Talkaoke is a way of design research, framed as a pop-up talk show. It is from the artist collective The People Speak, and has been running over 20 years. Talkaoke is a pop up talk show where any can sit down and air their views around the table of chat. Talkoake is a fun and exciting way to have a … Read More
Use the System Usability Scale to measure the quality of your tech
The government’s Usability team has a profile of one of the most common and well-verified measures of a tech system’s usability, the System Usability Scale (SUS). It’s a 10-question scale, that has an easy 5 option multiple choice for each question. Tallying up the score is more complex, but the site walks you through. The 10 questions are as follows. … Read More
Card Sorting outside in-person design research
This article from Rick More, Card Sorting outside UX: How I use online card sorting for in-person sociological research, describes ways to use survey instruments like Qualtrics to understand people’s mental models and preferences. Card-sorting means putting different concepts, images, or words on separate cards (virtual or real) and then having users arrange them into clusters that you’ve pre-defined or … Read More
Ethical Design and community engagement short book
Here is another free design resource we have made at the Lab: a short book on Ethical Design Engagement with your Community. It walks through essential mindsets and planning steps to make sure the user research, co-design, and other work with community members is done responsibly and ethically. It is a short introduction, that aims to be practical, helping a … Read More
The Boring-Exciting Map to understand users’ needs
This prompt asks the user to lay out possible ideas for a challenge area along a vector. In this instance, it’s what would be most boring (uninspiring) to what would be most exciting. After they lay things out, then you can follow up with why’s to uncover what the key factors are to get them excited about an idea in … Read More
Cultural Probes
Here are some methods to use in your design process, as you try to figure out what your target audience cares about, likes, and wants.
Text Analysis Tools for Research from TAPoR
TAPoR, the Text Analysis Portal for Research has a very useful overview of tools to use as you do qualitative or text-based research. TAPoR is a gateway to the tools used in sophisticated text analysis and retrieval. Please contribute! The project is led by Geoffrey Rockwell, Stefan Sinclair, Kirsten C. Uszkalo, and Milena Radzikowska and housed at the University of Alberta. Here … Read More
Know Your User persona template
This is a template I use with my design process to capture small Personas of my target users. Forcing myself to write down who will be using my design helps me to focus on adding features & functions that will engage them, and give them value. I recommend having a hierarchy of users — with some taking precedence over others, … Read More
Mapping Users’ Lives & Workflows
Ideo.org’s site Design Kit has an article from Shauna Carey, describing how she uses user-mapping in her interviews and ethnographic work with young women in developing countries. We asked women and girls—community health workers, taxi drivers and secondary school girls—to draw a map of their community, and used their maps to guide a conversation around the factors that allow for … Read More