This short animated video will give you an overview of how and why you might use a diary study:

So what the heck is a diary study?!

A diary study is a daily log of activities (read: behaviours) that you get a user to keep over an extended period of time. You might get users to take photos to explain their activities and highlight things that stood out to them across the course of their day. I prefer this photo method as you gain better insight into the users’ mind-set than words alone generally offer.

At Symplicit we run diary studies with our customer groups as we see more of their habits and behaviours over a given time-frame. This is important, as people often forget he day-to-day things that matter most to us as researchers. The extended time also allows us to monitor habits for a longer timeframe than other techniques such as shadowing might.

When would you use one?

A diary study is often conducted following a ‘contextual inquiry’, ‘in-depth interview’, or ‘shadowing’ method with your target customer groups. You do it because you want to delve more deeply into the habits and behaviours of your users. Diary studies are longitudinally focused and timeframes might range from 2 weeks to 2 months. It depends on what you are investigating and how long you think it might take to observe patterns of behaviour that reflect common, or less common, habits or routines.

How do you get started?

1. You firstly need to recruit your users. We tend to recruit for contextual inquiry or interview processes and then note the people we want to learn more about over an extended period. There is no need to over-bake it, you probably only need between 4-6 users. But choose wisely! You want engaged and talkative people, not the ones that were hard to extract information from!
2. You’ll need to brief your participants on what you want them to do over the diary period and give them either a physical book to record daily insights, or an online tool to help you engage with them electronically. We tend to use Evernote and Yammer.
3. Check in every couple of days to ensure they are doing what you want them to do and have not misinterpreted the task.
4. Once the designated timeframe is up I visit the person’s house and have them talk through their diary with me. Or we conduct a group session to get everyone in the room discussing their experiences together.

As with any method, a diary study is exploratory, so do what you need to do in order to get to the bottom of the answers you seek. Don’t be afraid to get creative too! Sometimes an interesting question or set of tasks you throw at people mid-study helps to uncover hidden gems of behaviour that you might not have exposed otherwise.

Most of all, have fun with it. Good luck!

The post Use a Diary Study to Extend Your UX research appeared first on UX Mastery.

How a Chinese NGO is using customer journey mapping to improve UX for rural Chinese teachers.

Every company or organisation delivers a user experience – whether it is good or bad, and regardless of whether they sell cosmetics, build libraries, or trade stocks. In some contexts it is easy to define and optimise this experience, however in others—including many social-impact driven organisations—genuinely listening and incorporating the voices of users and stakeholders is difficult to achieve. As an unfortunate result, we witness scores of well intentioned but ineffective outcomes.

Aware of these challenges, BEAM used the Design Thinking approach and the Lean Startup methodology to develop a mobile solution equipping teachers in rural China to exercise instructional skills through co-creating classroom projects (social problem-based learning).

I’d like to share how we used customer journey mapping to achieve our most effective insights from user feedback. Journey mapping is a visual or graphic interpretation of the overall story of an individual’s relationship with an organisation, service, product or brand; over time and across channels. In our case, we wanted to understand from our teachers’ own perspectives how we could improve BEAM’s service model.

How did we use journey mapping with the teachers?

Firstly, we sat down with teachers both individually and in groups. Armed with coloured pencils and paper, each teacher was invited to sketch out a timeline of their experience on the BEAM app. They were reminded to include whom they interacted with along the way, and most importantly, to distinguish the emotions associated with key points (peaks representing positive emotions, valleys representing negative ones).

This was the first time any of the teachers had been involved in this kind of activity, but it took no more than a minute of explanation and a quick example to get them started. The teachers warmed quickly to the activity and had a great deal of fun.

After five minutes or so, we asked the teachers to pause and narrate their timelines. This also allowed us to casually check in and ensure everyone had a clear understanding of the activity. The teachers were then asked to identify and annotate any particularly high or low points.

At the ten-minute mark, teachers were asked to talk together about their mapping for half an hour. In the context of group discussions, they enjoyed comparing and contrasting their experiences, particularly on points of excitement or despair. Following each session we were then able to spend less than ten minutes per map quickly debriefing teachers about key points and asking any necessary follow-up questions.

How does using a journey map resolve common feedback collection issues?

Although not every organisation is designing a product for rural teachers, journey mapping addresses similar difficulties to those found across many other customer bases.

In a situation with an unbalanced power dynamic, collecting feedback can be an extremely delicate process. Using journey mapping can help to rebalance the dynamic between interviewers and users. This is particularly helpful for groups working in the social-impact sphere, but may also be useful when interviewing children or young adults, or when involving other forms of sociocultural hierarchy. Surveys and traditional focus-groups can be overly formal and sometimes cause unnecessary anxiety.

Another potential and unwanted outcome may be ‘false positives’ caused by participants wanting to express gratitude. Due to China’s current social environment, teachers who use BEAM at this early stage will almost always view themselves as recipients of generous support and may therefore not want to give negative feedback. From a personal perspective—as a Chinese-American operating in rural China—it was important for me to rebalance any outgroup vs. ingroup effects.

Therefore, because journey mapping tempers the expectations often involved in a traditional dialogue setting, it allowed us to gather more genuine feedback.

Using journey mapping in this early stage can also mitigate the potential for distrust of online activity. Because Chinese online activity is notoriously fraught with scams, our model at this stage requires us to cultivate brand trust face-to-face. That being so, this round was not just about collecting feedback but also about cultivating relationships with our early adopters. One of the most comfortable and genuine ways to do this is to share stories, and so using journey mapping is the perfect launch pad.

As soon as the teachers realised that their opinions were truly valued, they moved quickly into storytelling mode. After each session, participants were clearly more comfortable and mentally prepared to participate in follow-up discussions.

Journey mapping can also provide an opportunity to recall hard-to-pinpoint details. Instead of formulating vague statements about positive or negative aspects, it was easy for participants to recall and articulate the entire experience with just a few minutes of drawing and writing.

As we break ground in the rural Chinese Internet market, much of the data we are gathering is new (or too forgotten to see parallels). Although user behaviour should never be assumed, I’ve been surprised more than once at some of the habits we’re uncovering. In a market where users are still using Windows XP or have wildly different perceptions of social dynamics, it is a battle for even the best product manager to craft an appropriate solution.

What Customer Journey Mapping taught us

Customer journey mapping helped us to recognise that the moments between submitting an application and receiving their first contact phone call were a low point for many teachers, simply because they didn’t know what to expect. They defaulted to feeling anxious. Although we may have made the same discovery using a more traditional interview process, it was something that some teachers admitted to forgetting, and it probably wouldn’t have come to light if we simply asked which parts of the process felt difficult or unfriendly.

When we mapped their experience in greater detail, we saw that teachers tended to open up the Baidu search engine and to search using fragmented keywords, rather than entering URLs – even if the URLs were only a few characters long. Without obtaining a first-person narrative, many of these tiny but critical details would have been overlooked.

