Document Templates

Research Plan Template

Contents:

  • What do we want to learn?
  • What tasks and features to test?
  • What prototypes to test?
  • Approach
  • Target audience

Recruitment Screener Template

Contents:

  • Who do you want to talk to?
  • Who do you want to exclude?
  • What criteria will identify them?
  • What questions will you ask?

Sample Invitation to participate in User Study

Contents:

  • Introduction
  • Details
  • Summary

Sample Non-Disclosure Agreement for User Study

Contents:

  • Introduction
  • Confidentiality
  • Excluded information
  • Obligation
  • Agency or partnership
  • Signature block

User Studies Preparation Guide

Contents:

  • 5 days and counting
  • 3 days and counting
  • 8 hours and counting
  • 10 minutes and counting
  • Here you go!
  • The next day

Example Questions for User Studies

Discovery Research

  • Types of questions
  • Follow up questions

Usability Research

  • Getting first impressions
  • After the user has completed a task
  • Debriefing

User Study Interview Guide

Contents

  • Introduction and opening
  • Discovery Process
  • Usability Proces
  • Debrief Process
  • Wrapping up and cooling down

How to do your own User Research

As you embark on this journey you want to start by thinking about - “what you want to learn” with this process. This will guide you towards the discovery and usability questions that you need to ask.  I’ve included templates to help you unpack this a bit more.

Once you have an idea of the kinds of questions you would like to ask, the next thing you want to think about is - how do you find people for your user studies? Who are the correct people and how do you get them involved?

The Power of User Research: Saving Time, Money, and Ensuring Success

This blog post highlights the importance of conducting your own user research in product development. By understanding your users, you can save time, money, and ensure a successful product that meets their needs and expectations.

The Human Touch in Product Design: Essential Qualities for Exceptional Designers

This process of exploration requires of us a spirit of play. It means being open to flow and the dynamic moment-to-moment opportunities that present themselves. Figuring out whichever one is the one that feels most promising, that seems to have the richest potential.

A spirit of play also requires us to open ourselves to possibilities that are impractical, impossible, science fiction, absurd. By keeping ourselves open to ridiculous possibilities, we prevent ourselves from developing unconscious filters, developing these internal editors and sensors that declare certain ideas to be unacceptable, to declare certain ideas to be off-limits. Those sensors restrict our access to the adjacent possible. So it takes conscious effort to stay in a spirit of play.

Embracing Discomfort: The Traits of Exceptional Designers

This blog post explores the essential traits of exceptional designers, highlighting the importance of questioning assumptions, embracing discomfort, staying self-aware, and trusting instincts in the creative process.

The Art of Design – The Design Thinking Mindset

Technology design work begins with the need to understand the human context, human capabilities, human expectations and human outcomes. And to bring this understanding into the decision-making process when we design technology. And this is why designers refer to their work as “human-centred design.” Because this is not just being good at making stuff, but being good at making stuff for people. Human-centred design is the radical idea that we should treat people as people, unique individuals, with uniquely human lives, and not as objects, or data points to be pushed through conversion funnels.