Picture this scenario: You're in your local coffee shop and hear a new song. You want to listen to it when you get back to the office. How do you obtain it? If you’re one of the 232 million Spotify users, you’ll simply open the app, search for the song and add it to your playlist. Within seconds, you’ll have the song ready to play whenever and wherever you want.

This new norm of music streaming wasn’t always the status quo. In the early days of the internet, the process of finding music was easy but nowhere nearly as easy as it is now. You’d often still be able to find any song you wanted, but you would need to purchase it individually or as part of an album, download it to your computer and then sync it across to a portable music player like the iPod.

Spotify is a prime example of successful human-centered design. The music service directly addresses the primary pain points with accessing music and building music collections by allowing users to pay a monthly fee and immediately gain access to a significant catalog of the world’s music.

It’s also far from the only example. Take HelloFresh, for example. Founded by Dominik Richter, Thomas Griesel and Jessica Nilsson in 2011, this company delivers a box of ingredients and recipes to your door each week, meaning there’s no need for grocery shopping or thinking about what to cook. It’s a service that addresses a fairly common problem: People struggle to find the time to go out and buy groceries and also create tasty, healthy meals, so the founders addressed both issues.

Both HelloFresh and Spotify are solutions to real user problems. They weren’t born as a result of people sitting in a black box and trying to come up with new products or services. This is the core of human-centered design – identifying something that people have trouble with and then building an appropriate answer.

The origins of human-centered design

But, someone is likely to ask, what’s even the point of human-centered design? Shouldn’t all products and services be designed for the people using them? Well, yes.

Interestingly, while terms like human-centered design and design thinking have become much more popular in recent years, they’re not entirely new methods of design. Designers have been doing this same work for decades, just under a different name: design. Just take one look at some of the products put together by famed industrial designer Dieter Rams (who famously influenced ex-Apple design lead Jony Ive). You can’t look at the product below and say it was designed without the end user in mind.

Why did human-centered design even gain traction as a term? David Howell (a UX designer from Australia) explains that designers often follow Parkinson’s Law, where “work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion”. He notes that designers could always do more (more user research, more ideation, more testing, etc), and that by wrapping everything under a single umbrella (like human-centered design) designers can “speak to their counterparts in business as a process and elevate their standing, getting the coveted seat at the table”.

Human-centered design, for all intents and purposes, is really just a way for designers to package up the important principles intrinsic to good design and sell them to those who may not be sympathetic to exactly why they’re important. At a broader level, the same thinking can be applied to UX as a whole. Good user experience should naturally fall under design, but occasionally a different way of looking at something is necessary to drive the necessary progress.

So human-centered design can really just be thought of as a vehicle to sell the importance of a user-first approach to organizations – that’s useful, but how exactly are you supposed to start? How do you sell something that’s both easily understandable but at the same time quite nebulous? Well, you sell it in the same way you’d sell user research.

How to sell human-centered design

Focus on the product

In the simplest terms, a product designed and built based on user input is going to perform better than one that was assembled based on internal organizational thinking.

When utilized in the right way, taking a human-centered approach to product design leads to products that resonate much more effectively with people. We looked at Spotify at the beginning of this article for a company that’s continuously adopted this practice, but there are countless others. AirBnB, Uber, Pinterest and more all jump to mind. Google and LinkedIn, meanwhile, serve as good examples of the ‘old guard’ that are starting to invest more in the user experience.

Understand the cost-benefit

In 2013, Microsoft was set to unveil the latest version of its Xbox video game console. Up until that point, the company had found significant success in the videogame market. Past versions of the Xbox console had largely performed very well both critically and commercially. With the newest version, however, the company quickly ran into problems.

The new ‘Xbox One’ was announced with several features that attracted scorn from both the target market and the gaming press. The console would, for example, tie both physical and digital purchases to users’ accounts, meaning they wouldn’t be able to sell them on (a popular practice). The console would also need to remain connected to the internet to check these game licenses, likely leading to significant problems for those without reliable internet access. Lastly, Microsoft also stated that users would have to keep an included camera system plugged in at all times otherwise the console wouldn’t function. This led to privacy advocates arguing that the camera system’s data could be used for things like targeted advertising and user surveillance.

Needless to say, after seeing the response from the press and the console’s target market, Microsoft backtracked and eventually released the Xbox One without the always-on requirement, game licensing system or camera connection requirement.

Think of the costs Microsoft likely incurred having to roll back every one of these decisions so late into the product’s development. If you’re able to identify an issue in the research or prototype phase, it’s going to be significantly cheaper to fix here as opposed to 3 years into development with a release on the horizon.

