New site: Questionable Methods - fast, cheap UX techniques for lean and agile teams

Today is World Usability Day. To celebrate, I launched a new site www.questionablemethods.com full of Creative Commons licensed information for UX-curious development teams and user experience professionals.

• Get your UX questions answered
• Learn fast, cheap methods to make your product better

If you are on a UX-curious team without specialist usability stills, or if you are a usability person struggling to fit your techniques into a lean or agile development cycle, this site shows you discount/guerrilla variants of usability skills that will get you fast, cheap results.

The site contains lots of tips to save your team development time and money by building the product that users really want. You can learn highly practical design thinking methods that integrate user experience (UX) techniques into rapid iterative development cycles.

If you have questions that aren't answered by the site, let me know. Audience participation is the key to making Questionable Methods work.

Fast, easy usability tricks in Denmark

This wasn’t the first time I’ve presented in Denmark, but it was the most fun. A packed room of over 100 people came to hear about Fast, easy usability tricks for big product improvements at GOTO in Aarhus, a developer-centric conference that has never had a user experience track before.

That evening I also got roped in to meeting with the local HCI chapter to talk about discount mobile usability techniques. It was supposed to be an interactive discussion just prompted by my slides, but Danish reticence won out and so the sharing session turned into a monolog. Apologies to the audience members that I bullied into sharing their experiences :o)

Many thanks to Trifork, who hosted the conference, and especially to Janne Jul Jensen for inviting me to talk (and also giving a great talk herself). I was particularly impressed by the way the conference organizers collected attendee feedback after each session. A member of the conference crew would stand at the exit holding an iPhone showing one third of the screen red (with a frowny face), one third yellow (neutral face) and one third green (happy face). Audience members just had to touch the relevant third of the screen to “vote” on the session. I ended up with 91% green, 9% yellow, which tells me there’s room for more UX content at future GOTO conferences. 

Balanced Team Conference - San Francisco

A couple of weeks back we ran a small but perfectly formed conference at Hot Studio in San Francisco to bring together practitioners and would-be practitioners to discuss ways of creating and maintaining balanced teams.

As was fitting for a conference discussing agile and UX integration, the program was created by the attendees. During registration we asked each attendee what they wanted to learn and what they could teach/share. We took all of the suggested topics and let attendees vote for the ones they wanted to see (using Google Moderator). After each chunk of sessions we had time for a fishbowl-style discussion where audience members interacted with the presenters in a highly interactive Q&A/conversation furthering manner.

It didn’t hurt that we had a large proportion of the brain trust in the agile/UX space gathered in the room. Every talk produced “aha” moments for the audience. The output was a set of resources that really show the state of the art in creating balanced teams. 

I talked on UX Coaching. By involving every team member in user research, interface design, paper prototyping and user testing, UX people can move their individual focus to harder interface problems while giving the whole team an inherently deeper understanding of what they need to build, backed up by good user research data. It’s win-win for all team members.

Choosing a User Experience vendor

I was chatting recently with an old colleague from Microsoft who is responsible for sourcing vendors to help when internal usability resources aren't available. We came up with a decision tree to use so that teams could find the right kind of vendor support.

It turns out that the decision tree isn't just useful for Microsoft teams, it is generic. Try it for your project: 

• What stage in the dev process is the team at?
  • Concept: Use an experienced vendor who can use advanced methods to provide good interpretation of user needs and help the team form a strategy.
  • Early development: Use an experienced vendor for concept testing (paper prototypes, site visits, etc.) and a cheaper one for lab-based studies using early code.
  • Close to finished (beta): Use a cheaper vendor who can churn through participants for verification and can find show-stopper issues.
  • Post-release: Use a cheaper vendor for benchmarking, a more experienced one for early work on the next product cycle.

• What type of application/service are you building?
  • Standard product, no particularly new concepts or interaction styles: Use a cheaper vendor who is confident with traditional usability testing techniques.
  • Unusual, new, or different interaction styles (i.e. MS Surface, mobile, games consoles): Work with a more experienced vendor to create suitable usability testing strategies for the novel areas. Later you may be able to transfer this work to a cheaper vendor resource.

• What type of budget do you have?
  • User research should account for around 10% of total budget. That includes early concept research and later lab testing. 
  • Counterintuitively the less money you have, the more likely you are to benefit from hiring a more experienced vendor. They will provide deeper and longer lasting insights rather than just telling you how many people successfully used your current prototype. 

• What type of management resource can you offer?
  • We have on-site UX managers: Cheaper vendors tend to need more oversight. An agency usability tester will need daily management, typically from someone very familiar with the usability role.
  • We need a self-starter who can manage *us*: More experienced vendors will be more self-sufficient. They will ask for the resources they need and provide direction to the team rather than needing to be told what to do.

Or to summarize, use a more experienced vendor when you need insights, use a cheaper one when you just need verification.

I fall into the more expensive/experienced end of the spectrum. Why would I "give away" potential work by recommending cheaper vendors? Because that work is also less interesting to me. Sure, I can do it, but it's not as exciting or challenging as working with an engaged team who are struggling to find out what it is that their users need and want. There is plenty of room in the industry for multiple levels of usability support. I would rather that a team spent less money where possible on usability and saved more of their budget for the areas that really matter - exploratory research and unusual interactions.

Efficiency versus satisfaction – how TSA got it wrong again*

Efficiency, effectiveness and satisfaction are all important elements of a usable process. The TSA’s Black Diamond program provides only two of those elements.

Traveling through SeaTac airport recently, I saw a sign advertising a new way of getting through the security lines. The TSA Web site identifies this as the Black Diamond self select program.

Click to read more ...