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adventures in ux

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A Collaborative Lean UX Research Tool - Smashing Magazine

This article describes and gives you a tool called the Rainbow Spreadsheet. With it, you will be able to collaboratively observe UX research sessions with team members (or clients).

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How would you improve jury duty?

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Project 4: DuckDuckNews

DuckDuckGo is a privacy­-focused search engine that doesn’t track its users. For this project, my classmate mikyremm and I designed a responsive news site, "DuckDuckNews," as a competitor to search engine news aggregators like Google News and Yahoo News. (Project timeline: 2 weeks)

Research

After doing some come competitive analysis and research into DuckDuckGo's brand and business goals, Mike and I sent out a screener survey to find research participants. We ended up conducting 4 phone interviews and 7 in-person interviews, each ending with a contextual inquiry where we watched participants browse and search for news on their laptops and phones. Based on our findings, we developed three main personas/types: 

The Steady Media Diet​, who visits the same handful of news sites every day and uses aggregators like Google News to supplement when he wants to explore a specific topic.

The Daily Aggregation Browser,​ who checks an aggregation site daily to get a sense of what’s happening and interesting that day.

The Social Searcher, ​who sees stories her friends are posting on social media then searches a news aggregator to learn more.

Synthesis

Our personas on hand, we set out to prioritize features, determine user flows and information architecture, and determine the types of content modules we would need. We even came up with some user story/user flow/site map mashups to help us better understand how our users would interact with the site. Here's an example of one of the personas:

Design and Testing

We started by sketching and testing some initial ideas with each other and classmates to get a sense of whether our layouts and page elements useful and easy to understand. Because we were trying to test for aspects like readability and scanability in our designs, we quickly moved on to creating high-fidelity mockups. We created simple inVision prototypes and tested them with our survey respondents, classmates, and coffee shop customers for clarity, scanability, usability, and the overall look and feel. Some sketches and a few of those screens:

Specifics and documentation

Because we were designing a responsive web page with dynamic content, we wanted to make sure we were considering aspects that weren't all conveyed in our mockups, including display and ranking logic, responsive breakpoints, and content requirements. We ended up creating a spreadsheet with all the various content modules from different pages (home, category, and search result) and how they should be treated on both web and mobile. 

We also made notes about how the breakpoints should work on mobile, tablet, and desktop.

Finally, we considered how best to integrate DuckDuckGo with DuckDuckNews. In addition to designing ways to link to DuckDuckNews from regular search results, we also focused on leveraging DuckDuckGo's poweruser feature, !bang.  This would allow us to send queries that begin with "!n" directly to a DuckDuckNews results page (currently !n queries take users to Google News results).

Key Takeaways

Interviews and testing revealed some key takeaways that informed our design choices. Sources mattered for all of our personas, so we made sure to include the source name, logo, and author in results whenever possible. 

Finding the right balance between offering an easily scanable, un-curated feed with lots of results while still offering a sense of structure and hierarchy to the results was a big challenge (still not sure we've gotten it right). This tension was particularly clear with the "top stories" instant answer box, a design feature that used by DuckDuckGo on their general search results page. While users responded well to the top stories being featured in the top side scroll bar, we wondered how many items to place in the section given that some "top" items would be hidden. 

Our sidebar modules went through several iterations as we honed in on what mattered most to people (separating news from opinion, getting a sense of what was trending, wanting to see tweets only in the context of a particular topic).

Peruse a pdf of our research report and presentation here.

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Stateless Voices is a an ongoing journalism project about stateless people in America and the European Union. Stateless people have no citizenship or legal status, and therefore often lack the ability to work, study, or travel freely. 