Wrap-up

As the Spotify founders discovered back in back in 2008, taking a human-centered approach to product design can lead to revolutionary products and experiences. It’s not surprising. After all, how can you be expected to build something that people want to use without understanding said people?

Co-design is a powerful way to improve design processes in two ways: speed and quality. When your work environment allows and encourages people to work remotely in a temporary or permanent way – as we do at Optimal Workshop – we need to get creative if we want to find ways to include everyone.

After a research project, my marketing team was looking at redesigning our Enterprise landing page. We wanted to speed up our experimentation and determined that collaboration was the best approach. Ideation exercises require more than just a team of designers –  we needed to involve the right people with the right knowledge. To generate more diverse, creative and insightful outputs, we invited different personalities as well as different roles. Our team was comprised of a mix of sales, customer success, marketing, developers and designers. All located in different locations around the world, including the United States, New Zealand, France and Ireland.

To make this global session happen, we used Mural, a digital workspace for visual collaboration. It’s a great way to explore ideas in a collaborative space from anywhere with an internet connection and a laptop.

What is a co-design?

A co-design is a fast-paced workshop that generates abundant and diverse ideas beyond what just one individual can produce.

What does it involve?

A clear plan

Define the problem you want to solve, articulate user needs and any pain points you’ve identified. It’s also important to explain why this problem is something worth investigating. This preparation work will help to cut back on inefficient conversations and ensure your team and stakeholders are aligned on goals, opportunities and problem statements.

HMW (How Might We)

HMW questions are a way to frame the challenge you are trying to solve using short, compelling questions to spark creative thinking and discover solutions.

Divergence

Diverging is a quantitative process where you create as many ideas as possible by answering the HMW questions. Each member then presents their ideas while the rest of the team writes their feedback on Post Its in two ways: ‘I like’ – what you like about the solutions and ‘I wonder’ – how you might improve the solutions.

Convergence

Converging is a qualitative process. Once everyone has presented their ideas and looked over the feedback, it’s time to consolidate the best designs into one solution. After presenting their solutions, team members vote on their favorite ideas or the most compelling features by placing stickers on the ones they like. Commonly, each person should have 3 stickers.

What do you want at the end of the co-design?

Once you’ve passed through the divergent and convergent stages for your HMW questions, you’ll hopefully have some key areas of impact to focus on that are worth prototyping in the form of a wireframe or a higher fidelity design. Using this process, you should be able to develop a design that incorporates input from all disciplines and departments.

Tips for running a co-design:

Plan ahead

• 8 people max per workshop
• Prior to creating a calendar invite, ask who would be interested to participate via a message or in person. Allow teams to choose who will represent their team.
• Have your low-fidelity sketching supplies ready: Post-its, markers, blank sheets etc

Setting the context and explaining the rules

• Write a description within the calendar invite to give some context prior to the meeting. e.g “What we are working on?”, What will we do with the output?” and “What if I am busy and can't come?”.
• Send reminders the day before to make sure people are registered to the software you might use, specify if they need to bring anything specific(laptop, tablet, etc).
• Adding a "What’s coming" section to the agenda helps people to stay on track.
• Set a clear presentation to encourage creativity – inspire your team!

A timer

• A mechanism for tracking time down to the minute is crucial for keeping track of the work achieved.
• Schedule a good amount of time for feedback and voting.
• Allow a 5 to 10 min break time.
• Involve a second facilitator to help with time tracking.

How we ran a remote-friendly co-design

What worked well?

True effort  and planning

The classic paper/post-it system isn’t suitable for remote workers. Despite video conferencing, it is still hard to hear everyone or read a whiteboard. I wanted a tool that would allow me to include everyone the same way, and allow easy follow up on the achievements. This system needed to work even for people who couldn’t attend or had to leave halfway through the meeting.

Feedback received:

• "It takes real effort to get these up and running and the use of other software to make use of the time of everyone" 
• "I can’t imagine doing workshops in any other way in the future"

Communication with remote workers

Avoid questions like “please vote if you are okay to come in early” which makes remote workers feel bad.

Feedback received:

• "Remote workers feel like they’re a burden in meetings, but you made us feel super included"

What could have been done differently?

Time and people management

Handling time and people is tricky, you can easily run out of time and be forced to rush through the last steps of your meeting. Don’t hesitate to ask for help facilitating the co-design.

Feedback received:

• "More time to give feedback to everyone's ideas would have been nice"

Remote organization

Find a way to be as inclusive as possible, like finding a remote solution for snacks and drinks.

Feedback received:

• "Consider snacks for overseas people or let us know that we should get something to be included in that"

Tips for running a remote-friendly co-design:

A well-chosen space and time

Involving people from multiple countries or time zones requires preparation and consideration.  Don't be afraid to ask people to arrive earlier than their standard working hours.

