Not just on the company blog or marketing landing pages either! Last Updated: October 15, 2020. For anyone starting to design a new product, it’s vital to make sure it’s a … By auditing, you’ll understand the content much better. They are often built on top of an Agile User Story by adding interactions the persona is going to have with the product or service and the context the interaction takes place. Discover the holistic experience of the user and find alignment. “User” can be in general or a specific persona. Note: Many different roles in an organization may produce these artifacts, not just UX specialists. Research Methods & Deliverables. If you didn’t use those terms in an application for clinicians or classified content for a casual user you would be decreasing the usability by using the improper taxonomy. Rest assured, each project is different and a UX designer wouldn’t need to produce all of them for each project. This is one of the most common UX deliverables a UX research consultant will provide early in a project. There are different types of flow diagrams that have different levels of detail into the user steps. The first deliverable that app UX designers work towards is the creation of a user persona. Heuristic analysis is a quick tool that can provide quick feedback throughout product design and development. That’s why findings should be ranked in terms of severity (low, medium or high). In UX Leadership, cross-functional collaboration is more critical than ever. If you continue to use this site we will assume that you are happy with it. Which behavior flows have pogo-sticking behavior? Designers use them to show the benefits of a proposed solution and to convince stakeholders with it. User stages do not have to be linear though, for instance, a stage where the user is a repeat customer would be cyclical as they make multiple purchases over time. All are for visually describing the mental model of users, the team, or an organization. Collect as much information and knowledge about users as possible by interviewing and/or observing a sufficient number of people who represent your target audience. A lot of people use the terms “wireframe” and “ prototype” interchangeably, but there’s a significant difference between the two design deliverables: They look different, they communicate different things, and they serve different purposes. What is the value being created for the user by doing X? Analytics provide valuable insight into what users are doing on your website or in your app, and this data will help you build compelling cases. Wireframes get stakeholders to focus on concepts, layouts, and approaches to a problem. The list below contains the most common deliverables produced by UX designers as they craft great experiences for users. This is where you get to bring up design and branding choices. Example research questions can be: Content audits can overlap with usability tests or include results from usability tests as well. These methods are really just examples of how you can take the above tools and recombine them to best validate/invalidate your proposed solutions. The goal of the experience does not need to have anything to do with a product. UX professionals need to communicate design ideas and research findings to a range of audiences. The diagram can contain all existing content, grouping of information, taxonomy, and relationships between data. A lot of things! A user journey map is a diagram showing the visible and invisible steps a user goes through when trying to accomplish a goal with a specific service. I like interactive wireframes because they bypass visual design preferences with stakeholders and get them to focus on the solution. Personas are probably the most controversial deliverable on this list among product creators. The goal of a prototype is to test products (or product ideas) before investing a lot of time and money in the final product. The empathy map is a deliverable that helps increase empathy with your user by sharing user needs and behaviors gathered from qualitative research. Thus, when reviewing the usability of a given product, it’s critical that the QA specialist have the use cases on hand. The user research report includes data from quantitative and qualitative research. By doing this, it will be much easier to have discussions about time and budget for UX activities. Tip: Test prototypes on real devices as much as possible. — to analyze where a product is going wrong (or right). What is far more important is the actual story you want to tell. Thinks – What a user is thinking during their experience. They are simple enough to do during strategy meetings with business stakeholders and technical architects. You can produce a PDF that can be loaded onto a smartphone or desktop that is clickable for a walkthrough wireframe/prototype. A usability report is a “plain English” report of usability testing results for an organization’s internal stakeholders. These are often confused with each other, but they are actually different UX deliverables. Just like other graphs, the relationships are edges that are directed (usually unidirectional). They use deliverables (tangible records of work that has occurred) for that purpose. Here is some low hanging fruit we always watch for: The content is often overlooked by UX professionals with a design or development background. Assessing the strengths and weaknesses of your rivals is a critical part of your own UX strategy. A prototype is great for usability or concept testing. This report can happen at any phase of a project. Working through task flows helps build understanding and alignment in your team before any UI or development work is started. At their simplest they are still non-interactive, so best used when you can walk stakeholders