uxtradesecrets

Trade secrets from UX front line from @chudders and friends

[uxtradesecrets]

Stealth user research

Use the live chat feature on your client's website to ask customer service people what queries they get asked all day.

Very quickly you'll get some excellent insights from true experts about customer problems.

Make sure you don't take up too much of their time as it is likely that they'll be targeted on call times.

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Trial translators first before booking them

From Sophie Freiermuth (@wickedgeekie) Freelance Agile & Lean UX designer

"Ask your freelance translators to send you a 100 word sample translation before you confirm the booking to make sure you get the right person for the job."

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Plan things using mindmaps

Mindmaps are a brilliant way of planning things out. I use them for work tasks like structuring proposals and presentations, and for other stuff like planning out what needed fixing in my house!

I use Mindnote Lite (for mac) but there are all sorts of other mindmapping tools available.

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Annotate print outs in user research

A really quick way of making useful notes when viewing user research is to print out the thing you are testing and write annotations straight onto that.

This saves you working out which specific part of an interface your individual notes refer to so it speeds up the amends process.

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Lay out your presentations to help to plan them

I had to run a workshop recently and had to get through a lot in a relatively short period of time.

I found that by printing slides (2 per page) and laying them out it made it far easier to work out my timings. 

I worked out where I needed to be by when, and ended up sticking this up on the wall as a guide to use during the workshop to keep me on track.

It worked like a dream and made it really easy to edit my slides as I could easily see everything in one place.

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Record audio with Pearnote

Pearnote (mac only) is amazing. It is a note taking and audio recording tool in one.

You know when you go back through your notes and some of them make no sense whatsoever?

With Pearnote you can re-listen to the audio at that specific time so you can remind yourself what you meant by your notes.

It essentially saves hours of trawling through audio to find pertinent audio clips for later use.

I use it for recording user research sessions as well as for recording workshops.

[uxtradesecrets]

Using the 5 w's to define user stories

The 5 w's is a classic technique used by journalists to research a story.

I've used this recently to define user stories. It gives a useful framework to really get to the bottom of who might use something and what they might want to use it for.

You could also use it as a framework for personas too I guess.

Who is the user?

What are they trying to do?

Where are they?

Why are they using it?

When are they using it?

[uxtradesecrets]

The 7 P's of effective meetings

We all go to far too many meetings.

To get the best out of meeting try this framework to help you plan more effective meetings.

It's called the '7 P's of effective meetings' and I read about it in a great book called Gamestorming.

So to run an effective meeting you need:

1. Purpose - What is the point of the meeting? What are we trying to achieve?

2. Product - What will be the end product (actions) from the meeting?

3. People - Who must be there and what role will they play?

4. Process - What is the agenda?

5. Practicalities - Where & when? 

6. Preparation - What do we need to do in advance? Who is doing what in the meeting? 

7. Pitfalls - What may stop us from achieving our objectives?

So as ever with these things take from it what works for you.

[uxtradesecrets]

Use masters for user journey waypoints in your wireframes

From Ben Hayes (@benhayes), UX Designer at benhayes.com

"When delivering wireframes it is often useful to show a user journey through the screens, so that stakeholders can click through and follow the journey for themselves. If you are doing this, you probably need some convenient way to highlight which link on the page will take them to the next step in the journey.

In Axure I like to use a little triangle to mark these 'waypoints' and create it as a master.

The advantage of this is that if you need to remove all the markers later (for example, when user testing) you can do so in a single action. To do this, edit the master and delete the triangle. Then if you want to put it back in later, just re-create the triangle again in the master, and it will appear on all the waypoints once more.

I like to make these triangles purple because it is a colour that is easy to avoid if you need to use colour within the UI itself."

[uxtradesecrets]

Protect your deliverables in transit

Large scale wireframes, customer journey maps and sitemaps can  get damaged when transporting them.

To keep your deliverables looking lovely, invest in a document tube from your local stationers (approx. £15).

For all you Alan Partridge fans out there, yes, it's an extender.

[uxtradesecrets]

User research on a shoestring

You won't always have the budget to conduct the amount of user research that you'd like to do.

In this situation I always ask whether my client has a customer contact centre.

I then spend a day chatting to call centre representatives to ask them why customers are calling them and what their most frequent queries are about. Often they will let you listen to a few calls as well.

This gives you a fantastic indication of where any problems lie and allow you to focus your redesign efforts of addressing these issues.

[uxtradesecrets]

Hold workshops away from clients offices

By holding workshops away from your clients offices you'll find that people are more focussed on the task in hand.

There is less scope for people being distracted by colleagues or being pulled into other meetings.

You'll also find that getting a group of people together in a new environment can aid original thinking and helps you to create a bit more of an event than an everyday meeting.

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Make your work visible to get high level buy in

From Dr. Susan Weinschenk (@thebrainlady), Founder and Principal of Weinschenk Institute, LLC

"When I'm working at a large company as an outside consultant I will sometimes comandeer a prominent conference room with lots of glass.

Then the team I'm working with and I will do our work BIG and COLORFULLY on paper or on white boards and fill up the walls of the room, so that people walking by will get curious and wonder what's going on.

Then we leave the room!!! and go away for several hours, especially over lunch time. It's happened more than once that when we come up there is a high level VP or other senior manager in the room looking at all the writing on the walls. Then he or she wants to talk about it when we go back in, and voila -- the project, and UX in general can take a big leap forward because it has a high level champion."

[uxtradesecrets]

Use 'copy as PDF' in omnigraffle to get duplicate masters

From Ben Hayes (@benhayes), UX Designer at benhayes.com

"This was from Viget, In OmniGraffle use 'copy as PDF' and then paste to get duplicate 'masters' that can be edited from one place.

This gives you a similar effect to shared layers, but the elements can be in different positions on different canvases (e.g. footers on pages of different lengths)."

[uxtradesecrets]

You gotta have a note taking system

No matter what you end up using you need a robust and reliable tool to store all your notes.

I use Evernote (it works for me) and I have a notebook for each of my clients and keep notes on all phone calls, meetings, research notes, project outlines and weekly to do lists which helps me to keep on top of things.

It synchs between my phone and laptop and saves to the cloud so I don't worry about losing stuff.

As I say it works for me (others swear by notational velocity, moleskines etc.) but regardless of what you use choose make sure you've got a system.

[uxtradesecrets]

Focus on core pages first

Homepages and section landing pages always seem to get a disproportionate amount of attention during the design process.

Many users never actually see homepages because they link direct to content pages from google.

Section landing pages are also sometimes skipped over because people use mega navs that allow people to hop straight to the lower level pages.

Try starting with the key pages first such as product pages or forms and work back from them. This method actually makes it so much easier to design the higher level pages because by that point you know what is important to flag on these pages.

[uxtradesecrets]

Work in pairs

Working in pairs is great because you'll have someone who understands the design problem as well as you do to bounce ideas off.

It stops you from reaching that dead end when you feel like you've simply run out of ideas!