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 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 31 - 6 Lean UX Tips

Lean UX is a set of flexible activities that teams use to attempt to rapidly create user experiences. Lean UX is based in agile and lean startup methodologies where the team (stakeholders, product, design, development, etc) swiftly creates prototypes, tests, and iterates while balancing business needs and customer needs. The key is to externalize and share broadly.

A teams's lean ux process may look like this:
Strategy session -> Business needs -> Audience needs -> Ideation -> Sketching -> Prototyping -> Testing

Or put another way:

• Think
• Make
• Check

1. Understand the business/customer needs and have the problem you're solving for articulated. Get stakeholders aligned and get business goals prioritized.
2. Have stakeholders work on the big picture concept. The designers should work on the details.
3. Make customer personas rapidly getting people to show them to each other and present them.
4. Scenarios - what are these customers thinking about in the moment they are engaging. What motivates the persona? People can work as teams on this.
5. Ideation and Sketching. Get people to individually, rapidly create/sketch volume in this step and quickly iterate on the designs. Present them and show them to everyone, critique and iterate.
6. Prototype and Test continuously. Prototyping is a strategy for efficiently dealing with things that are hard to predict.

What Lean UX tips do you have? Share your Lean UX tips in the comments section.