through them. Mind maps are useful as an exercise both to guide a user through to discover their mental model or for the UX designer/engineer to organize ideas when starting any project or tackling a tough challenge. Team members write down ideas and insights on sticky notes (or a digital version) during usability tests, brainstorming, etc. Heuristics include efficient navigation, clarity of text and labels, consistency, readability, scannability, etc. How content is interconnected and organized affects usage, findability, and navigation for the user at the minimum. If your tool or skillset allows, this is the best place to test micro-interactions like transitional animations. User Research Deliverables. (Whether good or bad). For example, links without underlines need some other signifier other than color to show they are links. Each use case is represented as a sequence of simple steps, beginning with a user’s goal and ending when that goal is fulfilled. Topics: Creative Inspiration & Trends, Design. Hope everyone is staying safe. If the pandemic has pushed your research into more remote tools and methods, we hope this will be of some help! Which pages have the highest bounce rate? They are great for communicating a design, for evaluating a design (for example via usability testing ) and for generally showing what should happen. They may be the most important tool for the UX strategist because they raise UX out of the singular feature focus up to across a whole product or organization focus. Surveys are an extremely flexible tool for getting a range of feedback and research data from users. However, this is also a deliverable in-house UX professionals doing usability research should be sharing. Competitor assessment is an assessment of the strengths and weaknesses of current and potential competitors. Service blueprints are usually chronological by time or stages for the user. What deliverables being delivered depend on the type of UX professional, specific project conditions, and the role of the professional in the organization. Task flow, user flow, and wireframe diagrams are all UX flow diagrams and help teams align on the steps a user will take to reach their goals. UX professionals need to communicate design ideas and research findings to a range of audiences. They are very useful to create before doing any prototyping because they define what actions the prototype should be built to test. Tip: For many projects in the active design phase, creating user flows might be time-consuming, because drawings will become instantly outdated as screens change. Interaction design (often abbreviated as IxD) is the practice of designing interactive digital products. What are users entering in the search, either in external or internal search? Usability testing reports can vary a lot and follow different formats. Affinity diagrams, also known as affinity maps and based on KJ (Kawakita Jiro) diagramming, are a design thinking method to group observations and insights from user research, ideas from design sessions, or ideas from UX strategy sessions. Does – What are the actions a user is actually taking to perform the task? This is a fundamental step. Apple’s Human Interface Guidelines, Microsoft’s Fluent, and Google’s Material are all design languages. Nov 25, 2017 - My UX deliverables I have done for agency and personal projects. Jun 24, 2019 - My UX deliverables I have done for agency and personal projects. An expert review can be more challenging since true UX experts with wide product experience are a form of unobtainium. In a mapping session, all the individual stickies are laid out for the team and anyone else to see. However, even marketing-focused analytics tools like Google Analytics can be used to gather experience focused analytics. Storyboards are illustrations that represent shots and that ultimately represent a story. For example in fin-tech or healthcare. A persona is a fictional character who uses the product in a similar way to a potential user type. They are also easier to do unmoderated testing with versus non-interactive wireframes or design mocks. A mind map is a more general visual thinking tool used by many to help expand concepts and thoughts around a single topic. An analytics audit is a way to reveal which parts of a website or app are causing headaches for users and are reducing conversions. The second need may get missed in a typical ticket of work without any thought to the scenarios the application is being used in. Accessibility analysis should be done for any new feature release, but often is sadly only done for a whole product at the last minute. Of course, you can test out layouts with design comps, but beware that it can be hard to get past style discussions with stakeholders. At the very least these should be done with stakeholders near the beginning of a project. User research focuses on understanding user behaviors, needs, and motivations through observation techniques, task analysis and other feedback methodologies. UX research is near useless if insights are not being shared with product teams and decision-makers. How To Create A UX Research Plan . They can lead stakeholders through the visual layout, interactive components, and the state changes caused by user actions for complex applications. The classic format of an empathy map is to have four sections (Says, Thinks, Does, Feels) in a quadrant around a user persona. Zone 3: UX Strategy. The key reason a prototype is useful over just producing the application is that only the UI or interactions are the focus. Personas are a controversial tool in the UX armory: Some UX designers love them, others hate them. The proposed user journey in storyboard form can be understood at a glance for busy stakeholders and give you feedback early. Journey