README.md

1. Empathize

In each phase:

Estimated duration:

Tools used

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• 1. Empathize
  2. Deliverable: You’ll outline a UX research plan, meet with the users to understand what they need, and compile notes and personas.
  3. In the Empathize phase, we’re looking to ground ourselves in a beginner mindset, where we seek to understand the problem and how people around us experience it.
  4. By taking the time to listen, we understand how people feel about a problem, what solutions capture their interest, and what we can build that they’ll share with friends.
  5. Caution: This seems like an easy step to skip. The problem is obvious right? If everyone has a home, there won’t be homelessness! The more you understand about a problem the more you can see why it’s a problem in the first play, why it hasn’t been solved already. Nothing feels worse than building a full product only to find that it doesn’t align with a solution.
  6. Key Tools
     • Personas
       • A document outlining categories of users, their motivations, and challenges. As you research, you’ll be building and documenting personas.
       • Communicate the value of your product
       • https://www.usability.gov/how-to-and-tools/methods/personas.html
     • Stakeholder Interviews - Meeting with stakeholders to ask non-leading questions about their perceptions and behaviors.
       • https://www.testingtime.com/en/blog/stakeholder-interview-guide/
     • Field Studies - Observational studies that record/document how users behave in context (also known as ethnography). What people do is often different than what they report.
       • https://www.nngroup.com/articles/field-studies/
     • Diary Studies - To understand long-term behavioral trends, diary studies require subjects to record their behavior (e.g. using food logs to track diet).
       • https://www.nngroup.com/articles/diary-studies/
     • Surveys - If you’re studying a problem, how many people are affected? How severely are they affected? Surveys can provide feedback from a large number of people quickly, and can be very measurable.
       • https://www.pewresearch.org/our-methods/u-s-surveys/writing-survey-questions/
     • Card Sorting - Users (individually or as a group) taking content and grouping it into categories to identify what terminology is intuitive for your users.. Examples include identify top level categories for website links or creating universal categories for open source projects.
       • https://www.optimalworkshop.com/learn/101s/card-sorting/
     • Tree Testing - Present users with a site map and ask them to identify where they would find specific, common content. This will provide feedback into ease of site navigation.
       • https://www.optimalworkshop.com/learn/101s/tree-testing/
     • Accessibility Testing - Validating with various users to understand challenges posed by accessibility, which could include everything from people with disabilities to those with limited cell phone access. The challenges they face may be much different than those faced by others.
     • Usability Test
     • Research Plan https://www.userinterviews.com/ux-research-field-guide-chapter/create-user-research-plan
  7. Deliverable: At the end of this phase, you should have documented your user research and completed personas in Google Docs
  8. Example:
     • For our C4SF app, we started by brainstorming categories of users:
       • Organizers (Executive team)
       • Product Owners
       • Contributors
     • In our research, we found a significant difference in the experience between remote contributors and in-person contributors, enough that we decided to split into two separate personas.