When it comes to music, most of us have an idea about low and high fidelity. Low fidelity is the radio in your grandfather’s station wagon. You get the idea of the sound, and in the ‘70s, that’s about all you had to work with. High fidelity is the car next to you at the stoplight with its trunk rattling and your windows shaking. You get to hear every nuance of the song, no matter how far you are away.
In the land of user experience (UX), we too have the concept of low and high fidelity mockups – also known as comprehensives, or comps. Let’s start at the beginning. When conducting usability testing, your results have a lot to do with your first decisions. There are many decisions you need to take into account when planning usability testing. Here are a few of the options:

• Moderated
• Unmoderated
• Remote
• Task-driven exclusively
• Task and evaluation
• Products already in production
• Low- or high-fidelity comps (mockups)

I have already discussed some of these options in other posts. Today, let’s focus on low- and high-fidelity mockups.

What is a low-fidelity mockup?

Typically, a low-fidelity prototype or mockup is more focused on structure. People joke about how many great ideas have been drawn on a cocktail napkin in a moment of inspiration. Although it might not be very likely, you could test an idea on a cocktail napkin. That would be the low of the low-fidelity scale. If you are working with a professional information architect, it most likely would be a low-fidelity wireframe. A wireframe, more often than not, is a black and white drawing showing what would be on a screen. Think of the stick drawings that you did as a kid. Sometimes a low-fidelity wireframe can include functionality like hover states, drop-down menus, swipe gestures, or links to other pages, but it doesn’t have to.

When should you perform low-fidelity testing?

Low-fidelity testing is usually performed earlier rather than later in the development lifecycle. These tests are used to get quick feedback on rough ideas without consuming a lot of your UX team resources. They can be used to flesh out many things such as page hierarchy, navigation placement or labels, even confirming the purpose of a page. They can help you gather answers to questions like:

• Tell me what you think you can do on this screen?
• What do you think is the main purpose of this screen?
• What would you expect to find if you were to click on each of the navigation buttons?
• Where would you click to [example, sign-in]?

Another benefit of low-fidelity testing is that users don’t focus on colors and images.

What is a high-fidelity mockup?

A high-fidelity prototype usually has a “finished” visual look. It takes everything from the low-fidelity comp and applies the expected visual styling of the end product. It may even be interactive to the point of enabling users to accomplish various tasks by clicking on text links or menu items.

When should you perform high-fidelity testing?

As you might guess, high-fidelity testing is typically performed as the next step after low fidelity. From high-fidelity testing, you can gauge the effectiveness of your design by measuring:

• Successful task completion
• Visual affordance of the page functionality, meaning that things look like what they do
• Whether the visual styling is creating any problems for users
• Emotional responses, or how users feel about the screen

A high-fidelity comp can also be given to developers to help them see what the fully developed page should look like. A high-fidelity comp is typically your last chance to “get it right” before developers begin coding.
For both low- and high-fidelity prototypes, the goal is to refine what you want to design before development. Stakeholders and product owners also benefit from both low and high fidelity. Stakeholders and product owners can be involved in the design process and refine a product that is guided by direct user involvement. Both types of testing greatly increase the confidence that stakeholders and product owners can have in moving forward into development with a product that reflects the needs of users.

So, what should you test? Low- or high-fidelity comps?

The safest approach is both. Give yourself as many opportunities as possible to learn from and adjust your course through the design and development stages. Both of these processes work equally well in an Agile environment, where the goal is to “build, test, and adjust” to take advantage of maximum efficiency.
Think of low- and high-fidelity testing like adjusting the water in your shower. First, you test the temperature of the water with your hand (low fidelity), and you make adjustments based on that. Then you venture in with more of your body (high fidelity). Once you’re sure of what you’re getting yourself into, you are ready to commit everything. So test, test, test until the water’s fine.

