Use words as well as images when presenting your work. People enjoy reading interesting editorial content and it helps demonstrate your abilities as a good communicator. It is essential that you are able to communicate effectively through some medium other than visual. Whether emailing clients, writing a blog or explaining your work as part of your portfolio, thoughtful stimulating and grammatically correct writing really shines through.
It almost goes without saying that a website is an essential first point of contact these days. However, it’s not good just sticking a few pictures up and forgetting about it. Your website needs to look good but it also needs to be dynamic. People want to feel your presence behind that storefront, always busy, keeping them enthralled.
Blogging is just one short step from the world of social networking. Social networking is an important and easy-to-use tool in the whole game of self-promotion. Twitter, Flickr, Facebook, Behance – they all give you a platform to show off your work to like-minded people in an instant. And some, such as Twitter, still offer a direct route to commissioning editors and other potential clients.
Usability trials determine whether your design is performing as required and how well it meets the needs of its users. Recruit as many different people as possible to test your design in different situations. Testing is a crucial stage in identifying any potential problems and will help to ensure that you’ve created the most positive user experience possible, which in turn will build brand reputations and customer loyalties. Remember, with digital products and service in particularyour competition is only a few clicks away – if you don;t meet and respond to your user’s needs, they will go somewhere else.
Ensure you have enough time to recruit the right people for their opinions, collect and analyse their feedback and reflect on your insights. You’ll probably need to refine your ideas at various stages of the deign process, so factor in time to test your ideas and make the necessary changes.
Choose research participants carefully. Don’t just target potential users for feedback – ask extremes of the user population too, as this is where the really useful ‘workarounds’ can appear. Frequently, the things that happen in an extreme situation will also be of great benefit to the majority of users.
Don’t just rely on friends or colleagues, either. A recurring issue is that designers tend to talk to each other a lot. The result is often a tiny minority designing for a tiny minority.
And remember that user research is highly unpredictable. People can be tricky to deal with; they change their minds and can be highly idiosyncratic in their behavior. Beware of assuming these are “cookie-cutter” findings that you can simply cut and paste into other, similar projects – this won’t work.
Don’t use use camcorders or dictaphones to record user feedback in discussion groups. It can be intimidating to be watched while you’re expressing your thoughts and people will clam up about their controversial or irregular views – and that’s just the sort of feedback you really want. Use photos and notes instead and allow people to comment anonymously.
Show people things that encourage meaningful conversations – props, storyboards, videos and working prototypes, for example. Finished-looking artifacts can make observers reluctant to comment, so show early designs as will and help people to express themsleves
Ask thought-provoking questions to tease out ‘hidden’ needs. If you work in an office, try leaving Post-it notes around with a saying, ‘Your opinion wanted’. This is a great way of enabling the cross-fertilization of ideas.
It takes courage to show early ideas to potential users, partners, bosses or colleagues. Learn to take constructive feedback on the chin. Build, show, discover, reject and refine your ideas, both quickly and frequently. By taking this approach, you’ll learn what’s right and wrong early in the process when it’s comparatively cheap to make adjustments.
Share your ideas with as many people as possible and encourage feedback. Send emails; post ideas to blogs and forums; talk to potential users; show people early prototypes. Interacting with people like this enable a cross-fertilisation of ideas and can lead to solutions you may not have otherwise thought of.
Take the time and effort to understand the usage contexts and motivations of your target users. Analysing their needs, desires and opportunities in the early stages of development is critical to ensuring your design is both useful and desirable and will help you create a positive user experience. This approach can reveal opportunities that simply would have been missed if you stayed in your studio and spoken only to other creatives.
Fight against the instinct to design for yourself. There’s no doubt that designers can grow too close to concepts and technologies they are developing – it’s natural. But if you don’t keep your users in the loop as part of the development process, you run a real danger of working with preconceptions and assumptions that just don’t match those of the everyday users.
Don’t however confuse user-centered design with usability trials: these occur at the end of the process, to determine whether the product or service is achieving it’s required performance. This isn’t much help to you because, by this point in the development process, the bulk of the design work has been done.