Collaborative tools

• Use inclusive tools during meetings that allow everyone to follow the work being done. Also making sure that the tool makes it easy for people to come back and review the work later if they can’t attend the meeting.
• Set up a Mural board that will replace your slide presentation. Everything should live in same place including Context, HMW, dedicated places to upload images etc.
• Make sure everyone knows how to use all of the tools needed. It might help to start with a small exercise to help everyone get familiar with it. If there’s not enough time for it, set that exercise prior to the meeting (maybe as part of your reminder).

Manage noises

Depending on the number of participants, background music can prevent remote workers from hearing and understanding conversations.

• Avoid background music.
• Manage people and time to avoid banter and chit chat where possible..

Be inclusive

Make sure everyone feels like they’re part of a team rather than a burden for being remote. Allow time for questions, repetition and clarification.

• Avoid questions that make remote workers feel bad like “please vote if you are okay to come in early”.
• Allow time for questions, repetition and clarification.
• If you plan some snacks and drinks, either include it in your workshop budget or let the remote workers know they can bring their own food (depending on timezone).

Note: We recently updated this post after receiving some feedback from our community.

There’s a long-held myth in the world of web design that search solves all problems. That, instead of needing to build out useful navigation that makes sense, you only need navigation that’s ‘good enough’ as people will just tend to use search anyway.

This isn’t actually true.

Back in 1997, Jakob Nielsen ran a series of usability studies and found that over 50 percent of users were “search-dominant”. Basically, these people would go straight for the search button on a website without paying much attention to the navigation. This was a by-product of the time. The internet was really just starting to grow, and search was the best way to cut through much of the chaff of early websites.

But times have changed. In this article, we’re going to take another look at the search versus navigation argument through the fresh perspective of another year, and then dive into some of the ways you can improve your own website’s navigation

Search versus navigation: No easy answers

As we saw in the example from Jakob Nielsen, users were largely search-dominant at one point, but this was over 20 years ago. A lot has changed since then, especially in the way that people seek information.

In 2003, Katz & Byrne found that most users preferred navigation over search, although this depended on "the layout of the home page and the site’s information structure". Gerry McGovern found something similar, with his team running task tests with a technical audience. The result? 70 percent started the task by clicking on a link, and 30 percent started with search. He noted that people use navigation first because it’s both easier and faster to click on a link than to use the search box.

Interestingly, even Jakob Nielsen acknowledged in 1997 that, despite the obvious tendency for users to head straight for a search button, navigation was still key: “Despite the primacy of search, web design still needs to [be] grounded in a strong sense of structure and navigation support: all pages must make it clear where they fit in the larger scheme of the site”. He noted that there were a couple of primary reasons behind this thinking. Firstly, web design still needed to account for those people who didn’t use search, and secondly, users who arrive on a page still need structure in order to understand how the page fits into the rest of the website.

Of course, if the navigation in place is poorly organized or doesn’t accurately reflect the content of the website, you’re likely going to see an uptick in search usage or just lose users entirely. In other words, if the navigation isn’t up to standard, people will be pushed away from using links. In Gerry McGovern’s article, he states that: “Clear menus and links are the foundations upon which all great websites are built”.

Other research supports the view that while in-website search is still a popular option for many users, the navigation cannot be an afterthought. An article from Kissmetrics points out that, in a survey of over 100 survey respondents, over half preferred to use navigation over search. Interestingly, 47 percent of respondents said they preferred to filter down to specific product details rather than use search functionality on the website.

Much of how people use websites comes down to the purpose of the site itself. With retail websites, for example, you’ll likely have a large subset of users who know exactly what they’re looking for and will subsequently use the search function to quickly find their item. Using the example of a website that sells books, a user looking for a particular book is far more likely to use the search functionality than go through pages of titles.

There’s really no easy answer to the question of search versus navigation – but there also shouldn’t be. In 2019, website design needs to account for different user journeys and information-seeking approaches. You need to account for the search user and the navigation user – as well as the different ways they’re likely to use these 2 approaches together.

Understanding levels

For many designers, the idea of a website with multiple, deep levels may run counter to the idea of a website that’s easy to navigate – but this isn’t the case. It’s true that broad-and-shallow architecture makes it easier for users to find content, but a significant portion of Google’s visits are via a mobile device – meaning there’s real value in migrating to a narrow-and-deep architecture. If you’re wondering how to go about this, a closed card sort is the most relevant testing approach.

The key thing to keep in mind here is that there’s nothing wrong with having multiple levels, even multiple deep levels, as long as the navigation (supplemental and contextual) is suitable.