Recruiting real end users can be costly and time consuming for usability testing. For anyone but a user experience (UX) purist, the temptation to use employees for usability testing can be quite a temptation. Employees are accessible and already paid for, so why not use them? After all, they are users outside of work. So, is there really a problem?

If you are careful in your recruiting efforts, you can get valid data

I worked at a software firm several years ago that had 3,500 employees on-site, and yes, we did use employees for some of our website testing. It can be an acceptable solution if what you want to find out is more general user behavior like:

• Can they find a phone number?
• Is the mega menu easy to use?
• Do they think there is content below the fold?
• Do they like hero image slideshows?

However…

That “if” is a big one, so let me explain how we handled it before you report me to the UX police. We always stayed away from usability testing with:

• Developers
• Marketing professionals
• Management
• Corporate training professionals
• Human Resources

Why? People in those positions can tend to know too much about website development or might be prone to overthink their reactions during testing because of their role in the company. We found usability testing with employees from the following categories will give us face-value reactions:

• Operations
• Finance
• Sales

Remember, we had a campus of 3,500 employees, so filtering our employees to find UX testing participants still gave us enough participants to have some confidence in the data we collected.

Would it have been better to not test with employees?

Sure! In an ideal world where enough time and money was always available for usability testing, yes. However, there are times where practical and ideal are at odds with each other. The worst thing you can do is not do any testing. All testing has some risks, such as insufficient sample size or the participants acting differently because they know they are being tested. But even with these risks, taking the “risk concern” to the extreme and not performing any testing ensures that you don’t get any insight. Remember to keep things in perspective. Testing website usability is very different from testing the failure rate of a heart valve.
As a researcher, I always paid attention to any behavior or comments from the employees that seemed like insider knowledge. When that happened, we were careful to call it out to stakeholders as behavior that might be suspect. As always, we were hypervigilant in keeping the identities of our testing participants anonymous. These are some of the judgment calls that you make as a researcher when it comes to qualitative data. They are part of the process of usability testing.
If you have filled out screeners in the past, before being part of a focus group or some other type of testing, what you do for a living, your age, education, or employment status can play into whether you’re accepted into the research. If you have a large enough pool of possible participants from your employees, or the role they perform is far enough removed, then you might be able to take advantage of employee convenience.
Sometimes it’s possible to run with scissors, as long as you run slowly and let everyone around you know you’ve got scissors. And yes, it’s usually more ideal to have amazing research budgets and not use employees.
Okay, now you can call the UX police on me.

Are usability testing and user acceptance testing (UAT) the same? Some people in the past have told me “yes,” because they are both about the user. My guess is that people who aren’t familiar with UAT see the word “user” and assume it means the “real-life” user. I don’t know who came up with the term “user acceptance testing,” or whether UAT or usability testing came first, but I have seen problems arise because of confusion over these two terms.

My suggestion: UAT should be changed to Requirement Acceptance Testing (RAT)

Techopedia defines UAT as follows,

User acceptance testing (UAT) is the last phase of the software testing process. During UAT, actual software users test the software to make sure it can handle required tasks in real-world scenarios, according to specifications. UAT is one of the final and critical software project procedures that must occur before newly developed software is rolled out to the market. UAT is also known as beta testing, application testing, or end user testing.

I’ve never seen UAT performed with actual, literal, real, end users. End users as in customers like my neighbor Don. Just a regular, “real” kind of guy who laughs at some of my jokes. Normally I see UAT conducted by trained IT professionals who compare the software to the business requirement document (BRD) to make sure it is successful in meeting the requirements of the product owner. UAT testers make sure that what the product owner wanted the software to do is, in fact, achievable with the software. All of the user acceptance criteria are specifically called out in the BRD. Yes, the software is tested just like it would be deployed to the market. However, only a closed-system of specific pre-determined scenarios are run.
Usability testing is all about user variation. UX researchers want to find out if the software matches the mental model of our target users and is easy to accomplish the tasks our product owners think are valuable to end users. A mental model is a “real” user’s expectation based on their experiences. One example of a mental model would be highlighting active text links in a different color. Most users would expect that attribute to be an active link.