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Membership approved: Civic Hall

This week I became a community member at Civic Hall, a new civic tech workspace run by Personal Democracy Media. Here's a little paragraph from my application about why I wanted to join:

I've been interested in civic tech before I knew there was a name for it– what I did know was that I was interested in journalism, community news, big data, privacy, health care, public art, Occupy, and more. Over the years I've worked both formally and informally on projects in these spaces, and have started to better understand their languages and communities. Realizing I wanted to find a place in the civic tech world, I recently started examining the skills I had to offer it. That introspection has led me to make a professional pivot to UX design and research (via the UX immersive course at General Assembly). UX and civic tech seem well-aligned– to me they're both about empathy, cross-disciplinary collaboration and advocating for the people who aren't in the room. All of this is to say: I'm embarking on a new path. I want to be a member of Civic Hall so I can be exposed to the people and projects in the civic tech space, and figure out where I can jump in.

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Remaking The U.S. Government's Online Image, One Website At A Time : All Tech Considered : NPR

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What or who is the public in public radio?

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Had a sweet time checking out the Civic Hall open house today! (at Civic Hall)

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Wondering what "civic tech" is? The Knight Foundation has an amazing report and interactive data visualization on the current civic tech landscape. 

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UXDi Project 4: Kickstarter

The assignment:

Our team of 3 was given 2 weeks to design a recurring pledge model for our hypothetical client, Kickstarter.

The proposal:

Based on our primary personas, we designed two types of recurring pledge models:

1. The "multiphase" model to help sustain long-term creative projects (like a documentary film) with several phases of funding over the course of 1-2 years

2. The "subscription" model to allow backers to "subscribe" to a creator's regular rewards (like a monthly magazine or quarterly performance series)

The process:

• Competitive research

• Screener surveys (58 respondents)

• User interviews (12 total)

• Personas, user journeys, task flows, feature prioritization, design studios

• Sketching, wireframing, prototyping, testing

My contributions:

Competitive research, screener survey and user interview questions, some interviews and transcriptions, faq guide, project comparison chart, home page mockup, creator flow wires + annotations, next steps and considerations.

Our presentation is BEAUTIFUL. Check out the pdf.

See my hi-res files of the FAQ guide, homepage, and annotated creator flow wires.

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This past weekend I went to a two-day Journalism Hackathon and got to learn from, hang with, and make things with a bunch of awesome coders, journalists, and designers.

Our team of 7 built an accelerated video consumption app. GREYHOUND uses Tinder-esque like/dislike swipe gestures to help you filter and discover content you care about from your preferred sources.

I mostly worked on personas and sketching out user flows and interactions.

See our presentation, check out the live version (click and drag to swipe) + Github, and check out all the incredible projects from the weekend!

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Unrelated to UX but a fun little brag: I interviewed Houston Texans running back Arian Foster about personal finance as an NFL player. 

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#JesuisAhmed

So here we go. Again. Which is a tragic reflection on the madness within which we live.

There are, of course, important statements of solidarity with those killed in the Charlie Hebdo offices, and again some more on the value and importance of free speech whether it provocative or incendiary.

There are also, and will also be, both thoughtful and ridiculous analyses of where and how the actions of these madmen reflect or don’t reflect Islam.

For the moment though, we think of Ahmed Merabet, one of the police officers killed in the attack.

Via The Atlantic:

For a number of reasons, the death of Ahmed Merabet should provide a way to understand Wednesday’s horrific shooting in Paris. Merabet, one of the two policemen shot and killed in Charlie Hebdo massacre, was a French Muslim man who died defending the laws that allow satirists to mock his religion.

It’s particularly surreal then that the footage of Wednesday’s carnage involved the terrorists approaching Merabet and executing him as he sat wounded on a sidewalk in the 11th arrondissement, begging for his life. Following the attack, many of the cartoons drawn or tributes delivered to the victims focused either on the journalists or the greater ideal of free expression. This leaves the story of Merabet (and fellow officer Franck Brinsolaro) as a footnote.

Yes, stand with Charlie, but remember to stand with Ahmed too.

Image: Twitter post, via @Aboujahjah.

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Fun fact: I also helped LearnVest concept/script this little Arian Foster promo video :).  Time to get your money in shape for the New Year, kids. 

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Twentysomethings: Barely Saving, but Surprisingly Confident - The Atlantic

As people age and get paid more, they actually become less optimistic about their preparedness for the future.

I helped write a report for LearnVest on financial confidence trends and the Atlantic picked it up!

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