UX Tools & Techniques
We are much familiar with what UX is, so let’s look into what tools and techniques are practised in the industry at each stage of the UX process.
Strategy
1. Competitor Analysis
Performing an audit/review of competing websites and apps, conducting user testing of competing sites, writing a report that summarises the competitive landscape.
Downloading, signing up for, purchasing, and using products that compete with yours is only part of the process; conducting user testing sessions on these products will also yield valuable insights.
2. Analytics Review
Analysing web or mobile usage data and making subsequent recommendations.
3. Stakeholder Interviews
Conversations with the key contacts in the client organisation funding, selling, or driving the product.
Research
4. Contextual Inquiry
Interviewing users in the location that they use the website/app to understand their tasks and challenges.
5. Content Audit
Reviewing and cataloguing a client’s existing repository of content/ system.
6. Surveys
Crafting an online survey, primarily to solicit feedback from current (or potential) users.
7. Diary Study
Asking users to record their experiences and thoughts about a product or task in a journal over a set period.
8. User Interviews
User interviews are a crucial activity for understanding the tasks and motivations of the user group for whom you are designing. Interviews may be formally scheduled, or just informal chats (for instance, in a suitable location that your target demographic are present).
9. Heuristic Review
Evaluating a website or app and documenting usability flaws and other areas for improvement.
An excellent method for determining how usable a site or app is entailed working through a checklist.
10. User Testing
Sitting users in front of your website or app and asking them to perform tasks, and to think out loud while doing so.
11. Unmoderated Remote Usability Test
URUT is similar to in-person usability testing; however, participants complete tasks in their environment without a facilitator present. The tasks are pre-determined and are presented to the participant via an online testing platform.
12. Personas
A persona is a fictitious identity that reflects one of the user groups for who you are designing
Creating personas for your project involves morphing qualitative and quantitative data from analytics, surveys, interviews, user testing sessions, and other research activities into a handful of representative “typical” users. These personas are assigned names, photographs, motivations, goals, and a believable backstory that is rooted in the backgrounds of real people using your website or app.
13. A/B Testing
Give one version of a page or feature to some customers; give another to the rest. Measure the performance of each to see which was more successful. Suitable for testing new or experimental features before releasing them to all customers.
Analysis
14. Use Cases
A list of steps that define the interactions between a user and a system. Use cases, mainly used as requirements for software development, are often constructed in UML, with defined actors and roles.
15. Storyboards
A storyboard is a tool inspired by the filmmaking industry, where a visual sequence of events is used to capture a user’s interactions with a product. Depending on the audience, it may be an extremely rough sketch, purely for crystallising your ideas.
Sometimes it can be useful to create a slightly more polished version of this — a comic — to communicate this sequence of events to key stakeholders to achieve buy-in for a concept.
16. Affinity Diagramming
A business technique for identifying and grouping patterns within unrelated data
17. Scenarios
A scenario is a narrative describing “a day in the life of” one of your personas, and probably includes how your website or app fits into their lives.
18. Mental Models
A mental model is an explanation of someone’s thought process about how something works in the real world. It is a representation of the surrounding world, the relationships between its various parts and a person’s intuitive perception about his or her acts and their consequences. Mental models can help shape behaviour and set an approach to solving problems (similar to a personal algorithm) and doing tasks.
19. Experience Map
An experience map, or customer journey map, is an extended version of a mental model. Rather than looking at one moment in time for a single user, an experience map is a holistic, visual representation of your users’ interactions with your organisation when zoomed right out.
Because many organisations and the projects within them are large and complex, an experience map is usually captured on a large canvas — a necessarily big poster that you can zoom in or out of to explore the details.
20. Card Sorting
Card sorting is a technique where users are asked to generate a folksonomy, or information hierarchy, which can then form the basis of an information architecture or website navigation menu.
Design
21. Collaborative Design
Inviting input from users, stakeholders, and other project members.
Provide all participants with some paper and a pen, and have them complete exercises such as drawing wireframes, or writing on printouts of screens that they like or don’t like.
22. Workflow Diagram
A workflow diagram (or activity diagram) is a graphical representation of activities and actions conducted by users of a system.
23. Sitemap
A sitemap is a complete list of all pages available on a website. Creating a sitemap is a useful task at the beginning of the design process, as it can be used to shape which screens to the wireframe.
24. Wireframe
A wireframe is a rough guide for the layout of a website or app. A wireframe is commonly used to layout content and functionality on a page which takes into account user needs and user journeys. Wireframes are used early in the development process to establish the basic structure of a page before visual design and content is added
25. Paper Prototype
Paper prototyping is the process of creating rough, often hand-sketched, drawings of a user interface, and using them in a usability test to gather feedback. Participants point to locations on the page that they would click, and screens are manually presented to the user based on the interactions they indicate.
26. Mood Board
A mood board is a collage, either physical or digital, which is intended to communicate the visual style a direction is heading (or should be heading). Stakeholders may use a mood board to provide a visual designer with the atmosphere they would like their site to convey and the colour palette to explore.
Development
27. User Testing
Sitting users in front of your website or app and asking them to perform tasks, and to think out loud while doing so.
28. Unmoderated Remote Usability Test
URUT is similar to in-person usability testing; however, participants complete tasks in their environment without a facilitator present. The tasks are pre-determined and are presented to the participant.
29. Beta Launch
Releasing a closed beta release of your product involves allowing only a select group of users to use the software and provide feedback before it becomes available to the broader public.