Two ways to improve your website's navigation

Include a proper footer

The website footer is an often overlooked part of a website’s design, thought of as merely an afterthought to drop at the bottom of the page. Despite just how underrated they are, footers are an essential part of a usable, accessible website. For people scanning your website, a footer is a great place to showcase other interesting pages, and it’s also a useful way to point people to pages they may not know they’re looking for.

Run a tree test

If you’re looking to improve an existing website, you should start by looking at your information architecture (IA). Your IA informs the navigation on your website, so if you want to address navigation issues, it's best to start there. As for actually fixing your IA, it's best to start with a tree testing tool like Treejack, which can identify bottlenecks and other issues. Then, you can use a card sorting tool to brainstorm possible fixes and then run the tests again to measure any improvements.

Keep in mind that tree testing works best the more you do it. You should test, make changes, test again and keep repeating the cycle for best results.

If you’re interested in diving into more navigation resources, Nielsen Norman Group has a great section here.

As UX professionals we know the value of card sorting when building an IA or making sense of our content and we know that first clicks and first impressions of our designs matter. Tools like OptimalSort and Chalkmark are two of our wonderful design partners in crime, but did you also know that they work really well with each other? They have a lot in common and they also complement each other through their different strengths and abilities. Here are 3 ways that you can make the most of this wonderful team up in your design process.

1. Test the viability of your concepts and find out which one your users prefer most

Imagine you’re at a point in your design process where you’ve done some research and you’ve fed all those juicy insights into your design process and have come up with a bunch of initial visual design concepts that you’d love to test.

You might approach this by following this 3 step process:

• Test the viability of your concepts in Chalkmark before investing in interaction design work
• Iterate your design based on your findings in Step 1
• Finish by running a preference test with a closed image based card sort in OptimalSort to find out which of your concepts is most preferred by your users

There are two ways you could run this approach: remotely or in person. The remote option is great for when you’re short on time and budget or for when your users are all over the world or otherwise challenging to reach quickly and cheaply. If you’re running it remotely, you would start by popping images of your concepts in whatever state of fidelity they are up to into Chalkmark and coming up with some scenario based tasks for your participants to complete against those flat designs. Chalkmark is super nifty in the way that it gets people to just click on an image to indicate where they would start out when completing a task. That image can be a rough sketch or a screenshot of a high fidelity prototype or live product — it could be anything! Chalkmark studies are quick and painless for participants and great for designers because the results will show if your design is setting your users up for success from the word go. Just choose the most common tasks a user would need to complete on your website or app and send it out.

Next, you would review your Chalkmark results and make any changes or iterations to your designs based on your findings. Choose a maximum of 3 designs to move forward with for the last part of this study. The point of this is to narrow your options down and figure out through research, which design concept you should focus on. Create images of your chosen 3 designs and build a closed card sort in OptimalSort with image based cards by selecting the checkbox for ‘Add card images’ in the tool (see below).

The reason why you want a closed card sort is because that’s how your participants will indicate their preference for or against each concept to you. When creating the study in OptimalSort, name your categories something along the lines of ‘Most preferred’, ‘Least preferred’ and ‘Neutral’. Totally up to you what you call them — if you’re able to, I’d encourage you to have some fun with it and make your study as engaging as possible for your participants!

Limit the number of cards that can be sorted into each category to 1 and uncheck the box labelled ‘Randomize category order’ so that you know exactly how they’re appearing to participants — it’s best if the negative one doesn’t appear first because we’re mostly trying to figure out what people do prefer and the only way to stop that is to switch the randomization off. You could put the neutral option at the end or in the middle to balance it out — totally up to you.

It’s also really important that you include a post study questionnaire to dig into why they made the choices they did. It’s one thing to know what people do and don’t prefer, but it’s also really important to additionally capture the reasoning behind their thinking. It could be something as simple as “Why did you chose that particular option as your most preferred?” and given how important this context is, I would set that question to ‘required’. You may still end up with not-so helpful responses like ‘Because I like the colors’ but it’s still better than nothing — especially if your users are on the other side of the world or you’re being squeezed by some other constraint! It’s something to be mindful of and remember that studies like these contribute to the large amount of research that goes on throughout a project and are not the only piece of research you’ll be running. You’re not pinning all your design’s hopes and dreams on this one study! You’re just trying to quickly find out what people prefer at this point in time and as your process continues, your design will evolve and grow.

You might also ask the same context gathering question for the least preferred option and consider also including an optional question that allows them to share any other thoughts they might have on the activity they just completed — you never know what you might uncover!

