UX Aprenticeship
Discovery
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Learn the Logic
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Dig Deep
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Stakeholder Interviews – Interview stakeholders
Customer Research – Find out about customers by using different techniques including: story mapping, tasks, participation, demonstration, role playing, exercises, homework, logging, stimuli.
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Build Consensus
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Personas
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Customer Journey Maps – Helps illustrate a path of your customers current path with your product or service.
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Alignment Meeting – Will uncover opportunities to improve your customer’s experience. The outcomes should be prioritised personas, design principles, and project objectives.
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See real life examples
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Research
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Quick & Dirty Research – Get current analytics and then sketch up a journey map and the personas
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The Map Leads the Way – Build a map and this will help you know where to go
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Test your knowledge
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Test yourself
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Access resources
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Books
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Articles
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People
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Strategy
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Learn the Logic
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UX, not UI
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Finding the Kick Ass Approach - Get your team together to brainstorm with strategies, ideas, solutions, etc and don't rule anything out because it is too expensive or infeasible.
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Story boarding - Story boards are useful as they are often easy to understand, you don't need to be artistic you can just draw stick figures and they give you a good understanding about your product and the consumer using it. They are also a quick way to get feedback on ideas.
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Test Early & Often - Validate the story boards with your consumers and they'll tell you if you're right or not.
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Conceptual Designs
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Draw from Experience - Get inspiration from other products that are similar to yours but also take inspiration from outside the industry. Draw six to eight concepts in 5 minutes, then pitch and critique. At the end, narrow it down to 2-3 concepts for testing.
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Prototype & Test - You can make very cheap basic prototypes out of paper or cardboard. You can also make digital versions. The conceptual designs. should focus on flow, not on specific UI controls. You can use your best story board as a script for testing out the concepts.
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Site Map (alpha) - Once you get a solid concept designed, you can start the site map.
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See Real Life Examples
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A New Model?
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See it in action - First reviews from stakeholders, then user validation. Set the stage with the common scenario, then show customers various concepts to see which worked well with the customers.
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Fast Feedback - Getting fast feedback means you can find out fast what you need to change or improve.
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Sticky Map - Come up with ideas that will be useful with sticky notes and make a sort of mind map with them.
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Test Your Knowledge
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Access Resources
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Books
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Articles
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People
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Design
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Learn the Logic
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Mock It Up - Wireframes are big time savers and they allow you to hash out the details of the page layout and interaction design before moving into high fidelity designs and development.
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Walk Before You Run - Learn and research about what you need to do before you do it.
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Adding Interactions - Prototyping is used to communicate the intent of a design both clearly and effectively. Prototyping helps you see or get a good idea of design ideas, gather real-time feedback from users/consumers as people are actually trying your product and test assumptions.
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Testing Tools- If your consumers aren't local you can use remote testing tools so you can still get feedback from consumers that are far away.
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Learn & Iterate - Make sure you start up well like getting fast feedback to avoid going wrong later on or just going down the wrong path completely.
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The Centerline - Start with internal reviews to make sure the designs are meeting the business objectives, then validate with your users to see if they think it's right. Start working with the development team if you haven't already as they can help steer you in the right direction and see if things are too expensive or infeasible.
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Handoff? - There is no handoff to an unwitting development team, or a tricky political situation to get sign off from the higher ups. By pulling in your stakeholders early and focusing the team on the right outcomes, you already have alignment. By collaborating with key contributors early on, it will make the development process and the release process a lot easier.
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Launch - When you've launched you'll be collecting customer feedback, evaluating the analytics, maybe even some A/B testing. From this you can improve your product.
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See Real Life Examples
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Getting Digital - Use online and/or digital resources to create your wire frames
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Prototype & Test - Create an actual prototype and not some sort of paper or cheap prototype, this prototype needs to be a proper one that if it goes well will be very similar to the final product if not the final product.
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Final - This is the final product that will be launched.
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Test Your Knowledge
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Access Resources
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Books
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Articles
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People