How to do it

1. With permission from a supervisor and from the participant, schedule a time to watch a typical work activity and record data.
2. While observing, ask the participant to act normally. Pretend you’re a student learning how to do the job. Ask questions to help you understand what the person is doing and why.
3. At the end of the session, explain what you have learned and check for errors.
4. Immediately after, write up your notes.

How to do it

1. Invite between six and 12 participants: stakeholders, users, and team members who need to build a shared understanding. Before the meeting, share applicable research, user personas (unless users will be present), and the design prompt for the exercise.
2. Bring drawing materials. At the start of the meeting, review the design prompt and research you shared.
3. Distribute drawing materials. Ask participants to individually sketch concepts that address the prompt. Remind them that anyone can draw and artistic accuracy is not the goal of the exercise. 15–20 minutes.
4. Have participants present their ideas to one another in groups of three and solicit critiques.
5. Ask the groups to create a design that combines the best aspects of members’ individual contributions.
6. Regroup as a whole. Have each group of three present their ideas to everyone. Discuss.
7. After the meeting, note areas of consistent agreement or disagreement. Incorporate areas of consensus into design recommendations and areas of contention into a research plan.

How to do it

1. Bring plenty of sticky notes and colored stickers to the meeting.
2. Gather everyone on the product team and anyone with a stake in the product.
3. Quickly review the project’s goals and the conclusions of any prior user research.
4. Ask team members to take five minutes to write important features or user needs on sticky notes. (One feature per sticky note.)
5. After five minutes, ask participants to put their stickies on a board. If there are many sticky notes, ask participants to put their features next to similar ones. Remove exact duplicates.
6. Give participants three to five colored stickers and instruct them to place their stickers on features they feel are most important to meeting the project’s goals and user needs.
7. Identify the features with the largest number of stickers (votes).

How to do it

1. Create an empathy map split into four quadrants: “Says,” “Thinks,” “Feels,” and “Does.”
2. Through user research, fill out the map to help visualize profiles.
3. Use the map to inform your design process.

How to do it

1. Recruit a group of three to five people familiar with evaluation methods. These people are not necessarily designers, but are familiar with common usability best practices. They are usually not users.
2. Ask each person to individually create a list of “heuristics” or general usability best practices. Examples of heuristics from Nielsen’s “10 Usability Heuristics for User Interface Design” include:
   1. The website should keep users informed about what is going on, through appropriate feedback within reasonable time.
   2. The system should speak the user’s language, with words, phrases and concepts familiar to the user, rather than system-oriented terms.
   3. Users often choose system functions by mistake and will need a clearly marked “emergency exit” to leave the unwanted state without having to go through an extended dialogue.
3. Ask each person to evaluate the website against their list and write down possible problems.
4. After individual evaluations, gather people to discuss what they found and prioritize potential problems.

How to do it

1. Gather four or more participants for 90 minutes. Provide sticky notes and markers.
2. Create a focused question about the project’s needs and select a facilitator to run the exercise.
3. Give participants five minutes to write at least three responses to the question, each on its own note.
4. Give participants 15 minutes to put their answers on the wall, read everyone else’s, and make additions. Have participants cluster similar answers without discussion.
5. Ask participants to write names for each cluster on their own - this is mandatory. They may also split clusters.
6. Put each name on the wall by its cluster. Exclude word-for-word duplicates.
7. Reiterate the question and have each person rank their three most important clusters. Visually tally points.
8. Combine duplicates and their points if the entire group agrees they’re identical. Three or four groups usually rank higher than the rest - these are the priorities for the question.

How to do it

• Conduct user research: Answer the following questions: Who are your users and why are they using the system? What behaviors, assumptions, and expectations color their view of the system?
• Condense the research: Look for themes/characteristics that are specific, relevant, and universal to the system and its users.
• Brainstorm: Organize elements into persona groups that represent your target users. Name or classify each group.
• Refine: Combine and prioritize the rough personas. Separate them into primary, secondary, and, if necessary, complementary categories. You should have roughly 3-5 personas and their identified characteristics.
• Make them realistic: Develop the appropriate descriptions of each personas background, motivations, and expectations. Do not include a lot of personal information. Be relevant and serious; humor is not appropriate.

How to do it

1. Form a project planning group for your team. This team will first determine the objectives and goals of the project, and once work begins, they will manage to see if the plan is being kept to.
2. To begin making the plan, do an initial assessment of the issues that need to be worked through and the difficulties that may be encountered in the project.
3. Whenever possible, involve the community to get feedback on their needs, whether through town halls or focus groups.
4. As the project continues, manage the plan, and make adjustments if necessary.

How to do it

1. Create a guide for yourself of some topics you’d like to ask about, and some specific questions as a back up. Questions will often concern the individual’s role, the organization, the individuals’ needs, and metrics for success of the project.
2. Sit down one-on-one with the participant, or two-on-one with a note-taker or joint interviewer, in a focused environment. Introduce yourself. Explain the premise for the interview as far as you can without biasing their responses.
3. Follow the conversation where the participant takes it. They will focus on their priorities and interests. Be comfortable with silences, which allow the participant to elaborate. To keep from getting entirely off course, use your interview guide to make sure you cover what you need to. Ask lots of “why is that” and “how do you do that” questions.
4. If there are other products they use or your product doesn’t have constraints imposed by prior work, observe the stakeholders using a competing product and consider a comparative analysis.

How to do it

1. Use our UX Questionnaire and get together as a team to talk through the questions, making sure to record your answers where all team members can access them.
2. As you go through the Discovery phase, refer back to your answers to help inform the design process.