If you were running this in person, you could use it to form the basis for a moderated codesign session. You would start your session by running the Chalkmark study to gauge their first impressions and find out where those first clicks are landing and also have a conversation about what your participants are thinking and feeling while they’re completing those tasks with your concepts. Next, you could work with your participants to iterate and refine your concepts together. You could do it digitally or you could just draw them out on paper — it doesn't have to be perfect! Lastly, you could complete your codesign session by running that closed card sort preference test as a moderated study using barcodes printed from OptimalSort (found under the ‘Cards’ tab during the build process) giving you the best of both worlds — conversations with your participants plus analysis made easy! The moderated approach will also allow you to dig deeper into the reasoning behind their preferences.

2. Test your IA through two different lenses: non visual and visual

Your information architecture (IA) is the skeleton structure of your website or app and it can be really valuable to evaluate it from two different angles: non-visual and visual. The non-visual elements of an IA are: language, content, categories and labelling and these are great because they provide a clear and clean starting point. There’s no visual distractions and getting that content right is rightfully so a high priority. The visual elements come along later and build upon that picture and help provide context and bring your design to life. It's a good idea to test your IA through both lenses throughout your design process to ensure that nothing is getting lost or muddied as your design evolves and grows.

Let’s say you’ve already run an open card sort to find out how your users expect your content to be organised and you’ve created your draft IA. You may have also tested and iterated that IA in reverse through a tree test in Treejack and are now starting to sketch up some concepts for the beginnings of the interaction design stages of your work.

At this point in the process, you might run a closed card sort with OptimalSort on your growing IA to ensure that those top level category labels are aligning to user expectations while also running a Chalkmark study on your early visual designs to see how the results from both approaches compare.

When building your closed card sort study, you would set your predetermined categories to match your IA’s top level labels and would then have your participants sort the content that lies beneath into those groups. For your Chalkmark study, think about the most common tasks your users will need to complete using your website or app when it eventually gets released out into the world and base your testing tasks around those. Keep it simple and don’t stress if you think this may change in the future — just go with what you know today.

Once you’ve completed your studies, have a look at your results and ask yourself questions like: Are both your non-visual and visual IA lenses telling the same story? Is the extra context of visual elements supporting your IA or is it distracting and/or unhelpful? Are people sorting your content into the same places that they’re going looking for it during first-click testing? Are they on the same page as you when it’s just words on an actual page but are getting lost in the visual design by not correctly identifying their first click? Has your Chalkmark study unearthed any issues with your IA? Have a look at the Results matrix and the Popular placements matrix in OptimalSort and see how they stack up against your clickmaps in Chalkmark.

3. Find out if your labels and their matching icons make sense to users

A great way to find out if your top level labels and their matching icons are communicating coherently and consistently is to test them by using both OptimalSort and Chalkmark. Icons aren’t the most helpful or useful things if they don’t make sense to your users — especially in cases where label names drop off and your website or app homepage relies solely on that image to communicate what content lives below each one e.g., sticky menus, mobile sites and more.

This approach could be useful when you’re at a point in your design process where you have already defined your IA and are now moving into bringing it to life through interaction design. To do this, you might start by running a closed card sort in OptimalSort as a final check to see if the top level labels that you intend to make icons for are making sense to users. When building the study in OptimalSort, do exactly what we talked about earlier in our non-visual vs visual lens study and set your predetermined categories in the tool to match your level 1 labels. Ask your participants to sort the content that lies beneath into those groups — it’s the next part that’s different for this approach.

Once you’ve reviewed your findings and are confident your labels are resonating with people, you can then develop their accompanying icons for concept testing. You might pop these icons into some wireframes or a prototype of your current design to provide context for your participants or you might just test the icons on their own as they would appear on your future design (e.g., in a row, as a block or something else!) but without any of the other page elements. It’s totally up to you and depends entirely upon what stage you’re at in your project and the thing you’re actually designing — there might be cases where you want to zero in on just the icons and maybe the website header e.g., a sticky menu that sits above a long scrolling, dynamic social feed. In an example taken from a study we recently ran on Airbnb and TripAdvisor’s mobile apps, you might use the below screen on the left but without the icon labels or you might use the screen on the right that shows the smaller sticky menu version of it that appears on scroll.

The main thing here is to test the icons without their accompanying text labels to see if they align with user expectations. Choose the visual presentation approach that you think is best but lose the labels!

When crafting your Chalkmark tasks, it’s also a good idea to avoid using the label language in the task itself. Even though the labels aren’t appearing in the study, just using that language still has the potential to lead your participants. Treat it the same way you would a Treejack task — explain what participants have to do without giving the game away e.g., instead of using the word ‘flights’ try ‘airfares’ or ‘plane tickets’ instead.

Choose one scenario based task question for each level 1 label that has an icon and consider including post study questions to gather further context from your participants — e.g., did they have any comments about the activity they completed? Was anything confusing or unclear and if so, what and why?