maps are helpful to the UX designer to demonstrate what users’ needs, goals, and motivations are at each stage. Key roles: Business analyst, UX specialist Everyone’s goal at this stage is to understand the user and his/her pain points. Although there is a newer version updated by the empathy map creator, Dave Gray. Depending on the scope of the projects, designers will g… We’ll go over when to use a report or presentation, and best practices for content and formatting, including our very own storytelling structure designed for UX researchers. If there is no value, that feature, text, button, research is a waste of time and money. A user or stakeholder can click or touch them and possibly complete tasks. Sketches are quick to comprehend and express ideas, although you should keep the number of panels low and concise. Quantitative questions capture measurable answers that can have statistical analysis applied to them. Who they are, what are they trying to do, what goals and needs do they have, what pain points and frustrations do they have. They can also highlight potential usability or technical challenges. Designers, QA engineers, and front-end engineers should all keep usability heuristics in mind whenever they are creating a UI. This will give the QA specialists a set of criteria that will have to have been addressed by the design. Tip: The most effective personas are created from in-depth user interviews and observation data of real users. Make sure your storyboard leaves the audience with no doubt about the outcome of the story. Too often organizations rely on unprompted feedback from users, like support requests or reviews. There are benefits to each tool, it really comes down to what questions you need answered, how you need to test a solution, risk of not testing something, and time allowed. They are tangible records of the efforts put in by the UX team. Use plain, simple language for your audience. Recently, somebody asked me about creating research deliverables. It enables designers to frame the user’s motivations and needs at each step of the journey, designing solutions that are appropriate for each. Concept sketches are an important part of solving problems and thinking outside of the lines (pun intended). Tools for doing behavioral user experience, interaction, and usability research. Thus, it’s important to understand not just benefits but also downsides of personas before using them in your UX design process. Other information such as demographics and education backgrounds complete the persona. Below are example reports in Google Analytics you can use from marketing analytics for tracking UX indicators. The content audit provides issues and recommendations for improvement with content readability, strategy, and consistency. Prototypes don’t have to be very complex or show every interaction, they should do just enough to demonstrate or test a specific concept. An expert can be an unbiased UX expert from outside of the product team, not necessarily a consultant. A wireframe diagram is excellent for all types of applications (web, desktop, mobile) and increases the benefits of wireframing for more complex flows. This book reveals the power of short phrases and surprising, personal stories to change minds and shape memories: Second, The Back of the Napkinencouraged me to think visual. Keep the survey succinct and run another in a month or two. Information architecting is the practice of deciding how to arrange the parts of something to be understandable. By keeping the value proposition in mind you and your teams will prioritize work that delivers the most impact for your users. Those “components” can be products, people, processes, physical locations, and more. If you want to collect more valuable information, you should use a better approach. If you need to be more in-depth for different audiences, create a full version and a summary version. For UX we want to focus on metrics and reports about what the user is doing in our application. Your design language provides a guide that removes the guesswork for developers, a framework for new features, and consistency for your users. These are one of our favorites during the discovery phase with our clients because it quickly exposes problems for customers and members of the organization. You have a toolset that can produce mobile/desktop/kiosk/TV prototypes quickly. For digital products, information architecture results in the creation of navigation, site maps, taxonomies and wireframes. An impact map visualizes the relationship of a business goal to the impact or outcome it has on a user. While wireframes are similar to architectural blueprints (for example, a building plan), a prototype is a mid- to high-fidelity representation of the final product. These can describe workflows that are happening before your solution, with your solution, or with another tool. For better readability, I’ve combined the deliverables according to UX activities: Project assessment is an evaluation process that helps UX designers understand the current state of the product. Enjoy! Creating Effective UX Research Deliverables. What are the problems, challenges, and current state for the user? One of the key deliverables at the end of a UX research project is a list of recommendations for the product development and design teams. This might be a current user or someone who represents a target user type. Creating a UX research plan can help you streamline the process and communicate the value of your study to stakeholders. Help users recognize, diagnose, and recover from errors. The problem is that it can become painfully long, and people will simply skip questions. This chapter focuses on the most common types of research deliverables: the standard written report and the live presentation. It