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Tag: deliverables

Posted
July 15, 2018
Category
Advice, Methods, User Experiences
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Better UX Recommendations

Findings and recommendations spreadsheet

As UX researchers, we tend to focus more time on explaining our findings than in providing our recommendations. Yet, however well we explain the findings and recommendations, there comes a time when we’re not present, and the people who have to implement the recommended changes have to rely on the written recommendations and what they remember from your explanation. So it’s very important to ensure that your UX recommendations are understandable, concise, specific, believable, authoritative, actionable, feasible, flexible, prioritized, and easy to review. I provide advice on how to provide better recommendations in my latest article on UXmatters:

Providing Better UX Recommendations

Posted
January 8, 2018
Category
Advice, Publications, User Experiences
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Tips for Delivering Bad News to Clients

Ugly software interface

Your Baby is Ugly!

That’s the title of the article I just published on UXmatters,  in which I give advice on how to soften the blow of delivering bad news to clients. Let’s face it, when we perform an expert evaluation, usability testing, or user research on an existing product – most of what we find is problems with the current product. Clients don’t pay us to tell them how great their products are. If they’ve hired us, it’s to find problems that can be fixed. But there are ways to make it easier to deliver bad news. In this article I provide the following advice:

  • Get the stakeholders to admit that it’s ugly first
  • Get everyone to buy into your research methods upfront
  • Encourage stakeholders to observe the research
  • Blame the bad news on the participants
  • Back up your findings with metrics
  • Present recordings and quotations
  • Don’t beat your audience over the head
  • Emphasize your expertise
  • Back up your findings with examples of best practices
  • Show your stakeholders they’re not alone
  • Position it as providing recommendations, not pointing out problems
  • Mention the positive aspects too
  • Deliver your findings in person
  • Prioritize the problems they should solve
  • Provide a plan for addressing the problems

You can find more details about this advice in my latest article, Your Baby is Ugly.

Posted
February 6, 2012
Category
Publications
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New article: Communicating User Research Findings

My latest article for UXmatters is about Communicating User Research Findings.

I’ve created a variety of different types of deliverables over the years, to communicate my findings and recommendations from user research. It can be difficult because you often have a variety of different people in the audience, from management, product owners, designers, and developers. Each brings a different level of interest in the findings.

This article discusses the considerations of choosing a deliverable format, types of deliverables, and elements of effective deliverables.

Read the entire article at UXmatters: Communicating User Research Findings.