Going mental with users

Mental models are typically seen as a somewhat common perspective shared between many users. However, in usability testing, researchers are also looking to understand what perspectives and expectations are not as common or shared. As researchers, we then have the responsibility to decide just how far off-center we need to make recommendations back to the development team to accommodate the differences between our target users. User acceptance testing is an organized process where we test predefined tasks, but it does not fulfill our desire to understand all the different ways users might accomplish those tasks.
Usability testing is designed to allow the participants (real users) to show how they would accomplish the task and for researchers to observe that without affecting the participants’ behavior. In a monitored testing environment, where a researcher is present, usability testing also allows for interaction after the task is completed to gain clarification of:

• What the participant found difficult about the task
• What would improve the ease or success of the task
• How the task is seen by the participant in relation to the larger view of the software

Are UAT and usability testing the same? You tell me. What if a business requirement was to develop square wheels for a car so it wouldn’t be prone to rolling downhill when unattended? It’s easy enough to test if those usability requirements have been successfully met with UAT. But when it comes to the bottom line of the company, how many of those wheels are likely to be purchased by real-life users who would enjoy that type of ride?
If your desire is profitability as a company, then consider conducting usability testing early on in the development cycle to ensure that when it comes time for “requirement acceptance testing” (RAT), you bring a product to market that won’t leave your company looking like a RAT.

UX Research is not 9-to-5.
It controls you and never leaves you alone. No matter what I am doing or where I am, I analyze stuff. From learning a new app on my phone to walking into a store, I am aware of my experience as a user. The user experience (UX) mantra, “We are not the user,” is important and helps us to not overly rely on our own understanding, but when I am not at work, I am also my own user.
The height of a showerhead, aisle signs in a grocery store. Why Costco moves some things around. Did they talk with users? Have I been watched while I was in the store? Or my favorite fantasy, being stopped while I’m in the store and being asked for my thoughts. That would be a special day for me. I think about everything, I think about thinking.
I am also known to let out an audible “YES!” when I discover something that was done really well. I’m always comparing my skills. Would I have caught the problem I just experienced? Could I have come up with that bit of greatness that just caused me to say “yes”? What could be a next step to what I just experienced?
One of my favorite pet peeves: Newscasters that ask guests multiple questions before giving them a chance to answer. It makes me crazy. I find myself yelling at the TV, “Shut up and give them a chance to answer! If this was a survey question how would I know what question they are answering? How could I possibly code that kind of data?” There might be a good reason to ask multiple questions as a newscaster, but not so much as a UX researcher. Like I said, it makes me crazy.
I’m always running scenarios through my head about how would I pitch a project to a stakeholder. Questions like:

• How can I find out what’s important to the stakeholder, so I can involve users in helping the stakeholder to make successful decisions?
• How can I figure out what’s the least amount of research needed?
• Am I staying impartial with my analysis of the data?
• How do I stay flexible in my approach to stakeholders?
• How do I compromise on some of the battles to make sure I stay in the war?

I’m sure the psychological community has a term for my condition.
I’m sure our HR department also has a term for my condition. I trust it’s “passionate-questioning-dedicated” with a sprinkle of “user advocate” for good measure. I’m OK with not knowing everything and excited about learning what I don’t know. I get more excited about being the weakest member of a team than being in the spotlight. I love learning. Every project is like an elementary school field trip. I dive in wide-eyed and excited to experience something new.
Have I put a smile on your face reading this? Has this caused you to take a second look at how you view UX research? Will you view your next trip to the store a little differently? I encourage you to be aware of your own user experiences. Consider seeking out a researcher to help you see things from your users’ perspective. User experience is anything but a 9-to-5 thing.