Once you’ve completed your Chalkmark study and have analysed the results, have a look at how well your icons tested. Did your participants get it right? If not, where did they go instead? Are any of your icons really similar to each other and is it possible this similarity may have led people down the wrong path?

Alternatively, if you’ve already done extensive work on your IA and are feeling pretty confident in it, you might instead test your icons by running an image card sort in OptimalSort. You could use an open card sort and limit the cards per category to just one — effectively asking participants to name each card rather than a group of cards. An open card sort will allow you to learn more about the language they use while also uncovering what they associate with each one without leading them. You’d need to tweak the default instructions slightly to make this work but it’s super easy to do! You might try something like:

Part 1:

Step 1

• Take a quick look at the images to the left.
• We'd like you to tell us what you associate with each image.
• There is no right or wrong answer.

Step 2

• Drag an image from the left into this area to give it a name.

Part 2:

Step 3

• Click the title to give the image a name that you feel best describes what you associate that image with.

Step 4

• Repeat step 3 for all the images by dropping them in unused spaces.
• When you're done, click "Finished" at the top right. Have fun!

Test out your new instructions in preview mode on a colleague from outside of your design team just to be sure it makes sense!

So there’s 3 ideas for ways you might use OptimalSort and Chalkmark together in your design process. Optimal Workshop’s suite of tools are flexible, scalable and work really well with each other — the possibilities of that are huge!

Further reading

• How to test mobile apps with Chalkmark
• What is mixed methods research?

Having a library of user research books is invaluable. Whether you’re an old hand in the field of UX research or just dipping your toes in the water, being able to reference detailed information on methods, techniques and tools will make your life much easier.

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There’s really no shortage of user research/UX reading lists online, so we wanted to do something a little different. We’ve broken our list up into sections to make finding the right book for a particular topic as easy as possible.

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General user research guides

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These books cover everything you need to know about a number of UX/user research topics. They’re great to have on your desk to refer back to – we certainly have them on the bookshelf here at Optimal Workshop.

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Observing the User Experience: A Practitioner's Guide to User Research

Mike Kuniavsky

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This book covers 13 UX research techniques in a reference format. There’s a lot of detail, making it a useful resource for people new to the field and those who just need more clarification around a certain topic. There’s also a lot of practical information that you’ll find applicable in the real world. For example, information about how to work around research budgets and tight time constraints.

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• Goodreads link

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Just Enough Research

Erika Hall

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In Just Enough Research, author Erika Hall explains that user research is something everyone can and should do. She covers several research methods, as well as things like how to identify your biases and make use of your findings. Designers are also likely to find this one quite useful, as she clearly covers the relationship between research and design.

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• Goodreads link

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Research Methods in Human-Computer Interaction

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Harry Hochheiser, Jonathan Lazar, Jinjuan Heidi Feng

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Like Observing the User Experience, this is a dense guide – but it’s another essential one. Here, experts on human-computer interaction and usability explain different qualitative and quantitative research methods in an easily understandable format. There are also plenty of real examples to help frame your thinking around the usefulness of different research methods.

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• Goodreads link

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Information architecture

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If you’re new to information architecture (IA), understanding why it’s such an important concept is a great place to start. There’s plenty of information online, but there are also several well-regarded books that make great starting points.

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Information Architecture for the World Wide Web: Designing Large-Scale Web Sites

Peter Morville, Louis Rosenfeld

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You’ll probably hear this book referred to as “the polar bear book”, just because the cover features a polar bear. But beyond featuring a nice illustration of a bear, this book clearly covers the process of creating large websites that are both easy to navigate and appealing to use. It’s a useful book for designers, information architects and user researchers.

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• Goodreads link

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How to Make Sense of Any Mess

Abby Covert

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This is a great introduction to information architecture and serves as a nice counter to the polar bear book, being much shorter and more easily digestible. Author Abby Covert explains complex concepts in a way anyone can understand and also includes a set of lessons and exercises with each chapter.

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• Goodreads link

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User interviews

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For those new to the task, the prospect of interviewing users is always daunting. That makes having a useful guide that much more of a necessity!

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Interviewing Users: How to Uncover Compelling Insights

Steve Portigal

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While interviewing users may seem like something that doesn’t require a guide, an understanding of different interview techniques can go a long way. This book is essentially a practical guide to the art of interviewing users. Author Steve Portigal covers how to build rapport with your participants and the art of immersing yourself in how other people see the world – both key skills for interviewers!

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• Goodreads link

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Usability testing

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Web usability is basically the ease of use of a website. It’s a broad topic, but there are a number of useful books that explain why it’s important and outline some of the key principles.

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Don't Make Me Think: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability

Steve Krug

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Don’t Make Me Think is the first introduction to the world of UX and usability for many people, and for good reason – it’s a concise introduction to the topics and is easy to digest. Steve Krug explains some of the key principles of intuitive navigation and information architecture clearly and without overly technical language. In the latest edition, he’s updated the book to include mobile usability considerations.

