Tue Oct. 31

Goals

• I know the term "wireframe" in the context of UX and can explain it to others
• I have created a wireframe based on a user journey
• I have run a "Moderated In-Person Usability Test" on a wireframe of my group

Recap: the process of how to understand

Yesterday, we learned, that the process of how to understand can be divided into four main elements/phases:

• explore
• ideate
• prototype
• test

Today we want to focus on the second half of this process.

3 · prototype

You hopefully now know a lot about your potential future users. In the best case know who they are, what they think, feel and need. You can imagine your users by looking at your persona sheets. You can ask yourself “would that make Persona XYZ happy?”.

Great. Good start.

With this data you could go ahead. You could shape your initial idea of your product according to this newly gained knowledge. You could bring your idea to paper, you could start designing or even start with the fist lines of code. You could start investing a loooooot of time and effort to finally bring your shiny new idea to a real life product.

But here’s the point: you could invest a lot of time without knowing if you made the right conclusions based on your data.

There is an urgent need for a better way than investing too much time and energy: Prototyping.

It simply means that you choose one of the best and most efficient ways to visualize your idea to be able to conduct tests afterwards. Test, which should provide clarity in terms of your conclusions.

As “prototyping” is not a fixed term, there are multiple options how you could do this:

• sketch on paper
• rough digital visualisation
• roughly coded prototype
• …

Each of these options has advantages and disadvantages. Defining what the best way is needs to be a mix of…

• most efficient for you to draw
• easiest to present to potential stakeholders
• best fit into existing process
• …

For the last years I have tried mostly all different options in real life projects. Given certain restrictions I came to the conclusion, that the best, easiest and fastest way for me is to draw rough wireframes in an web-based tool.

4 · test

You are not done yet. You ran a proper research, you did your user interviews, studies and analysis, you created your personas and journeys … and you finally even drew some wireframes.

Now it is about time to find out, if your understanding of the user’s point of view matches with the real world.

Go, get some real life persons and ask them!

If you want to run these kind of tests (usability tests, user acceptance tests) in a very professional way, you usually set up a dedicated test lab. In such a lab you have a room which should feel like a familiar ambiance to the test user.

In the observation room just beside you try to track every reaction of the test person.

Of course there are much more pragmatic ways to get valuable feedback from your test users. The more pragmatic your setup is, the less accurate your data might get.

Postponed: Group Exercise

Run a “Moderated In-Person Usability Testing” with your wireframes

• if your individually created wireframes do not match, choose as a group, which one you’d like to test
• think of tasks you would like to test. what task should your test person be asked to accomplish? Think of your journeys!
• Write down a few tasks you would like to test.
• In the test…
  • one is the facilitator (moderates the test)
  • the others are observers
• the moderator just gives the task to the test user. Do only tell the “what”, not the “how”!
• ask the test user to “think loud” and comment every little detail going on in their head.