-
Blog
- Five Trends for 2010
January 14, 2010
- Viisi nousevaa trendiä
January 12, 2010
- Internet Marketing Guide Book (in Finnish)
December 22, 2009
- October Newsletter - Lokakuun uutiskirje
October 30, 2009
- Work, work, work
October 27, 2009
- Teaching the old dog some new tricks
September 9, 2009
- New Finnish Guide for Internet Marketing Coming Up
September 4, 2009
- Towards Conscious Spending
August 13, 2009
- Good example of functional gestures in Games
July 2, 2009
- Summer time!
June 29, 2009
- Five Trends for 2010
Project Snapshot: Including end-users even with tight schedules, part 2
Tuesday, May 26, 2009
A month ago I wrote about a project in which we ran into a challenging schedule caused by the Easter holidays. In short, we had very limited time to do user research, design and validation for a service being developed, with the holidays making it impossible to collect all user feedback prior starting the actual design work.
In order to deal with these limitations, I started by probing the minds of our client’s lead users and business owners. Then I started to work on the design and conducting contextual interviews simultaneously. On top of the user interviews, I was able to spice up the process with lightweight participatory design sessions. After hearing the users, I returned to the drawing board to finish my wireframe designs before handing them over to a visual designer.
This method turned out to work very well. The project schedule was kept, with every day being utilized fully in either research or design. As a downside, there was not enough time to consolidate and analyze all user feedback. User insights, needs and opinions had an impact on the design but instead of providing clear design drivers, they were more fine-tuning the design than driving it. Luckily I had plenty of personal experience from similar services: without it, my initial bearing could have been wrong, and the user feedback would not have put me on the right track in time.
Another risk involved in this “straight to design” method is the lack of documentation. In my case, one of our client’s feature requests was fine-tuned by the users based on the design, as the feature was something they had not used previously in their normal routines. The use of proper research documentation takes time, but that effort saves time later by eliminating unnecessary iteration cycles during design validation.
Every day, UI designers face challenges related to time constraints, technological constraints, user needs and client expectations. Balancing and prioritizing all these can be demanding. Based on my experiences, I came up with the following pointers:
- Start working on the design when you know you have the right design direction. You do not need to carry out every interview or observation session, but be confident that you are heading toward the right goal.
- Fine-tune your design based on individual needs and insights from user interviews. Do not ignore the data that has been previously collected – good notes and structured documentation helps a long way here.
- Take the time to analyze all client and end user needs together. Are they reflected in your design?
- Doing research and design simultaneously can be an effective to tackle time constraints. Take everything you can out of user feedback: time spent with users is not lost, but saved.
.harri