Finally, the journey mapping technique allows us to map teachers’ experiences to BEAM’s back-end operations. It is not difficult to obtain the data, but it can be challenging to get the right data and use it to make the right decisions. By identifying the teacher’s low point just before that first application confirmation call, we learned that we needed to adjust the attitude taken by staff making the calls.

Data collected via journey mapping also takes no analysis, or very little analysis, before delivering value. Within 12 hours of completing the last interview, we were able to condense all of the maps and associated data in a way that allowed us to make informed decisions about our next steps.

Within 48 hours, we were ready to implement the next round of changes to our model, all thanks to the power of customer journey mapping.

The post Using Journey Mapping for Better User Feedback appeared first on UX Mastery.

This short animated video will give you an overview of how and why they are such a valuable tool.

What are wireframes?

A wireframe is like an architect’s drawing. It’s a draft visual representation of your user interface. You can use them to communicate four things.

•  The structure of your navigation and information architecture.
• Layout, which includes page hierarchy and placement of elements on the screen.
• Real content. Wireframes give content writers an idea of how content will be placed within the design.
• Functionality – Wireframes can describe how your product will work, and how it interacts with the people using it.

Wireframes are an indispensable tool in any UX designers’ toolkit, and they come in handy in many situations. They can be created at varying levels of fidelity, and this is what makes them so powerful.

How much detail?

At the low-fidelity end, you have the hand-drawn sketch. Sketches are a great way to flesh out ideas on your own or with your team. They’re fast to create and quick to iterate on. It doesn’t matter if you’re not great at drawing – anyone who can draw a square, a circle and a triangle is perfectly capable of creating sketches.

Next, we have the more traditional wireframe. There are literally hundreds of tools that we can use to create these. Balsamiq, Omnigraffle, Illustrator and UX Pin are just a few examples.

Wireframes like this allow you to communicate your ideas to your team, your clients and your stakeholders. They can be very useful to explain your product, and exactly what you’re building.

At the high-fidelity end of the spectrum, a clickable prototype lets you design interactions and user flow. Clickable prototypes are the way to go when conducting usability testing. You could use Axure, Keynote or even create wireframes directly into the browser using HTML, with the help of frameworks such as Foundation or Bootstrap.

Sometimes a quick sketch is all you need. Other times, an annotated wireframe is more appropriate. It really depends on the project, and the stage you’re at. Your wireframes should convey just the right amount of detail, and no more.

Here are just a few practical tips to keep in mind when you’re wire-framing:

Keep them simple

The key to wireframing is speed and simplicity. We will ultimately throw wireframes out, so in most cases they don’t need to be highly polished or pixel perfect.

Use a grid

Grids create structure and simplicity to your layouts. Every decent website these days is built on a grid, so make sure you’re using one in your wireframes too.

Use short, sharp annotations

Unlike a 50 page functional spec doc, team members actually read wireframes more than any other document. So make sure you add some key annotations. Don’t go overboard though. Keep them brief and to the point.

Encourage feedback

Finally, sharing your wireframes, and encouraging feedback from your team members is a sure-fire way to improve them. So, stick your wireframes up on the nearest wall, and encourage your team, and anyone else, to give you feedback.

As you can see, wireframes can be easy to create, but it does take some experience to understand when and how to get the most out of them.

As with most things, practice makes perfect!

The post How to Create Wireframes That Wow appeared first on UX Mastery.

Design is in demand, and the tech sector is at the forefront of business innovation. It is also a time where we have access to a huge number of tools and techniques that enable us to innovate and adapt our practice for a broad range of scenarios.

Usability testing is a cornerstone of UX practice. Perfect for evaluating the designs we create, flexible for collecting a range of information about customers and easy to combine with other techniques. Usability testing is a technique where representative participants undertake tasks on an interface or product. The tasks typically reflect the most common and important activities and participant’s behavior is observed to identify any issues that inhibit task completion.

Usability testing is a super flexible technique that allows for the assessment of a variety of aspects of an interface including the broad product concept, interaction design, visual design, content, labels, calls-to-action, search and information architecture. It is a proven technique for evaluating products, and in some organisations is used as a pre-launch requirement.

• It’s relatively time consuming; lab based study is typical completed with between 5 and 12 participants. Assuming each session takes 1 hour, with one facilitator running the sessions this would take between 1 and 3 days.
• Recruiting participants to attend the sessions takes time and effort; via a recruitment agency it would take minimum a week to locate people for a round of testing.
• Due to the time-intensive nature and cost of in-person usability testing, most studies are conducted with relatively small samples (i.e. less than 10). While a small sample is often adequate for exploring usability and iterating a product, some stakeholders have less confidence in these small sample sizes. This is often due to exposure to quantitative market research where samples in excess of 500 people are common.
• They are conducted in an artificial environment. In person tests are often lab-based or in a corporate setting that may not reflect real world use of the product.

One of the ways these downsides can be overcome is the use of unmoderated remote usability test (URUT).

Let’s take a look at some of the basics of running URUTs.

What is URUT?

URUT is a technique that evaluates the usability of an interface or product; that is, the ease of use, efficiency and satisfaction customers have with the interface. It is similar to in-person usability testing however participants complete tasks in their own environment without a facilitator present. The tasks are pre-determined and are presented to the participant via an online testing platform.

There are two broad methods for URUT with varying ways for collecting participant behaviour and these are dictated by the technology platforms.

URUT utilising video recordings of participants interacting with interfaces. These studies are more qualitative in nature with participants thinking aloud during the recording to provide insight.

URUT where the behavior is captured via click-stream data and is run more like a survey. These studies are more quantitative in nature because larger sample sizes are practical and the systems automate tracking of user behaviour.

Both methods are designed to evaluate the usability of a product and both have strengths and weaknesses. Video based sessions require more time to identify the findings and lend themselves to smaller samples however by listening to participants and observing their behavior more information can be collected regarding the design. Click stream methods allow for larger sample sizes and tend to be faster to compete due to the automation of data collection.

Note that some tools support both methods; click stream for large samples and video is collected for a subset of the sample to be able to explore specific aspects of the design in more detail. More on the tools below.

When to use URUT?

Common scenarios where URUT is value include:

• Obtaining a large sample and/or a high degree of confidence is required: A small sample of in person usability tests may be all that is required from a design perspective but if your stakeholders are used to seeing large samples and buy-in with a small sample is difficult then using big numbers may be simpler than trying to convince them of the value of the small sample. Further, where a new design is critical for an organisation or will have will have a substantial impact, the confidence gained from a large sample study can be valuable.
• Where the audience is geographically dispersed or hard to access: The audience for some products are geographically spread and can be hard to access without travelling great distance, imagine a health case management system for remote communities in the Kimberly. Also consider trying to access time poor senior executives, they may be able to complete a 15 minute online study late at night in a time convenient for them but not during the day or in a specific location.
• Where speed is critical: Everyone working in the digital industry will have worked on a project with tight timelines or is running behind schedule. Also, in today’s Agile workplaces, getting usability testing conducted quickly may be the only option. An URUT study can be run in entirety in a couple of days whereas a typical in-person study would take more than one week, if not longer.
• Where a specific environment is critical: Some products will be used in environments, which cannot be replicated in a lab or where their context of use is critical. For example, an app used outdoors in snow bound towns.
• Where budgets are tight: Running 6 usability testing with a video recording technique especially where the sample is fairly generic, can be inexpensive.
• In cases where you need to compare 2 or more products or interfaces: URUT is perfect for benchmarking studies comparing either competitor products or different iterations of your product. The ability to capture large sample sizes means that statistically significant differences between interfaces can be identified.