Before I’m labeled as a “visual design hater,” you should know that I was a visual designer for five years and a creative director for 10 years. I left the creative side of the house for two reasons. I felt a lot of people were better designers than I was and I became obsessed with the “why” question. Finding out why something is successful became my passion and calling.

Visual design and UX are different, and both are necessary

Visual design and user experience (UX) are like the washing machine and the oven in your house. You need them both. And they are different. We know that we don’t clean in our oven or cook in our washing machine. However, there seems to be a trend for some to attribute UX success to a pleasing visual design. Visual design and user experience have very specific and different goals and tasks.
When I think of visual design goals and tasks, what comes to mind is:

• Aesthetically drawing attention to what’s important
• Consistency in visual treatments
• Supporting an emotional response
• Awareness of popular visual trends

When I think of UX goals and tasks, I think of ways to directly involve the end user such as:

• Conducting research directly with users
• Developing testing that is focused on understanding user intent
• Validating what is user-friendly directly with users

I think we can see this same concept played out in the culinary world. “We taste first with our eyes” is a mantra of many great chefs. How food looks is not synonymous with how it tastes. In a high-end restaurant, the chef who prepares the lobster is not the same chef who plates the lobster. Visual design and UX have a similar relationship. Just because a product is visually pleasing doesn’t automatically mean it is satisfying to use. Have you ever downloaded an app with that seemed to be what you were looking for only to find it was awkward to use?
With visual design and UX, the goal is to balance the right aspects of each to deliver a product that develops enduring brand loyalty. The challenging thing for us on the UX side is that what we deliver is more behind the scenes than what a visual designer delivers.

So, how can we develop more internal visibility for UX?

A lot of people are familiar with Dr. Sanjay Gupta, a famous neurosurgeon, but whoever hears about the anesthesiologists he relies on? How do we in the UX field build awareness for the value of the role we play?
Identifying an executive champion might be one possibility. An executive champion could be a director, vice president, C-level individual, or another type of leader who is willing to support and promote the value of UX. If one doesn’t exist, we will do well to educate and help convert executives into UX advocates. It’s our responsibility to promote a clear understanding of visual design and UX, and an executive champion is one way.
Some other options to consider might be:

• Hosting lunch and learns to educate other teams about what we do
• Announcing certifications we earn and awards we win
• Publishing thought leadership
• Establishing partnerships with visual design teams

Here’s a personal story: I knew the visual designers on a particular project several years ago were very frustrated with clients making what seemed to be endless changes to high-fidelity comps. I pitched to the visual designers that the UX team could work with them to flesh out more of the internal structure with the stakeholders using low-fidelity wireframes. Our offer to partner with the visual design team turned out to be an easy sell and a huge success. In addition to that, our UX research helped to guide and support the design team’s recommendations to stakeholders with hard data. The result was that the visual design team started getting less push-back from stakeholders. In the end, the visual design team encouraged more UX involvement in their projects.
It’s time for UX teams to be creative in making sure that things not only look great, but also work great. Be proactive in finding ways to partner with other teams to support them. Be an advocate for promoting both washing machines and ovens, visual design and UX. Each has an important role and getting those roles confused can lead to some unplanned results.

I’m not sure who came up with the “Fail Early” concept associated with rapid prototyping. It seems like a negative sale or a glass-half-empty approach. I can’t help but think it would be easier to sell stakeholders on a program that is geared to “succeed sooner,” rather than “fail early.” It might just be semantics, but depending on the size of risk associated with a project, promoting success might be the key to more stakeholder support.

Use UX research to succeed sooner

It can be said that finding where to go for success is more important than knowing where not to go for failure. Just because you know where something isn’t doesn’t mean you know where it is. With early adoption of user experience (UX) research in a project, stakeholders can find out sooner where to focus their precious resources. “Sooner” success because of UX research can build confidence and lead to a greater UX involvement. The bigger goal is to succeed sooner, rather than to fail sooner.
Every process that your UX team engages in is geared toward providing successful insight to guide your decision-making process. When testing rapidly prototyped wireframes with users, researchers can deliver the most value by clarifying what is working for users and why. Granted, you will also learn what isn’t working and why, but the focus is on delivering next-step insights on where to go for success. Exceptional research is designed to illuminate the path to success. A UX strategy that is more focused on what to pursue for success is easier for stakeholders to embrace than a strategy of what to no longer do.

