My experience with the “User Experience”

Over the past few months, I’ve participated in a class designed to teach each member of the class to be “a user experience team of one.” The key text for the class was “The User Experience Team of One: A Research and Design Survival Guide” by Leah Buley, a text designed for people interested in the UX [User Experience] field or current practitioners. With that in mind, throughout the course, the class worked together much the same way people would in a workplace to create a “peer-to-peer learning community” and conduct usability testing of our own using peer-review and other usability testing methods. Over the semester we learned a lot about usability testing and I would consider myself somewhat of a budding UX expert. One of the main things that I observed over the course of the semester is that an individual can most effectively approach UX and conduct usability testing by focusing on their own individual strengths. For example, as a digital filmmaking major, focusing on using the skills and knowledge associated with visual storytelling when working in the UX field review gives me valuable perspective in regards to peer-review and other usability testing methods.

The tasks throughout the semester were built around two projects designed to exhibit the effectiveness of usability testing and how to conduct usability testing of information products and designs on our own.

For the first project, we were each tasked to create customized “how-to” guides for usability testing. As a requirement, each of our customized guides were to have a minimum of 15 generic questions for usability testing using the “fill in the blank” method. For example, “Can you effectively navigate this [website, book, etc.] without any help?” The goal was, ultimately, to create a collection of qualitative and quantitative questions as a class for each of us to later pull from when creating and conducting usability tests of their own.

Rather than simply creating a list of generic questions and placing them inside a document I decided to embed my list of questions into a script of how a usability test could be conducted. The idea here was to use the script to create a video showing an example of how a usability test could look. For my example script, I had one person conduct a usability test of a website in development. The script used the “fill in the blank” method for the questions but, included example text inside the actual blanks so that the script could also provide examples of some answers that could be given by a participant in a usability test. One of the biggest problems I faced in creating this video was deciding how much detail to include in the answers and the amount of specificity, in general, to have throughout the guide. Fortunately, I was able to work out these issues through in-class peer-review.

The second project was completed in stages using different UX research methods such as card sorting, focus group work, and actual usability testing. The goal of the project was to create a 12-page booklet using the UX principles we had learned about throughout the semester and creating multiple revisions based on these different stages of usability research methods.

The first stage of UX research methods mentioned above was the card-sorting method. For this stage, the class broke into groups used this information gathering method to begin work on creating headings for sections and general concepts to discuss in our booklets. The first step was to use these working ideas for our booklets and writing suggestions on sticky notes for each other’s topics and sticking them to whiteboards.

After that, the person working on the particular subject would arrange these particular headings into working order for the booklet.

This turned out to be a pretty valuable stage for me because I was able to create a wireframe out of the suggestions I got and many of the headings I got from this research method actually ended up being headings in my final document

The next stage of research was to create paper prototypes of our booklets based on the headings and ideas gathered through card-sorting and conduct usability tests with these prototypes. This was a very valuable step for me because at this stage I completely reworked the way my booklet was going to be designed. For my booklet, I decided to once again my expertise in the digital filmmaking field to create a guide to evaluating the success of video projects of varying kinds. Originally, my idea was to have sections in the booklet representing the different aspects of a video project that can be evaluated and then breaking those down according to the different genres of video. However, after some testing with the paper prototype, it quickly became obvious that that would not be the most usable design. Because of this testing, I completely flipped the function of the booklet and organized the headings according to the genre, and then broke down the evaluation of each genre according to the headings that I created in the card-sorting stage of research.

I would argue that this was probably the most important stage because not only was it a breakthrough moment in my project but I also helped another student reach a breakthrough during this stage. When working with her prototype of a guide to creating a TV show, the discussion I had with another student helped her realize that her project needed to be reduced to a guide to developing a pilot for a TV show and drastically simplified her document as a whole.

Finally, the last stage of research was creating working versions of our actual documents for usability testing. At this stage, most of the class had already figured out most of the issues with their projects and were basically fine-tuning what were already functional documents. For me, this stage was useful in showing me how much I had been overthinking my project and needed to reduce the clutter of my document by simplifying the concept as a whole.

Throughout usability testing with not only other students but also other digital filmmaking majors I was getting similar comments and input about the fact that the guide was unnecessarily specific and too detail oriented. By listening to the input I got from my final usability testing I was able to cut down on the number of pages of my document and create a more user-friendly guide to evaluating the same number of different types of video projects.

Your Guide to Evaluating Video Projects