At the UX Content Workshop, we asked what information UX practitioners need to help make their jobs easier.  We broke this up into four main stages of the UX lifecycle – user research, ideation, design, evaluation, and asked for feedback for each stage.  Below are the results collected for Design.  This is the raw data – we’ll be sorting and analyzing and determining the best way to publish content to meet practitioner needs.

Please add to the list!

(What is this? Background: http://uxcontent.wordpress.com/about/)

Design:

• The “up-sell”- How do you get clients to invest in research and design, to see the value in it?
• Defending/ justifying design
• Overcoming stakeholder as design authority mentality
• Form the physical design field. I know about design process and thinking. I can understand mechanical engineering. Software development is inaccessible.  Maybe some way to talk about formalized CHI that’s newbie-centric.
• How to work with business analysts (the people who write the specs)
• Resolving conflicts between user needs and cost/ease/limits of development
• Usable examples to clearly explain design concepts to clients… or to use to spark design discussions
• Accessible introduction to designing tools and their benefits/disadvantages
• How to create design templates for developers.  How to influence them to standardize design
• Guidelines and how to get non designers to use them.
• How do you train yourself to constantly think in the user’s shoes and use your research while in the design process?
• Designing for emotion/ persuasion (i.e., the flip side of UX)
• What makes a design or experience “good enough”?
• Reviewing most successful UI examples in all media—learning why they are successful
• How to design something that never fails
• How to bring your research into design/ ideation
• Determine level of risk
• Translating mockups into products- eg, web technology
• How to create and present high-fidelity mock-ups
• Wireframing/ prototyping tools- best practices
• Prototyping
• How to wireframe/ document fluid/dynamic interactions
• Working in an agile environment as a UX pro
• Visual design- colors, graphics-size, when is it too much?
• How to write good and precise pop-up or error info messages
• Mobile
• Tangible
• Mixed realities

At the UX Content Workshop, we asked what information UX practitioners need to help make their jobs easier.  We broke this up into four main stages of the UX lifecycle – user research, ideation, design, evaluation, and asked for feedback for each stage.  Below are the results collected for Ideation.  This is the raw data – we’ll be sorting and analyzing and determining the best way to publish content to meet practitioner needs.

Please add to the list!

(What is this? Background: http://uxcontent.wordpress.com/about/)

• New Web 2.0 technology
• Implications of technologies on design
• Moving users to new technology adoption
• When is new technology better than old?
• Incorporation of UX into strategic company goals and initiatives (ie UX as business strategy)
• How can I downplay the bad ideas from Upper management?
• How to communicate ideas effectively/ methods for sharing ideas
• Effectively extracting important info from subject matter experts (on the team or not)
• How do you get people to start believing that UX research is not just something to do, but rather something that needs to be done in order to even think about design?
• Participatory Exercises
• How to bring your research into ideation/design
• Incorporating and continuing strategic direction and UX
• Sketch/ mockup methods
• Group brainstorm/ iteration methods
• Collaboration tools in design and development
• Interactive design ‘concepting’/ POCs
• Getting different types of clients in the same design/headspace
• Concept evaluation
• Inspiration; “creativity jolts”
• Social networking
• How do I show my high-level ideas?
• How do you come up with other designs when most have been exhausted?
• Brainstorm methods- a book of just those—how to use and aloes how to facilitate sessions
• Brainstorm exercises and how to conduct them remotely
• Brain-writing
• How can one better inspire innovation in non-innovative development cultures, especially ones whose customer base aren’t likely to provide honest or sincere feedback?
• Managing risk

Please add to the list!

(What is this? Background: http://uxcontent.wordpress.com/about/)

User Research:

• Personas (#1 need!):
  • The true usage of personas
  • Personas- personas vs. market segments—how to co-exist, how to design for an individual when company focus is on groups
  • Persona creation
  • How to create user stories (not sure where it goes, user stories for agile environment)
  • Persona based inspection
  • Creating scenarios
  • Creative personas and persona-based inspections
  • Create scenarios
  • How to justify user-experience practitioners 
• Selling to the company:
  • How to create a compelling argument to maintain UX personnel
  • Selling/ justifying
  • Convincing IT/business leaders of the strategic influences of UX in technology decision process and the role of UX in innovation of digital media
  • How can I best dissuade clients from wanting to run 20-30 participants in a UX study?
  • How to convince upper management to do user research/ UT
  • How to get more money out of clients by upselling usability practices 
• Cost efficiency
  • What are the inexpensive tools I need (mac-based) for capturing my research?
  • Cost-effective field research alternatives (Ex: online logbook instead of contextual observations) 
• Analytical Techniques
  • Field Research Techniques- Qualitative
  • Qualitative and Quantitative analysis (x2)
  • Comparison evaluations- how do you test preferences?
  • What are the best ways to aggregate and report qualitative data?
  • Coding/framing/qualifying qualitative interviews
  • Streamlining the research process.  Going from statement of RQs to field quickly
  • Analyzing statistics 
• Guide book for extracting user field data
• Effective use of social media for information getting
• Developing roadmaps for projects
• Differentiating from focus groups
• How to get or balance joint vs. core development
• Institutionalizing UX—governance, engagement models, staffing models, chargeback funding, how to stand up a service
• General way to start research for a global market
• Best practices for staffing for an internal UX services/internal consulting team
• Skill development of UX services team
• Streamlining data collection
• Negotiating user research with other information sources (market research, etc.)
• User testing methods
• How often a customer uses a product?
• What feature is most important for customers?
• How to indentify your target audience (when marketing/sales doesn’t know)
• Where to get professional training materials for internal training
• Ways to do quick, cheap ethnographic research
• Ethnography
• Observer Debriefing
• Buy-in—selling research
• How to test for user preferences
• Discovering unmet needs
• Negotiating user participation—incentives and legal concerns
• Remote field studies- are they possible?
• How to know which user research methods to employ
• Career/ industry skills, spectrum, mobility, etc.
• Affordability/implementation/ execution in startups
• Improving research skills of subject matter experts
• How to incorporate innovation in UX
• Agile development process—how do UX professionals fit in
• Way more access to combat-experienced soldiers/ e.g returning from Iraq
  • In person/ Videocon meetings, interviews (nothing systematic exists)
  • User blogs on each newly fielded equipment item (to hear their gripes and “wows” in real time and over time (Probably exists but I have no access)
  • Books not useful because equipment and missions/user situation helps morphing.

On May 26^th, at the annual Boston UPA conference, Chauncey Wilson and Mary James conducted a workshop to analyze the content needs of the UX community. The goal was to help ensure that content publishers are providing the UX community with the information it needs to most effectively help with work, studies, teaching, and research.

We thank all who participated, and as promised, we’re now presenting the results.

We broke up the workshop into four main sections, each garnering feedback from the audience.

1. What information do you need to do your job easier?  (we broke this up into four main stages of the UX lifecycle – user research, ideation, design, evaluation, and asked for feedback for each stage.)
2. What questions come up again and again in your work (but are not easily answered)?
3. Where do you currently go for information?
4. What are new UX topics you’ll need to know in the next 3-5 years

The raw data is presented here with commentary and question responses, where appropriate.  Our vision is that this will be a living sources of information – to elicit discussion, additional feedback,  and even conflicting ideas (no yelling please .

Thanks for your feedback! 

Chauncey Wilson, Senior Manager of User Researcher, Autodesk

Mary James, Associate Acquisitions Editor, Morgan Kaufmann Publishers, m.james@elsevier.com
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