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As a testament to just how popular this book is, it was released in 2000 and has since had 2 editions and sold 400,000 copies.

• Goodreads link

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Design

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The design–research relationship is an important one, even if it’s often misunderstood. Thankfully, authors like Don Norman and Vijay Kumar are here to explain everything.

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The Design of Everyday Things

Don Norman

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This book, by cognitive scientist and usability engineer Don Norman, explains how design is the communication between an object and its user, and how to improve this communication as a way of improving the user experience. If nothing else, this book will force you to take another look at the design of everyday objects and assess whether or not they’re truly user-friendly.

• Goodreads link

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101 Design Methods: A Structured Approach for Driving Innovation in Your Organization

Vijay Kumar

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A guidebook for innovation in the context of product development, this book approaches the subject in a slightly different way to many other books on the same subject. The focus here is that the practice of creating new products is actually a science – not an art. Vijay Kumar outlines practical methods and useful tools that researchers and designers can use to drive innovation, making this book useful for anyone involved in product development.

• Goodreads link

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See our list on Goodreads

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We've put together a list of all of the above books on Goodreads, which you can access here.

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Further reading

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For experienced practitioners and newcomers alike, user research can often seem like a minefield to navigate. It can be tricky to figure out which method to use when, whether you bring a stakeholder into your usability test (you should) and how much you should pay participants. Take a look at some of the other articles on our blog if you’d like to learn more.

Recently, everyone in the design industry has been talking about design sprints. So, naturally, the team at Optimal Workshop wanted to see what all the fuss was about. I picked up a copy of The Sprint Book and suggested to the team that we try out the technique.

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In order to keep momentum, we identified a current problem and decided to run the sprint only two weeks later. The short notice was a bit of a challenge, but in the end we made it work. Here’s a run down of how things went, what worked, what didn’t, and lessons learned.

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A sprint is an intensive focused period of time to get a product or feature designed and tested with the goal of knowing whether or not the team should keep investing in the development of the idea. The idea needs to be either validated or not validated by the end of the sprint. In turn, this saves time and resource further down the track by being able to pivot early if the idea doesn’t float.

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If you’re following The Sprint Book you might have a structured 5 day plan that looks likes this:

• Day 1 - Understand: Discover the business opportunity, the audience, the competition, the value proposition and define metrics of success.
• Day 2 - Diverge: Explore, develop and iterate creative ways of solving the problem, regardless of feasibility.
• Day 3 - Converge: Identify ideas that fit the next product cycle and explore them in further detail through storyboarding.
• Day 4 - Prototype: Design and prepare prototype(s) that can be tested with people.
• Day 5 - Test: User testing with the product's primary target audience.

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When you’re running a design sprint, it’s important that you have the right people in the room. It’s all about focus and working fast; you need the right people around in order to do this and not have any blocks down the path. Team, stakeholder and expert buy-in is key — this is not a task just for a design team!After getting buy in and picking out the people who should be involved (developers, designers, product owner, customer success rep, marketing rep, user researcher), these were my next steps:

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Pre-sprint

1. Read the book
2. Panic
3. Send out invites
4. Write the agenda
5. Book a meeting room
6. Organize food and coffee
7. Get supplies (Post-its, paper, Sharpies, laptops, chargers, cameras)

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The sprint

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Due to scheduling issues we had to split the sprint over the end of the week and weekend. Sprint guidelines suggest you hold it over Monday to Friday — this is a nice block of time but we had to do Thursday to Thursday, with the weekend off in between, which in turn worked really well. We are all self confessed introverts and, to be honest, the thought of spending five solid days workshopping was daunting. At about two days in, we were exhausted and went away for the weekend and came back on Monday feeling sociable and recharged again and ready to examine the work we’d done in the first two days with fresh eyes.

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Design sprint activities

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During our sprint we completed a range of different activities but here’s a list of some that worked well for us. You can find out more information about how to run most of these over at The Sprint Book website or checkout some great resources over at Design Sprint Kit.

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Lightning talks

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We kicked off our sprint by having each person give a quick 5-minute talk on one of these topics in the list below. This gave us all an overview of the whole project and since we each had to present, we in turn became the expert in that area and engaged with the topic (rather than just listening to one person deliver all the information).

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Our lightning talk topics included:

• Product history - where have we come from so the whole group has an understanding of who we are and why we’ve made the things we’ve made.
• Vision and business goals - (from the product owner or CEO) a look ahead not just of the tools we provide but where we want the business to go in the future.
• User feedback - what have users been saying so far about the idea we’ve chosen for our sprint. This information is collected by our User Research and Customer Success teams.
• Technical review - an overview of our tech and anything we should be aware of (or a look at possible available tech). This is a good chance to get an engineering lead in to share technical opportunities.
• Comparative research - what else is out there, how have other teams or products addressed this problem space?

