Demystifying the UX process
Every project is different, so how do we know how to proceed with our UX tools? I think the first step in outlining the best approach for your project is rooted in a series of steps that can help you figure out your next move. Here is where I recommend starting no matter what your project is.
There are four steps that are crucial in the UX research process:
While this seems relatively simple it is not always a linear process. I will be showcasing my unique project to show how I utilized this process, but that it wasn’t necessarily linear.
UVU’s Surveying & Mapping Department: A Case Study
Stage 1: Discover
The first thing that happened in this process was meeting our stakeholder. We met with the head of the Surveying and mapping department and through a series of interview questions that we decided on, we learned more about the website we were going to be redesigning.
Knowing our product was everything and asking the right questions is incredibly important to identify the right problem to solve. Something that can always hinder you as a UX team is scope creep. Preventing your team from going down the rabbit hole is something that is difficult to do when you don’t define the problem from the beginning.
Our team individually took notes during our interview. We then had a meeting to synthesize our findings and see the picture more holistically. When you lean on your teammates and start to combine perspectives, it can be a very powerful tool to deepening the understanding of the product and the problem. Our goal was to clearly define the following from our collective notes:
- Understanding the Organization/Background
- Finding the Need/Problem
- Client Goals for Site
- Success Metrics (How tell if successful? Measurable indicators?)
- Who are the key Stakeholders?
- More information on our Users (characteristics, background, motivations, goals for using site)
- What are the requirements for the project?(data/content, functional, product qualities)
- Identify our constraints (e.g., time frame, branding, style guides, budgets, technical)
This was the result:
The next step was to come up with a plan to actualize our How Might We? statements. To do this, we needed to plan out the processes that would be most useful to get the information/data we needed. Then, our project manager sat down with our team and started planning what UX tools we would need to utilize and the time frame we had to accomplish them in working backwards from the stakeholder’s hard deadline.
Project Plan:
The next part of this discover phase was a survey done through email, QR code posters in the department, and grassroots efforts by our UX team. We were able to garner over 100 survey responses that gave us an interesting insight into the effectiveness of the website.
The overarching goal was to recruit more students into the program. But before we focused on getting these students through marketing means, we had to find out what students valued and what our users were looking for when selecting a major. These are the questions we chose to ask in our survey:
And with that we were ready to move into the Exploration stage.
Stage 2: Explore
In this stage we did the following:
- Identified the Style Guide and it’s restrictions
- Conducted a Heuristic Analysis for the most important user journeys as dictated through Google Analytics, survey results, and the stakeholder interview. Of course this needed to be cleaned up later down the line as readability and sharing artifacts is KEY in UX. This was one of those moments I learned from. I highly recommend using numbered callouts for your annotations when you are redlining to keep the Heuristics readable and organized.
- We did an Asset Inventory to account for the materials we would need to reconsider or use for the redesign.
After these artifacts were complete we begin to build our personas and get our target users narrowed down. We were able to then move on to our User stories and start to hone in on the key features we wanted to implement.
We then made a site map to get an idea of the structure of the website and how the Information Architecture was laid out. We would need to consider the way the navigation functioned and how we wanted to relay information to our users focusing on the top user journeys.
We were able to lay out the site map and get started on our approach:
From various sketching and wireframes, this is where our wireframes landed after our first iteration >> Wireframes <<
We were able to draw from the style guide, our wireframes, and our site map to land in a good place with our Surface comps. We were then able to meet with our stakeholder and make revisions to our design based on their feedback. We were ready to move into Testing.
Stage 3: Test
This stage was the most exhausting as we did many kinds of tests to find out different information. The first one we conducted was a 5 second user test. We had 10 participants in our target demographic testing the homepage. We were interested in seeing if they understood what our website was, who it was affiliated with, and what it was for.
After this phase it became abundantly clear that our titles and assets were not clearly communicating the following:
1. That the department was affiliated with Utah Valley University.
2. What the website was about.
3. What Surveying & Mapping is.
We then went back and iterated our surface compositions and began to prototype as well.
After the prototype was complete we were fortunate enough to utilize some eye tracking equipment through our state of the art UX lab at UVU. We conducted 3 in depth user test accomplishing various tasks while our team watched behind a two way mirror.
Stage 4: Listen
The last step is listen. We were able to mark out next steps based on the feedback from our Prototype Eye Tracking test. We outlined where we wanted to go next and planned the next steps to getting there. Logging and documenting our successes and failures. We were doing some gritty UX and as my first real team experience I learned a lot of lessons.
Conclusion
Teamwork is everything and utilizing many perspectives takes you farther than favoring one. Using democratic processes and involving team members in every step of the process can be so informative and challenging. Learning to work as a unit and stick to a project timeline is also challenging and you may find yourself adapting your UX tools as the experience unfolds. Don’t get stuck on a project plan. UX is more about the destination and less about the journey. If a particular process isn’t fitting your needs, regroup, vote, and redirect.
Sarah Mendez is a student in the Digital Media program at Utah Valley University, Orem Utah, studying Web & App Development. The following article relates to Web Development in the DGM2240 Course and is representative of the skills learned.
