Day 80 - Return on Usability Investment

Why should the business care about ux research, usability and design?
Research at IBM shows that as a rule of thumb for every $1 dollar spent solving a problem in design, you save $10 dollars in development, and you save $100 dollars in post-release maintenance.

$1 : $10 : $100

Day 76 - System Usability System (SUS)

SUS is a series of ten questions. It's a quick and dirty usability scale to give your users once they've completed testing your service.  Users are asked to rate statements from 1-5 depending on how much they agree with them.

1. I think that I would like to use this system frequently.
2. I found the system unnecessarily complex.
3. I thought the system was easy to use.
4. I think I would need the support of a technical person to use this system.
5. I found the various functions in this system were well integrated.
6. I thought there was too much inconsistency in this system.
7. I would imagine that most people would learn to use this system very quickly.
8. I found the system very cumbersome to use.
9. I feel very confident using the system.
10. I needed to learn a lot of things before I could get going with this system.

Day 55 - User Interviews - Questions to Ask

UX is about building something based on research not intuition.

You want to build something people want. But in research interviews, you generally don't want to ask what people want.  It could lead to wrong insights. You want to discover problems and find their root causes.

Better questions to ask in user interviews:

1. What are you trying to accomplish?  Try and find some context for what they want to get done. 
2. How do you currently do this?  Try and understand the series of steps they go through.
3. What could be better about how you do this?  Search for opportunities.

Day 50 - Usability Testing - Vendors vs. DIY

When recruiting interviewees for usability and research tests you can either partner with a vendor or do it yourself depending on the budget and scope of your project.

USING A VENDOR:

• Can save you time
• Be expensive
• Give you less control
• Leverage usability testing skills they may be better at
• Access to user and client relationships you don't have
• Provide blind testing

THE DO IT YOURSELF (DIY) APPROACH:

• More of your time
• Cheap
• More control
• You own the relationships
• Can be blind
• Learn about your users by doing your own recruiting

Day 48 - Usability Testing - Getting Participants for Your Research

How would you go about finding people to interview for your research and usability testing of your prototype?

1. Have a tight deadline.  Lock the calendar date of when your user interviews will take place.
2. Create a screener questionnaire by defining your criteria, writing the questions and creating a Google Form. Also see Google Venture's worksheet for writing a screener.
3. Create a Craigslist Ad with a link to your form.
4. Offer payment or reward for participants.
5. Choose your interviewees carefully. Your ad and questionnaire should be used to vigorously filter out and disqualify candidates that don't meet your target user criteria.
6. Get NDA signed - Get their permission/signature to record the interviews. Also, "The ideas that come out of this, I own that".

Day 13 - Be Prepared for Usability Testing

1. Know what you're testing for when you design your tests
2. Recruit participants
1. Define recruitment criteria
2. Recruit on Craigslist
3. Paid recruitment https://ethn.io/pricing 
4. Create Google Forms to screen and qualify candidates
5. Survey Monkey
3. Have all testing materials ready and practice before your testing dates
1. Prototype/s
2. Location
3. Questions
4. Schedule
5. Participants
4. Schedule the selected participants
5. Conducting usability interviews
1. Set proper expectations
2. Shut up and listen.
3. Avoid bias.  If UX designers conduct interviews on their own designs bias is very likely.
4. Record the interviews.
5. Follow up answers. Make participants feel comfortable, be genuinely inquisitive and probe deep to gain insight.
6. Provide a reward upon conclusion - gift card, voucher, or cash.

Day 9 - Usability - User Interview Tips

Understand more about your users by doing usability testing.  Used in User-Centered-Interaction-Design, usability research can help you evaluate a product's direction by giving you direct user feedback.

Here are some interviewing tips when conducting research with your users:

1. Get into your "research persona" and be professional so that the interview can feel friendly, casual, and conversational.
2. Smile (no explanation needed :)
3. Be neutral and encouraging. Don't be a grinch.*
4. Don't behave in judgmental or dismissive ways.
5. Ask open ended questions that start with who, what, when, where, why, and how. 
6. Ask follow up questions.
7. Don't pitch nor try and convince the user that your product is the bees knees.
8. Shut up and listen

*Never blame the user (although sometimes you feel like you want to!).

Day 8 - Creating a Persona Checklist

In user-centered design, personas are the fictional characters you create that represent the types of people that will use your product. They're fictional examples of a target user and their goals. Personas are captured in a written summary that includes behavior patterns, goals, skills, attitudes, and environment as well as a few personal fictional details to give the persona a realistic character.

The persona of each character should include the following 8 elements.

1. Name and title.
2. Basics.  As an example, Bob is a 29 year old male living in Boston.  He likes old architecture and machinery and is an early adopter of [your product].
3. Professional and personal background.
4. Quote.
5. Technical background.
6. Favorite apps or websites (1-3).
7. Goals.
8. I need/I want statements.