URUT tends to be less appropriate for more exploratory style usability testing because it is not possible to change tasks mid stream or ask impromptu questions. Click-stream tools tend to provide lots of data on what is happening however tend to provide less insight on why the behavior is occurring. Video based studies can be frustrating when there is a core questions that you would love to ask but hadn’t planned for. For early stage low fidelity prototypes in-person usability testing tends to be preferable because the facilitator can provide more context for participants regarding the intended functionality of the interface.

How to run an URUT

Before you start testing: You need to fully understand why the research is being conducted. Like all UX research techniques this comes back to defining the objectives of the study. All good research requires a clear understanding of:

1. The objectives of the project.
2. Identification of the research questions, which spell out how we will explore the objective.

Exploring these objectives and research questions with stakeholders at the outset will help with designing the study and provide a reference point for subsequent discussions. Spending the time up front to get this right will save time down the track and help ensure a successful study.

Audience

In order to run an URUT is important to identify who will complete the study. Ideally the sample would be representative of the product audience. There are a number of options for sourcing participants:

1. Emailing the study to a database of existing customers. This assumes that you have customers.
2. An intercept can be run on a website with existing customers. That is, a pop-up on your site invites people to participate in the study. An advantage of this approach is that the sample is likely to be representative.
3. A panel is another option, especially when you don’t have an existing customer base. A panel is a database of people who have indicated that they would like to participate in research. Usually panel databases can be segmented to target a specific audience however you typically pay for the convenience. Some URUT tools have an integrated participant filtering which can be used to improve the representativeness of the sample.
4. Social media can be another means to locate sample especially for organisations who have an engaged following. With social media it is important to ensure that the sample is representative of your audience.

Offering some form of incentive may be required to motivate participants to compete the study such as gift voucher prize. Audiences that are more engaged with the organization tend to require smaller incentives and those that are less engaged a greater incentive.

Tasks

It is crucial to get the tasks right for URUT. It needs to be very clear to the participants what is required of them. Provide enough detail for the participant to compete the task on their own and try to include any information they would require to complete the task. For example if a task requires credit card details providing fictitious card details will be necessary.

Avoid adding extraneous information in a task, which may confuse participants. Also avoid clues and telling the participant what to do, for example avoid including the wording of a call-to-action in the task, which will give the task away.

And finally, ensure that the interface supports participants to actually complete the task and for them to be aware that they have done so. In a prototype this may require adding specific content. An example task: Imagine you have decided to stay in Cairns for the first week in September. Use this site to reserve accommodation and pay.

Include questions

It is recommended that survey questions be provided as part of a study.

• Include closed questions after each individual task to measure ease of task completion. This will provide insight on which tasks are harder to complete than others. Also including open-ended questions will allow participants to describe their experience and any issues they encounter.
• Questions can also be provided after the test as a whole, to allow an overall assessment of the experience. This could include metrics such as customer satisfaction with the product, Net Promoter Score and System Usability Scale, which can be used to benchmark the product over time and against competitors. Again open-ended questions should be used to allow participants to provide feedback and to understand why issues are occurring.
• Questions can also be included with the intention of profiling participants. These can be helpful to understand the audience and/or to check that the sample matches a known audience.
• Finally, questions can be used to understand whether participants have understood a task. This can be especially valuable on content sites. For example if you were testing the Australian Tax Office website, the task could be to find the tax rate for a given salary and then follow up with a question to ask what the rate is.

Test assets

What are you actually testing and how will the URUT tool and participants access the interface? Consider how you are going to set-up the URUT tool and the prototype or interface being tested. The responsiveness of the interface you are testing can impact participant’s experience of the product. It is important to make sure that the participant doesn’t need any set-up from their end; barriers to people completing the study will reduce the completion rates. Try to ensure that the interface can be accessed from any computer or device the participant may be using.

Piloting

Testing the study with either a subset of participants or in a preview mode will allow issues with the prototype, technology, tasks or questions to be ironed out. Piloting the study will protect against wasting sample you are paying for or using up a small limited sample.

Tools

There are a number of different tools out there and more coming onto the market all the time. It is recommend that before running a study you explore some of the different options out there. Tools that support video recordings of participants include:

• Open Hallway
• Usertesting.com
• TryMyUI
• What users do

Tools that track click stream data include:

• Usability Tools
• Loop11

A tool like User Zoom collects both video and click-stream data.

Field-work

While the survey is being conducted it is important to monitor the data and be available for offering help to participants. Monitoring the data will ensure you see everything is working as planned and that you are receiving the data you need to meet your study objectives. Being available via email or phone helps manage the relationship with customers and to provide help where it is required.

Analysis

Once you have collected your results it is analysis time. To begin with look at some overarching metrics such as overall task completion and customer satisfaction. These can be automatically calculated in tools that measure click-stream like UserZoom. This will provide an overall feel for the effectiveness of the product. For video based tools you will need to watch the sessions and note whether the participants have been able to complete each of the tasks.

With an overall feel for the product look into the individual tasks and identify those that are causing issues. Next you need to find out why. With video based tools, watch video of specific tasks to observe behavior to identify the elements of the interface that are causing the issues. For clickstream services focus in on a combination of the pages visited during the task to identify behavior during the tasks and where the issues have occurred (i.e. which screens). Also view open-ended feedback.

Tips for running URUT

Choose the testing platform after you have identified the objectives of the study. It is crucial to select a tool that is fit for purpose and will support your study objectives. Some platforms do not support specific technologies such as flash and have limitations in the way they measure user behavior. As an example I worked on a study recently that was evaluating a single page app. In order to be able to measure user interaction we needed to get our developers to insert additional code to measure some interaction because the tool tracked the URL which did not change when users navigated a variety of content.

Set clear expectations for participants. Obtaining useful data is dependent on participants understanding what is expected of them. Setting clear expectations up front (during recruitment and at the start of the survey) about what participants are required to do and why the study is being conducted will help ensure success.

Remember that participants won’t receive any assistance during the study. It is crucial to ensure that tasks are clear, user friendly and that help is available. Consider how much assistance is available within the URUT tools for participants during the study.

