue to use market research, equating it to, or substituting it for usability research. UX and marketing or brand insights, are completely different and should be considered as such. UX research is behavior-driven, while market research is opinion-driven. Therefore, market research is not appropriate as a way to gain insight into user behavior.
Summary: Personas are used routinely in design organizations. Beyond a tool to socialize customer profiles throughout the company, quality persona development is extremely important for bringing high impact results to your design efforts. Functional personas help bring vital empathy and data-based decision-making to teams.
Personas need to be made functional for better product development. Using associating adjectives to capture role-based activities within a persona, can improve the usefulness and functional benefits of personas.
Persona means "mask" in Latin. Personas are commonly found on the desks of Product Managers, Business Analysts and UX teams. They are considered an essential of UX, but oftentimes their value and utility are often diminished due to a lack of clarity of the functional UX purpose of a persona.
Summary: Hiring UX Designers and UX managers or UX consultants can be difficult especially for product, marketing, engineering or HR folks who are unfamiliar with what a UX designer ought to be doing to generate real value. Know what you are shopping for, so you get what your organization needs! Better yet avoid these mistakes made by those before you. Good UX hiring contributes to reinforcing an Outside-In Design organization.
Summary: Testing with 5 users has become a commandment in UX research. Worse yet, a sample of 5 has become the rule, for any type of user research (field studies or diary studies). Sample size is a big deal in UX because it impacts your learning and decision-making. Skimp on sample size and you will likely cut yourself short of valuable insights.
For Usability Testing: If you follow Jakob Nielsen's advice: test with 5 users or less (2 users for low-fidelity prototypes) and do many iterations of testing (at least 3 rounds of testing). Our advice: if you have multiple user segments and you don't have time to play with 3-5 iterations, test with 8-10 users for prototypes, and 15-20 users for finished products. If you can, or need to iterate then a second round of testing should suffice.
Summary: This infographic summarizes 7 classic mistakes in approaching user experience design and process. The text of the infographic is below the image, with the addition of more summary notes not found in the infographic--look for “Comment” in the text version below for these exclusives.
User Experience Management combines organizational dynamics: the right people, in the right role/org chart, doing the right processes and delivering business value through design.
Comment: If you just think UX is about ease of use, you’re missing the party over in the Desirability department.