represents the typical users, their goals, motivations, frustrations and skills. What is a design language system and why is it important? You will also take your first steps towards creating a UX portfolio—something that … Just like interview questions, qualitative survey questions should be open-ended and use terms like describe, how, and explain. I find that each one, even for the same solution, will raise different questions from stakeholders. An important part of UX is connecting business goals with user needs, and impact mapping helps visualize those connections. This seems like an easy mistake not to make, but I’ve seen it happen multiple times at otherwise savvy tech companies to save money in the short-term. A service blueprint visualizes the user experience across different service components of an organization. The research hypothesis, what’s the point of research? A heuristic evaluation is a method that should ideally be used throughout a project by more than the UX team. Feature creep is a term that comes up regularly during product design. A powerful tool, a cognitive map helps user researchers understand how users think about concepts, workflows, or problems. Branching: You show the possible decisions for each step and the results of each decision. Please keep in mind that the activities that we discuss below relate only to UX research, as the entire design workflow includes much more. Without a shared language your interfaces will not communicate what you intend to users. If you’re describing an unfavorable situation, end with the full weight of the problem; if you’re presenting a solution, conclude with the benefits of that solution for your character. For example, users from a specific type of department or job function. Client UIs with mocked backends: These are often overlooked with newer UX Designers as more come from a design background and the availability of more tool options for prototyping are available. However, getting at least semi-independent expert reviews can find usability issues early. For instance, you can have “sketchy” low-fi wireframes inside of a prototyping tool like Axure or Adobe XD that shows advanced interactions or design mockups on hardware that aren’t interactive. UX flow diagrams detail the steps a user takes to accomplish a task. This is helpful for your audience, but also as a reference for the UX team later after the UI has changed. This covers the full UX design process from research to launch. At the minimum, your design language should include a basic style guide (color use, font use), pattern library with sample components per platform being developed for, and any guidelines for elements that must be consistent. The stickies are then grouped and ordered by priority under categories by the team as a whole. Tip: Keep the survey short. They also work well to share key insights gained from performing user research to the rest of the organization. By starting with a mass of insights and collaboratively clustering them into topics and sub-topics, you’ll get greater stakeholder engagement than from sharing research reports. A UX Persona is a general representation of one type of user or target user for a system. Even if the work has business value, if there’s no user value likely the business goal won’t be met either. While allowing the team to use their experience, creativity, and intuition affinity maps make potentially large amounts of data more meaningful. This will help the team identify critical issues exposed by the usability study. Although IA may not be visible to the user, it will drastically affect the user experience. By providing an easily shared vision for each user archetype, personas serve to remind product teams of who they are designing for. They should contain relevant characteristics, tasks they need to perform, and goals or needs they are trying to meet. By implementing various research methods, like competitive analysis, user research, and UX research, we are able to gain valuable insights about users’ needs, behavior, and motivations. Also, you won’t need to worry that some change you’ve made will ruin everything. A visualized user flow makes it easier to identify which steps should be improved or redesigned. An analysis of competitor’s products will map out their existing features in a comparable way. Updated Feb 12, 2021. While cognitive and mental model maps are often depicting how the user organizes and think about a process, concept maps are used by the UX designer to model a process based on what was learned from research. Well, a lot of stuff. Typical high-level steps for a mapping session are: Categories can be pre-determined beforehand to get things started with the flexibility of adding more during the mapping session. User Research Stage Deliverables Ideation Stage Deliverables Prototyping Stage Deliverables Evaluation Stage Deliverables Before everything, the UX professional begins with understanding the business requirements and the vision of the project; the reason for the very existence of the project. UX Deliverables. A value proposition is a statement that maps out the key aspects of a product: what it is, who it is for and how it will be used. Accessibility analysis is a big topic, and we’ll include a fuller guide in the future, but WebAIM is a good resource for information and tools. It makes it easy to visualize the basic structure and navigation of the website. UX design activities go hand in hand with UX research. There are many advantages to user personas, keys to successfully using them, and pitfalls to avoid. This can be product agnostic or include the product or service. Designers, your light/medium gray text on a light background isn’t accessible, stop using it! 28 UX Research Deliverables If you haven’t guessed by now, I