Avoid bias. While all bias cannot be avoided, it is important to remove as much as possible. Randomise the order of tasks, which means that learning the interface during study will not influence performance on latter tasks.  Task wording can also introduce bias. As discussed, pay attention to task wording to ensure that they effectively test the product.

Keep participants engaged: Avoid participants quitting your study. Participants are more likely to complete the study if they feel like their feedback is valuable, if the tasks are interesting and the study isn’t too long.

Case study

A large corporate was about to implement a significant change to their site. Multiple rounds of in-person usability testing had been conducted and indicated that the new design would be a success. Due to the scale of the change the organisation wanted a high degree of confidence that the new design would enhance the experience. We ran a study which involved benchmarking the task completion rates, perceived ease of use and advocacy on the live site. We then repeated these on a prototype of the new design. By utilizing larger sample sizes, we had tight confidence intervals on core metrics that provided an accurate picture of the performance of the new design in comparison to the old.

Wrap-up

URUT is a technique that can offer quick, inexpensive and robust usability testing. Of particular value can be the ability to use the technique for benchmarking and context-sensitive studies. It is a great tool to have in your bag of research techniques and can be a great compliment to in-person methods. Exploring the different tools on offer and experimenting with the technique is the best way to learn and develop expertise.

Make it clear what is expected of participants, keep your research objectives in mind, and avoid bias. Good luck!!

The post How to Run an Unmoderated Remote Usability Test (URUT) appeared first on UX Mastery.

This short video will walk you through the process.

You can (and should) get good data from secondary sources such as analytics, marketing intelligence, customer support staff, third-party reports, and the like. But for genuine insights, you can’t beat spending time with users, in their own environments, watching them do the things your product or service is going to support.

One of my favourite quotations is from Sun Tzu: “Time spend in reconnaissance is seldom wasted.” You can often trace the fundamentally good things about design solutions to simple observations you made during field research. For example, a function that’s given prominence in the UI may have been identified as important early in your research.

Formally, the method we’re talking about here is “contextual enquiry” (or “inquiry” depending on your neck of the woods.) I usually just refer to “site visits” or “user research,” as these are terms my clients relate to. And we UX’ers are the enemies of jargon, right?

Really, you should always have your user research hat on. I’ve often gathered really useful information from opportunistic circumstances. For example, when visiting a workplace you might strike up a conversation with a person who can provide valuable insights. I believe you should always be willing to abandon or adapt your plans to take advantage of changed circumstances.

So while we’ll talk about an ideal or typical approach here, let’s not forget that we should always be willing to ride the waves.

Let’s think about our contextual analysis in 3 parts:

1. Identify the people (users) to visit and schedule visits
2. Carry out the visits
3. Analyse the data

Who to visit?

You need to visit the right people, and you need to visit enough people. You also need to constrain this activity, because it will become time-consuming and you may be swamped by a flood of data.

So, how many people? Figure it like this: You need to see at least 2 people from each significantly different user groups. That’s easy to say, but let’s take an example. For example, if you were looking at travel website, you might figure that you need to get input from:

• people who always book their travel online
• people who tend to use offline services

If we see 2 people from each, that’s a total of 4 people. My personal preference would be to beef this up to 6, just because experience has shown that 6 is a good number and gives you a degree of confidence that you’re getting a good understanding. Within that 6, you’d try to get a spread of other characteristics – for example a mix of older and younger people, and an approximate gender balance.

On more complex projects, the number of people to visit can get very big very quickly. For example, a project in the justice system might mean visiting prisoners, young offenders, police, court staff, judges, health professionals and more.

Where possible, limit your site visits to around 12 people. Certainly if you go above 20 you’re going to have a very large data set to deal with.

You’ll also have to consider budget. As a rule of thumb, visiting 6 people will probably take 3 days of planning, 3 days for the visits, and 3 days of analysis – say 2 weeks of effort. While that’s likely to be money well spent, it’s a considerable undertaking. Adding more users will increase this cost.

Scheduling

Don’t underestimate the effort involved in scheduling. You’ll need to contact each user and set a time that you can visit them. People may be reluctant to commit too much time, so you need to clearly communicate the benefit of what you’re doing, and undertake to limit their time commitment.

In general, I find that a one-hour visit is likely to be acceptable, particularly if people understand that what you are doing will make their life (or the life of their peers) better when you design and implement the new system or product.

When scheduling, you should communicate (typically by email) to let users know what to expect. Key elements are that you want to see them in their regular environment (at their desk or office or workbench in a workplace, in their home for home-based products, and so on).

Another important aspect of scheduling is that you probably want to see people on a typical or busy day, whereas people’s natural inclination will be to see you on a quite (and perhaps unrepresentative) day. Try to communicate how important it is to see them on a typical day.

A team of two

I like to have another person with me when conducting site visits. This may be a fellow UX’er, or it may be a member of the development team, or a client (and there’s nothing to stop you mixing-and-matching so that several people get to go on site.) Having another person means that you can discuss together what you observed, and what might be the implications. It also means that you have two sets of notes (ideally) and are less likely to miss things. It also means that several people have the opportunity to get an invaluable view of the “real world,” as well as learning how to conduct site visits for future projects.

Avoid cramming

I try to limit visits to 2 per day. This may sound like a light workload, but it’s really important to have time to write up your notes, and consider and discuss what you’ve learned, after each visit.

On the other hand, there are times when you have to cram more visits in, so you need a degree of flexibility. Just keep in mind that the quality of your effort deteriorates as you over-pack your schedule.

Conducting a visit

Before you go on site visits, there are a few things you need to prepare. If you are audio- or video-recording, then you will need to make sure your equipment is fully functional. You’ll also need to ensure that you have appropriate forms that explain how recordings will be used, and which you interviewees can sign to indicate their acceptance of the conditions. You should also be prepared to abandon recording if your interviewee is uncomfortable or reluctant.

Recording adds a level of complexity; for most of my work I do not record, but this really depends on your work domain and whether you need to record to communicate findings to others.

I like to have a very short script explaining why we are conducting a site visit. I read the script to interviewees at the earliest opportunity at the start of the session. Some people don’t like using scripts, and they can feel a bit stilted. On the upside, they ensure that you make a clear statement of the purpose of your visit, and this can serve to redirect sessions that are going off-track (you can refer back to your introduction.) The script also enables you to make any appropriate remarks about confidentiality or anonymity.

I like to offer people the highest degree of anonymity. For example, I always undertake not to use people’s names in reports or documents. However, I also have to alert people in some cases that it may be possible for others to deduce who made particular comments. It’s also the case that some people specifically don’t want anonymity, and want their voices to be heard clearly, and perhaps acknowledged. You’ll need to make your own decisions as to how to deal with these factors.

It’s also a good idea, in a work situation, to point out that the site visit is not an evaluation of the person’s performance, nor a review of their position or role.