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Empathy exercise

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I asked the sprinters to participate in an exercise so that we could gain empathy for those who are using our tools. The task was to pretend we were one of our customers who had to present a dendrogram to some of our team members who are not involved in product development or user research. In this frame of mind, we had to talk through how we might start to draw conclusions from the data presented to the stakeholders. We all gained more empathy for what it’s like to be a researcher trying to use the graphs in our tools to gain insights.

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How Might We

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In the beginning, it’s important to be open to all ideas. One way we did this was to phrase questions in the format: “How might we…” At this stage (day two) we weren’t trying to come up with solutions — we were trying to work out what problems there were to solve. ‘We’ is a reminder that this is a team effort, and ‘might’ reminds us that it’s just one suggestion that may or may not work (and that’s OK). These questions then get voted on and moved into a workshop for generating ideas (see Crazy 8s).Read a more detailed instructions on how to run a ‘How might we’ session on the Design Sprint Kit website.

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Crazy 8s

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This activity is a super quick-fire idea generation technique. The gist of it is that each person gets a piece of paper that has been folded 8 times and has 8 minutes to come up with eight ideas (really rough sketches). When time is up, it’s all pens down and the rest of the team gets to review each other's ideas.In our sprint, we gave each person Post-it notes, paper, and set the timer for 8 minutes. At the end of the activity, we put all the sketches on a wall (this is where the art gallery exercise comes in).

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Art gallery/Silent critique

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The art gallery is the place where all the sketches go. We give everyone dot stickers so they can vote and pull out key ideas from each sketch. This is done silently, as the ideas should be understood without needing explanation from the person who made them. At the end of it you’ve got a kind of heat map, and you can see the ideas that stand out the most. After this first round of voting, the authors of the sketches get to talk through their ideas, then another round of voting begins.

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Usability testing and validation

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The key part of a design sprint is validation. For one of our sprints we had two parts of our concept that needed validating. To test one part we conducted simple user tests with other members of Optimal Workshop (the feature was an internal tool). For the second part we needed to validate whether we had the data to continue with this project, so we had our data scientist run some numbers and predictions for us.

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Challenges and outcomes

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One of our key team members, Rebecca, was working remotely during the sprint. To make things easier for her, we set up 2 cameras: one pointed to the whiteboard, the other was focused on the rest of the sprint team sitting at the table. Next to that, we set up a monitor so we could see Rebecca.

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Engaging in workshop activities is a lot harder when working remotely. Rebecca would get around this by completing the activities and take photos to send to us.

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Lessons

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• Lightning talks are a great way to have each person contribute up front and feel invested in the process.
• Sprints are energy intensive. Make sure you’re in a good place with plenty of fresh air with comfortable chairs and a break out space. We like to split the five days up so that we get a weekend break.
• Give people plenty of notice to clear their schedules. Asking busy people to take five days from their schedule might not go down too well. Make sure they know why you’d like them there and what they should expect from the week. Send them an outline of the agenda. Ideally, have a chat in person and get them excited to be part of it.
• Invite the right people. It’s important that you get the right kind of people from different parts of the company involved in your sprint. The role they play in day-to-day work doesn’t matter too much for this. We’re all mainly using pens and paper and the more types of brains in the room the better. Looking back, what we really needed on our team was a customer support team member. They have the experience and knowledge about our customers that we don’t have.
• Choose the right sprint problem. The project we chose for our first sprint wasn’t really suited for a design sprint. We went in with a well defined problem and a suggested solution from the team instead of having a project that needed fresh ideas. This made the activities like ‘How Might We’ seem very redundant. The challenge we decided to tackle ended up being more of a data prototype (spreadsheets!). We used the week to validate assumptions around how we can better use data and how we can write a script to automate some internal processes. We got the prototype working and tested but due to the nature of the project we will have to run this experiment in the background for a few months before any building happens.

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Overall, this design sprint was a great team bonding experience and we felt pleased with what we achieved in such a short amount of time. Naturally, here at Optimal Workshop, we're experimenters at heart and we will keep exploring new ways to work across teams and find a good middle ground.

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Further reading

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• The Sprint Book - a book by Jake Knapp
• Design Sprint Kit — a whole bunch of presentation decks, and activities for sprints
• Sprint Stories — some case studies that show the processes and value of design sprints
• How to run a remote design sprint without going crazy - an article by Jake Knapp
• Choosing the right sprint problem - a blog by Lisa Jansen