General Assembly UXDI Day 15

Skipped a week, get over it

Project 2 took over my life last week, and I didn’t have the time nor the inclination to write these posts. As they’re for my own benefit, anyway, no harm no foul.

SO! Getting right back into it, this week (our fourth!) we begin Project 3, our first group project! I’m really excited to get a sense of what it’s like to be a part of a UX team instead of a UX team of one. As I’m not sure where in this industry I’ll ultimately fit, I suppose I should be getting a taste of both, but I can tell I’m going to enjoy sharing the work load a little.

Things I learned today:

1. It’s crucial to start recruiting users for research (and testing) as soon as you possibly can. You don’t want to be stuck scrounging for user at the last second, and for god’s sake, we’ve hopefully learned by now that we can’t be our own users.
2. The research phase goes as follows: create a plan for research (defining clear tasks, goals, and deadlines), devise screeners for getting the right kinds of participants, use various research methods to obtain results, and use a scripted interview process to guide participants.
3. Using screeners helps narrow the field of participants to give you people that will provide the most useful results. Screener questions should elicit honest answers, succinct (yes/no), multiple choice, and can be open ended (fill in the blank). We’re kinda using a mix between a screener and an initial survey for P3. Though we’re not telling them specifically what we’re going to interview about, we are narrowing the field a bit with some questions pertaining to our goals.
4. Project plans guide both execution and goals. Execution covers the identification of a problem, conceiving a solution, designing it, implementing and testing it, and (though not in our case) bringing it to market. The plan should consider quality, cost, schedule, and scope. It’s important that the plan be flexible, as all sorts of things can change over the course of a project.
5. Project Plans and Research Plans should both identify tasks, goals for those tasks, timelines, personnel involved, and any deliverables. These plans help create a good group dynamic and keep everyone on the same page. Research plans do this, and include info on research methodology.