Once you’ve got any paperwork, permissions and formalities out of the way, you’re can get down to the nitty-gritty. Firstly, make sure you’re in the user’s normal context. Despite your best efforts in initial communication, you’ll often find that when you visit, people may have booked a meeting room or set aside a special area. You will need to gently but firmly explain that you want to meet with the person in their regular environment so they can show you, not tell you, what they do.

The importance of detailed note-taking

It’s really important to take detailed notes. I use pen and paper. Some people I know have tried to use tablets or laptops. The problem with this, in my experience, is that it tends to distance you from your participants. But if you can make it work, go for it. I take copious notes – you never know what details are going to be important, but you can be absolutely sure that you won’t be able to create sufficient details from memory. You may be able to do so from audio/video recording, but this is inherently inefficient.

I type my notes, as soon as possible after each visit, into a simple document of spreadsheet format. Here’s an example. Each individual item is numbered (so you can always find exactly the source for any statement, comment or observation,) and each item is associated with a particular person (or group if you end up doing a group visit.)

As you can see, the notes are very rough – but this is precisely where the value lies. As you first make these notes, and subsequently review and analyse them, you are making valuable connections between items, and developing an understanding of the “problem space.”

What should the notes contain?

Everything! What you saw, what was said, what was done, what artefacts were used, what interruptions occurred. You want to get a full rich view of the user’s world. Some people are good at doing quick sketches and these can be very useful. I’m too slow at that, so I stick to words.

The “master-apprentice” model

In the book “Contextual Design,” the authors describe a “master-apprentice” model that I’ve always found a useful mindset. When you’re on site, you are visiting a master. The participant, by definition, is the master within their own domain, and you are there to learn from them. If you also communicate this concept to the people you are working with, it helps prevent the situation where you are a colleague attempts to teach a participant the “right” way to do something.

All that data!

You’ll very quickly accumulate a lot of information, and you will need to decide how to handle it. To the greatest possible extent, you need to get key information out of your notes and into the minds of the people you need to work with.

For small amounts of information, you may be able to process it online, simply “eye-balling” it in a spreadsheet and sorting it into groups to identify important themes, issues and opportunities.

I generally do a card-sort – printing out each notation on an index card, and grouping them (preferably with at least one other person) to build up a sensible and manageable dataset. This may seem like a lot of effort, but it really is great way to come to grips with a lot of information.

For very large data sets, you can use programs such as nVivo or Dedoose, but be aware that these tend to have a reasonably steep learning curve, and demand a certain commitment of time and effort.

You may want to create personas (fictitious, representative users) based on your observations of how people behaved and what characteristics had an influence on how they interacted with the product or service.

Stories also provide a strong and simple way of describing typical actions and interactions. These may be simple scenarios, or fully elaborated stories; you will need to consider what best suits your needs.

Whatever approach you take, make sure that you consider the purpose of the materials you prepare – for example, scenarios will help in conducting participatory design, personas will help designers, and the client, agree on the target audience for various features of the product or service.

A service map or blueprint may be useful for working on more elaborate problems.

The main thing is to ensure that the data you gathered is mined for your immediate needs, and also retained for possible future re-use.

However you end up working, the key thing is getting out and spending time with users. Provided you do this with an enquiring and flexible mind, you will reap many benefits, and your designs will be all the better for your effort.

The post Conducting Contextual Enquiry (or Site Visits) appeared first on UX Mastery.

So how do you conduct a persona analysis? This short animated video will give you some helpful pointers.

You can begin by compiling everything you know about your customers and grouping your findings in a spreadsheet. You could use headings relevant to your areas of study, such as industry, device, time, and goals. Or you could create affinity diagrams by organizing your findings on post-it notes. You might start to see patterns—the industries in which customers work, and what devices they use, at what time of day, and where. From here, you can form questions about your customers and work out what they have in common and also how they differ.

Then find the people who form these clusters—either in your existing customer database or by recruiting them— and talk to them. It’s a win-win. You get to learn from customers and they get access to the folks who create the software they rely on. Visiting a customer is ideal. But if you can’t visit in person, a video-chat is your next best option. A persona has a personality—the more you observe and capture during these interviews, the more realistic that personality will be.

You can then tag and analyze your findings. Return to your spreadsheet or affinity diagram and add more data points—office environment, software in use, collaboration habits and so on. Look for the predominant clusters and shared attributes.

You might find that two of your personas share many characteristics. You can combine these personas. Or if there is enough distinction to warrant it, divide the persona into two. Creating personas is an iterative process. What seems right at first glance may not hold up to close scrutiny.

Now it’s time to come up with names and representations for these personas. Your representation might be a photo, an illustration or an icon. The important part is that these personas be distinct and memorable. You want your colleagues, at the mention of the Alice persona, to picture Alice and recall what she represents.

Once you’ve created your personas, you can use them to design for customers with accuracy and confidence. For example, we can say, “This is a feature that Alice would use, but one that Jim might not discover in his typical use of our app.”

Finally, share your personas with as many colleagues as possible. Create posters of your personas and hang them throughout your office. Your goal is to create a shared understanding of just who you work for and how everyone can better serve them.

Personas can give you real insights into your customers, which will your result in you designing a much better product or service. Just remember that personas change over time—create them, learn from them, share them, and then don’t forgot to revisit them and begin the process anew!

The post How To Create UX Personas appeared first on UX Mastery.

Here’s a transcript of the video:

Everyone is different. We live, work, play, and interact in our own individual ways. Many of our experiences are influenced by our senses and our situations.

In the online world, this means how we see, hear, move and think can vary greatly. That thing you just did on that app? Someone does that in a completely different way.

When you’re planning your next digital creation, think about your audience’s preferences and how varied those experiences may be. Don’t cut someone out just because you haven’t prepared for the way they might interact with your creation. And most of all, make it easy.

This is what being inclusive is about: making sure that EVERYONE gets to do what they want to, in a way that suits them.

Here are a few things to keep in mind.

Some people may have 20/20 vision. But some might find your app blurry, or may see colours a bit differently from you or I.

Some folks might need to bump up the text size a lot to read it.

And some people may not be able to see at all, and will listen to content read out aloud to them by a screen reader.

So, make sure you have enough contrast—let your text really pop.

Use a bigger font. Make it easy to see, and easy to change when needed, and

Code it correctly, so that it makes sense when a screenreader reads it aloud.

If you’re using sound, not everyone will hear it, and some will want to turn it off.

So make sure you’re providing an equivalent way to get the message across, like a transcript, captions, or sign language.

We move differently.

Some of us can easily use a mouse or swipe on a touchscreen. But not all people navigate in the same way. Some people use the keyboard to go through everything linearly on a page.

Others might use a head-stick, or an eye tracking machine to perform that same action.

Some will need more time to get things done. And for some people, it might hurt to move.

So make it easy to get around your creation. You should be able to use a keyboard as well as a mouse to perform any action.

Not everyone will understand things easily or in the same way. Every brain is wired differently, so some people process information faster or slower than others. Some people understand information better when they hear it, compared to when they see it. Others may find it difficult simply because your language is not their language.