love making lists. A concept map is a graph of concepts and relationships for a user or group of users. They use deliverables (tangible records of work that has occurred) for that purpose. They often focus on the what of a user’s behavior. Insights supported by the data. If you plan to present a wireframe to the team, try to include annotations. Are the features you are about to spend several sprints on addressing the top needs of the user? In general, you should: A heuristic analysis report is the UX artifact from performing a heuristic evaluation or expert review. Too often task analysis is skipped because stakeholders believe in the “idealized” task flow they are proposing, but usually, this is a mistake. Where storyboards really shine is getting engagement and feedback from your own organization. User-experience research methods are great at producing data and insights, while ongoing activities help get the right things done. Use sections to break up key areas and keep sections clear. Every issue that’s discovered through usability testing is not equally important. Do all images have ALT text descriptions? Usability reports are to inform decision-makers, not share opinions or promote agendas. We use cookies to ensure that we give you the best experience on our website. If they work, you’ll find out almost immediately. Analyze: Gathering all the previous data and extract the essence. A use case is a written description of how users will perform tasks in the app or website. Although prep time for an effective survey usually takes longer than people expect, surveys are still a very quick and cheap research tool. Research: Discovering the users and their needs. Data, business logic, code quality don’t matter in a prototype, so validation and iteration is faster. This is one of the most common UX deliverables a UX research consultant will provide early in a project. Often though a designer has something in mind and the developer has something else in mind during the handoff of static assets. Tip: Use user stories to prevent feature creep. UX research is near useless if insights are not being shared with product teams and decision-makers. UX Designers, UX Strategists, UX Engineers, User Researchers, and Interaction Designers all have UX artifacts they produce as part of their process. You might find things you didn’t know existed, spot duplicated or outdated content, or identify all kinds of relationships in the content. Tip: Rank your findings. ... Layering different renderings of the user experience; ... There’s literally hundreds of user experience research methods and the job of the product designer is to pick the one that’s more adapted to the context. In the enterprise world, the customer and the user of a system may be two different roles so we prefer User Journey Map when thinking of UX. Tip: A taxonomy is a living document, and it needs to be retested and updated regularly. UX deliverables: 6 steps for a better product design workflow. At each stage of the process, there are certain outcomes and deliverables that you build and they behave as input to the next stage of the process. Storyboards are a set of linear sketches with a narrative that shows and tells the user journey during an experience. Qualitative examples along with metrics. They help avoid getting bogged down in design considerations like color choice or branding and focus on the problem being solved. POV for techies means “point of view” but in healthcare, it’s “personal owned vehicle”. Balsamiq, which produces “sketchy” wireframes, can add links between wireframes. Many designers will collaborate with other team members on project deliverables. Discovery stage. Insights make these reports usable for stakeholders and give them actionable points from the research. I grouped them together because there can be a lot of overlap and blending of the three. All of those are part of an organization’s design language. Provide screenshots of the user interface that was tested. Not always something I would deliver to stakeholders, but often done as part of a session with them. Examples are showing the view state sliding left when a button is pressed, a thumbnail “expanding” to fill the screen when pressed, or a notification showing after a specific action. This part of the UX deliverables is concerned with looking into the users’ side of the story – who they are, what they prefer in an application, etc. An experience map is a representation of all the complete(end to end) routes customers take to reach a specific goal. Do mobile applications work with built-in OS accessibility tools? Beautiful design comps answer a lot of questions but aren’t great for portraying a user story. Design Comps or Design Mockups: These are usually non-interactive, and show the full-fledged design of the UI. Surveys allow you to prompt for feedback from users who have a full spectrum of experience and feedback. You don’t have to produce a system that is as thorough as these for your team, but they give you an idea of what you should be including beyond what colors to use. An experience map is a diagram that explores the multiple steps taken by users as they engage with a product. The heuristic analysis report should follow and include Nielson’s Heuristics for Usability: An accessibility analysis is similar to the heuristic and usability report but focused on accessibility issues by an expert. A taxonomy helps designers to define the content structure that supports the user’s and the business’ goals. Are they even familiar with applications or design standards you are modeling your product after? First, Made to Stickchallenged me to think simple. The list below aggregates most common methods and deliverables produced by UX Designers as they craft amazing experiences for other people.