And some people just might need more time to process information and act on it. Don’t rush them.

So write your content so that it’s simple and clear. Make it as obvious as you can.

As creators of digital experiences, our mission is to make sure our users can do what they need to do. We’re all different, and we should respect those differences in ourselves and in others.

So plan for their success. Be inclusive.

That thing you’re creating that you want them to use? Build it to help them be awesome. They’ll love you for it.

The post Everyone Is Different appeared first on UX Mastery.

Surveys are increasingly becoming a more accepted tool for UX practitioners. Creating a great survey is like designing a great user experience—they are a waste of time and money if the audience, or user, is not at the centre of the process. Designing for your user leads to the gathering of more useful and reliable information.

Let’s take a look at some of the basics of creating and running a useful online survey.

What is a survey?

A survey is a simple tool for gathering information. Surveys typically consist of a set of questions used to assess a participant’s preferences, attitudes, characteristics and opinions on a given topic. As a research method, surveys allow us to count or quantify concepts—a sample or subset of the broader audience is used, the learnings from which can be applied to a broader population.

For example, we might have 100,000 unique users of a website in a given year. If we collect information from 2,000 of those users, we could confidently apply the information to the full 100,000.

When it comes to the digital space, we can use surveys for a variety of purposes including:

• Gathering feedback on a live product or during a pilot;
• Exploring the reasons people visit a website and assessing their experience of that visit (such as a True Intent survey);
• Quantifying results from qualitative research activities such as contextual enquiry or interviews; and
• Evaluating usability, such as the System Usability Scale.

Surveys can be an effective method of identifying:

• Who your users are;
• What your users want;
• What they purchase;
• Where they shop;
• What they own; and
• What they think of your brand or product.

Benefits

Surveys can benefit and inform the design process by:

• Providing information to better understand end users to design better products;
• Mitigating risk of designing the wrong, or a poor, solution for users;
• Providing stakeholders with confidence that a design is, or will be effective. Gathering larger sample sizes, in comparison to qualitative research, often speaks the language of business stakeholders. Whether we like it or not, there is often a perception when it comes to research that more is more.

Before starting

Like with any UX research activity an effective survey must start with a clear understanding of the needs and information required from the project. To create an effective survey both the business context and project objectives must be clearly understood. The business context of the interface or the product includes insight into why it exists and how it supports the business objectives. The project objectives include the reason the survey is being conducted. For example, is the survey being run to understand the end user, inform the direction of a design or assess a live website? The project objectives may inform the type of survey, the collection method and the robustness of the evidence required, which in turn could influence the ideal approach.

Furthermore, a set of research questions should be defined around the information that needs to be collected. These research questions can then be used as a framework for ensuring that the required information is collected effectively. Defining the information  can also be a mechanism for avoiding any irrelevant questions that could creep into the activity.

The information required also provides a framework for the scope of the research.  As a start point to any project, the information to be collected needs to be agreed to by all parties. Without this information the research becomes an exercise in guesswork and is likely to miss the mark for stakeholders and be frustrating for all.

Creating an effective survey

Effective questions and good survey design are important for generating quality data and maximising completion rates. Poor questions result in poor feedback that cannot be relied upon. Dropout is the enemy of achieving a robust sample. It is a win in the first place to get someone to agree to participate in an online survey. It is unforgivable if they drop out because they are bored or frustrated.

The following is a guide to creating an effective and engaging survey:

• Logical flow of questions. In order to make the questions easier and faster to answer they should be grouped with like questions and ordered in a logical manner. Imagine answering questions about your attitude to boat refugees, then being asked about your experience of your favorite fast food chain. The transition can be jarring. Obviously there is a need to be able to change topics, however minimising any unnecessary shifts, particularly at inappropriate times, will result in a more effective survey.
• Questions need to be easy to understand. Many surveys will be completed without the aid of anyone to clarify any confusion. It is important to make sure that questions can be readily understood without any additional information. Of major concern is that ambiguous or difficult to understand questions can be answered incorrectly which can bring the data into question.
• Provide questions appropriate for the audience. People can and will answer just about any question put in front of them. This doesn’t mean that they are qualified to answer them, or are able to provide insightful feedback. A good way to check this is to ask yourself, “will my audience know the answer to that question”?
• Avoid double negatives. Double negatives, particularly in combination with the available responses, can make answering questions difficult. Imagine the question:

For a participant, the response “No, my manager is not non-responsive” could be a challenging idea.

• Avoid questions that contain two concepts. For example:

You may think your manager’s leadership is great but their communication skills could be improved. In that case, how do you decide on an answer? This also gets challenging when analysing the findings. Which skill does the manager need to work on if the rating is poor? All questions should relate to one concept. If required, add an extra question to explore the other concept.

• Use balanced ratings scales. Use an equal number of positive and negative options—this relates to probability. With 4 options the natural spread would be 25% per answer, therefore if we have more positive options than negative we would increase the chances of getting positive feedback. An example of this would be:

A balanced rating scale is shown below:

With a balanced rating scale there is a greater chance of the results reflecting a participant’s true beliefs.

• Avoid answers that overlap. An example of overlapping scale would be:

Obviously for someone who is 24 years of age there are 2 options. The same advice goes for concepts.

• Use open-ended questions. This allows us to better understand what is happening. It is great to use multiple-choice questions to gather proportions of feedback and priority and then ask the more probing, ‘Why’? A common use is to follow-up a satisfaction question. For example, follow-up the question “Overall, how satisfied were you with your experience of the website?” with ‘Why’? as an open text field. This can provide great insights into what was driving the feedback.
• Use writing-for-the-web techniques. Using elements such as bolding key words, avoiding unnecessary copy and using a conversational tone can go a long way to making your survey more engaging and easier for participants to read and understand. For example, a question about gender is simplified in the second option below by removing unnecessary copy:

(Note: Read Jessica Enders’ article for an in-depth exploration of how, when and why you should—or shouldn’t—ask for someone’s sex or gender in a survey).

• Keep it short. There is often a temptation when writing surveys to add more areas for exploration. The problem is that they can become painfully long. A better approach is to keep the survey succinct and run another in a month or two.
• Avoid asking about behaviour. While there is nothing stopping you from asking for feedback regarding behaviour there are better techniques for collecting this type of information that is likely to translate to making better design decisions. For example, trying to assess the effectiveness of myki (Melbourne’s poor public transport ticketing system), observing people buying tickets and travelling throughout the network would yield more accurate and useful feedback than asking people how they had used the system over the last week.
• Include ‘don’t know’ options. There will be cases where participants legitimately don’t have an answer. It is likely to be more helpful to know that your audience don’t hold an opinion on a topic than forcing them into an answer, which can distort the picture by overestimating the positive or negative. The same can be said for neutral options in rating scales.

Once the survey has been written

It is a good idea to test the survey before launching it to your full audience. Initially this could be done with a colleague or someone from your organisation to pilot the survey. Don’t give them too much feedback on the survey background—only provide the information any potential participants would have. Give them clear direction in terms of the type of feedback you are looking for. Something along the lines of:

• Are there any questions that didn’t make sense to you?
• Are there any questions you couldn’t answer or were missing the answer you wanted to provide?

Once you are happy that the questions are clear and can be answered, launch the survey to a subset of your audience. When using a panel, go out to a subset of the total sample or when using an intercept survey (a pop-up on a live website) limit the proportion of visitors who will see the survey. Once you have checked that the questions are being completed as would be expected, go out to the whole sample.

Tools

There are many tools available for scripting and running surveys, ranging from light weight and inexpensive tools right through to specialist market research tools. The more comprehensive tools include greater functionality for including logic and routing in the survey as well as more powerful reporting functionality.

For most UX applications more simple surveys tools such as those discussed in the next section should offer adequate functionality to create surveys. My advice would be to keep surveys simple. A lot of time can be spent creating clever logic and routing within a survey but the more complex the survey, the greater the amount of testing required (a seemingly exponential increase). Often the benefit gained from the additional complexity of the survey does not reflect the time taken to set this up.

Below is a list of some of the survey tools on the market. This is not intended to be an exhaustive list, rather a place to start if you are interested writing and running a survey.

*Only available in paid-for solutions.

Consider the following when choosing a survey tool:

• If you work in a medium to large organisation, someone will already have access to a survey tool. Use it. It will save you money and the time spent trying to choose one. Try marketing, HR or market research teams.
• If you plan to use a research panel for your sample, contact them and see which tools they can integrate with easily.
• For all but the most basic of surveys expect to pay something for the tool. The costs are fairly low—for example SurveyMonkey and SurveyGizmo have $19 offerings which remove most restrictions to allow access to much of the functionality required.

Wrap-up

Surveys can be a really useful UX tool to provide input for the design process. The key to a successful survey is establishing the objectives and information required from the study up front, then making sure the questions asked cover them. Keep at the forefront of your mind the importance of creating a good experience for the participants by writing appropriate questions. Designing an effective survey is going to produce the best results.

Keep it short, keep the participant in mind when writing the questions and engage with your audience—good luck!

The post Better User Research Through Surveys appeared first on UX Mastery.

I say need, not want—a content audit isn’t something you’re necessarily going to want to tackle. It’s one of those un-sexy, tedious jobs that hardly anyone talks about. But you can’t undertake a redesign of a content-heavy site without it.

What is a Content Audit?

A content audit is the activity of checking all of the content on a website, and compiling it into a big list. There are three main types of audits you can perform:

• Full content inventory: A complete listing of every content item on the site. This may include all pages as well as all assets (such as downloadable files and videos).
• Partial content inventory: A listing of a subset of the site’s content. A partial inventory may include, for example, the top few levels of a hierarchical site or the past six months of articles. All sections of the site will be covered.
• Content sample: A less detailed collection of example content from the site.

What is a Content Audit Used For?

The main purpose of a content audit is to produce a listing of the site’s content, usually in a big spreadsheet.

This list of content will come in handy at various stages of the project. If you’re re-doing the information architecture, you’ll return to it again and again to remind yourself of the details of each page; you can also use it to talk to authors about managing and rewriting their content; and if you’re going to be moving to a new content management system, you’ll use it to keep note of what you started with, and where you’re up to.

That said, having a comprehensive list of content isn’t the only benefit of this process. Just by taking the audit you’ll get a much better understanding of the content. You may find things you didn’t know existed, spot duplication and identify all kinds of relationships in the content. It can also serve as a precursor to a more comprehensive content analysis, but that’s a topic for another post!

What Does a Content Audit Include?

I always record a content audit in a spreadsheet, mainly because spreadsheets are so flexible. They are also great at holding a large amount of information in a fairly manageable way. Plus they’re easy to share with other people.

I recommend collecting the following information for every page:

• Navigation title: The name of the main navigation link to the content (e.g. the link title in the main navigation)
• Page name: The displayed page title
• URL: You may want to display the URL or just link from the page name
• Comments: Notes and things for you to remember
• Content hierarchy: Some way of showing the basic relationship of the content items

You may also like to add information about:

• Content Type: Is this a basic page, publication, news story, article, technique, FAQ, or something else?
• Basic content description: A brief reminder about what’s on the page
• Topic, tags or category: Meta data for products, articles, news, blog posts
• Author: Who wrote this content?
• Owner: Who is responsible for the content?
• Date last updated: When was the content last updated?
• Attached files: How many files are attached, and what type of files are they?
• Related: What information is linked from sidebars or Related Links boxes on this page?
• Availability: Is the content available to desktop, mobile and/or app users? Is the content syndicated to other sites?
• A numbering system: An index to help you when referring to each content item.

You may need to collect different information for each type of content. For example, you may want to list topics or categories for news content; and only list downloadable files in a publications area.

The most important thing to know about a content audit is there really is no right or wrong way to do it—it’s a tool for you to use throughout your project, so create your content audit in a way that will help you. And don’t be afraid to adapt it after you start—each client and project is different, so  each audit will be different.

Where to Begin

Getting started is easy! Here’s how I go about it.

1. List the main pages or sections of the site in the first column of your spreadsheet (right alongside your index). Here’s an example of content audit spreadsheet for a site that may look familiar:

   

2. Choose one page to start with and dive into it, capturing the information you’ve decided upon for that page.
3. If that page has sub-pages, make a list of each of them, and repeat the process for each of these in turn.

   

4. Then just keep going, until you’ve explored and written down everything you need to. That’s really all there is to it.

   

Auditing your content it this way—writing down details of the current page, then listing the sub-pages, then exploring a page—builds out your list in a way that allows you to come back and explore each section one-by-one.

If you’re auditing a big site, it can be very easy to get lost—it’s important to take this process step-by-step, and to finish one section before starting another.

Tips

• If your site is run from a CMS, you should be able to get access to a list of all the pages from the site. If it’s a good CMS, and the content is already fairly well structured, you may even be able to have the CMS generate a good quality starter audit for you. If the CMS can’t do it, a tool like the Content Analysis Tool may help.
• Don’t capture information you are unlikely to need or use. If you’re unsure whether you need information for a specific page, write it down for a handful of pages, to get a feel for whether it will be useful. You can always come back and fill it in for other pages at a later stage.
• It can sometimes be difficult to determine how a site is structured. In fact, often the process of figuring out what the main sections of a site are can be a challenge. Don’t worry too much about getting the relationships right and showing how pages are connected at the beginning. Just focus on getting pages written down into the spreadsheet—as you get through the audit, you may find a better way of organising the information.
• Don’t expect the content audit to be fast. Big sites can take days and days to audit. I use this fact as an excuse to buy new music, then sit down and plough through it!
• Don’t try to take shortcuts, skip sections or skim through without really looking. It’s important that you understand all of the content before you try to work with it later.
• If you’re working on a brand new site, a content audit can still be useful. Instead of starting with the current site, make a list of all of the resources you’ll be using—printed procedure manuals, fact sheets, videos, paper forms and other documents that will influence the site.

It All Starts with Content

Whether you decide to create a comprehensive list of every item, or just a sample selection, a content audit is a crucial first step in the path to understanding any content-heavy website. While the process may sound tedious (and, granted, often is!), undertaking this process will provide you with the insight and context you need to make informed design decisions.

Creating a content audit doesn’t require years of experience, but it does require patience, persistence, curiosity, and attention to detail—all good traits of a UX Designer!

Download the content inventory spreadsheet used in this example.

The post How to Conduct A Content Audit appeared first on UX Mastery.

If you’re after more specific advice, be sure to pick up a copy of our ebook, Get Started in UX, the definitive guide to making a career change and landing a job as a user experience designer.

We’ve received quite a few emails lately from readers looking to get started in UX Design—many coming from a print background. Here’s one such email, which I’ve published here with permission:

I’m a traditional print-based graphic designer looking to get into UX design. I’ve a good background in the Adobe Suite and traditional print software (QuarkXpress etc). Currently I’m working within the newspaper industry and am fearing for my future, as the industry is in (probably) terminal decline. I am looking to re-skill towards web-based UX design. Can you recommend a starting point and path I should look to take? Many thanks.

In our animated video (embedded below) I mentioned that a career as a UX Designer is interesting, challenging, rewarding, pays well, and has a low barrier of entry.

What I didn’t touch on is how to get started as a UX Designer. What follows is my advice for anyone looking to get started in UX Design.

1) Get Educated

I’m not saying you should go invest in a university degree. While I’m certain that there are quality higher education courses out there, I don’t think that’s a necessary step to take to break into the UX world. What I mean is: read, watch and listen to everything you can get your hands on in order to understand how UX Designers do what they do.

We’ve put together a ton of recommended books, which should form a good starting point. If you’re looking for an online course to help you get started, our big list of UX courses is the most comprehensive collection you’ll find. For complete beginners, try Lis Hubert’s UX Basics course or the course Become a UX Designer from Scratch by the Interaction Design Foundation; developers may find Amir Khellar’s Design Your User Experience in 7 Simple Steps more to their liking.

In many of these courses, the subject matter itself isn’t difficult to digest, but there is often a lot to learn. The more you can digest, the better off you’ll be.

2) Get The Right Tools

UX Design is more about working with people than working on your own in front of a screen.

That said, there are two tasks that stand out as being a huge part of what I do: creating interactive wireframes and conducting guerrilla usability testing sessions. Both require software to do properly. I’ve tried a few different applications, but keep coming back to Balsamiq Mockups as my wireframing tool of choice, and I use Silverback (Mac only) for recording my usability testing.

There are plenty of other alternatives to these tools out there; these just happen to be what works best for me. For the most comprehensive list of UX Tools ever, check out our 100+ Awesome Tools For UX Designers.

3) Get Some Experience

Your next step is to find a way to put some of this new-found knowledge into practice. Luckily, it’s possible to do so without having to bluff your way into a job only to discover you’re out of your depth.

Whether it means spending some time after hours helping a friend’s small business, a local non-profit, or a personal project, seek out the opportunity to apply some of the theory, and start getting those runs on the board. It could even be as simple as taking the initiative at work to conduct some user testing sessions, and branching out from there.

Approach an agency or organisation that you have contacts on the inside, and volunteer your time to conduct some usability testing sessions or perform user interviews. While it may go against the grain to admit to being a novice at something (and taking a pay cut to go with that) after you’ve had an established career doing something else, this is a field that is so fast moving that I honestly feel like a year after being “that intern” people would forget that was where you came from, and if you’re adding value then you may be in a good position to renegotiate (or move on to somewhere else that recognises the value you’re adding).

For an activity such as conducting user testing, a handful of sessions is all you need to get the hang of things. Once you’ve introduced that user feedback loop to your project, you can start focussing on developing other skills.

4) Get Connected

The best UX jobs, like all jobs, aren’t advertised. They come through LinkedIn, Twitter, local event meetups, referrals, or are only ever sourced internally. Trusting somebody to own the user experience of a product to somebody, for many organisations, is like trusting them with a newborn baby.

There will be a ton of questions and building trust with the interviewer is key. If the position has come from the result of a conversation in a social setting, or a recommendation from somebody you met, then you’ll already have a head start on building that trust. So get along to your local UX Book Club, find an event on meetup.com, and start following some of the UX thought leaders on Twitter.

5) Get A Mentor

For me, finding a mentor was a real turning point. Even though we don’t catch up as often these days as when we first formalised the mentoring relationship, when I look back now, many of the big decisions I made career-wise happened soon after I found a mentor and he started encouraging me to step out of my comfort zone.

My mentor not only helped shape the process that I use on design projects to this day, he also encouraged me to start giving presentations at conferences and meetups, and to quit the low-paying job that I was in and take control of my career. For that I’m eternally grateful. Finding a mentor can be hard, but hopefully if you’ve done a good job of Step 4, you’ll at least have more people within your circle and a better understanding of who’s who. Hopefully someone will stand out. Failing that, you could try a more formal program such as IAI mentor program or a mentor-led bootcamp like Get a New Job in UX Design by the Interaction Design Foundation.

6) Get Hired

With those ducks all lined up, you’re now in the best possible place to land an awesome job. What’s missing, however, is a portfolio of your work.

Much like a graphic designer would have an A3 portfolio that showcases logos, posters and t-shirts he or she has designed, your portfolio should include examples of the deliverables you’ve produced.

Your portfolio could include wireframes you’ve created, example personas and scenarios you’ve developed, photos of walls covered in post-it notes from affinity diagramming exercises, photos of you conducting a workshop … whatever you need to tell a story about the process you follow, and to help you talk about that process during an interview. If you want help, we recommend the online course called How to Create a UX Portfolio by the Interaction Design Foundation.

Want to hear more? Pick up a copy of our ebook: Get Started in UX.

Where to learn more:

• Recommended UX Books
• See our list of UX Conferences
• Find an Online UX Courses that suits you
• Our giant list of UX Degrees
• The best UX Tools and Software

Related Reading

• Get Started in UX: the complete guide to launching a career in user experience design by Luke Chambers and Matthew Magain
• Whitney Hess’s mind-bogglingly comprehensive collection of resources and guiding principles.
• Patrick Neeman’s list of seven tips on how to get started in user experience
• Nick Finck’s excellent tips on starting a career in user experience design
• UXPin’s collection of free UX books
• A comprehensive (and free) UX course
• A free course on UX Design for mobile developers
• UX Beginner
• UX Apprentice

What other advice do you have for people trying to migrate to UX Design from another career? Let us know in the comments.

The post How To Get Started In UX Design appeared first on UX Mastery.