Let user intent be your guide

One strategy to employ would be to design questions and tasks to learn more about user intent, rather than product failures. Moderated sessions of users and researchers together provide a greater chance of capturing insights of user intent. Researchers skilled in probing into user intent through natural conversation is one such approach. Asking users for elaboration on their intent in a conversational manner also provides researchers with the ability to discover insights that they might not have considered. It’s much like a UX survey that provides users with open field text boxes, rather than only predetermined answer options. Although you lose some control over analyzing the answers of all respondents, you gain the ability of discovery.
UX researchers understand the benefits of partnering with stakeholders for their success. Our path to this success is keeping users involved in the development process from start to finish. I guess the elephant in the room is that there isn’t a single user who isn’t willing to share with researchers what would make a product better for them.
What Olympic athlete visualizes what failure looks like so they can stay away from it? No, they visualize what winning looks like so they can win.

Your strategy has a lot to do with your results. I grew up with the phrase, “It’s easier to catch a bear with honey than with vinegar.” While I never had the goal to literally catch a bear, the strategy of finding out what appeals to bears is likely to be a successful strategy for catching one.

Narrow your focus, but not too much

The granularity of the strategy you employ makes a big difference in your results. Your user experience (UX) strategy needs to be concise without being too narrowly focused. If your strategy is focused on the exact type of honey you should use to catch your bear, you might have a problem. What if the bear thinks your honey is too sweet, not sweet enough, too cold or too warm? Strategies that are focused at a micro level like this could have a negative impact on achieving your goal. It’s easy to miss the bigger picture if you are micro-focused with your strategy. It’s tempting to micro-focus a strategy; it feels closer to a solution. But it isn’t, it could be a self-inflicted error.

Understand your users’ goals

Having a UX strategy of identifying and understanding user goals is a great starting point. Goals drive needs, by focusing on goals you are less likely to prematurely end up in the weeds and miss some important insights. The goals that drive me to use Amazon are convenience and confidence. The convenience that I don’t have to drive around in my car, and that I can easily compare product options and price. Confidence that I am purchasing something that will please me, which I gain by reading the customer reviews. Those are my goals, convenience, and confidence. If you understand your user’s goals, you are that much closer to helping your user achieve them.
Typically, your users’ goals drive how they engage with your products, so your UX researcher is a great asset for learning about your users’ goals. Surveys and interviews might come to mind when trying to understand user goals. An unmoderated survey is fairly cost efficient for gathering data from a large group of users, but it’s not likely to offer deep insight about your users. Understanding user goals requires a moderated approach. One where a researcher can interact with a user to probe for elaboration based on the users’ initial answers. Because this type of data is more qualitative, you don’t need a large sample group to gather data from. A group of 10 to 15 participants might be the maximum you need.

Take it in steps

This moderated research process also lends itself to an iterative approach. One where you select five to seven participants to interview and begin building what you think are their common goals. Based on the conclusions you draw from that first set of participants, you can then set up additional sessions with three to five additional participants. Based on the extent of similarity in the data from your second session and your first, you might choose to run an additional round of interviews. If, after the second group, you are seeing very strong patterns of similarity between your participants, there is probably little value in repeating this process any longer.
Basically, when the obvious becomes obvious about the goals of your users, you move forward into integrating your users’ goals into your ongoing testing and research for the duration of your project.
Keeping the right granularity of your strategy and monitoring it with your ongoing UX processes can help you to build a solid UX strategy. Whether you want to catch bears or new business, understanding the goals that drive your user is one way to build a strategy for success. UX strategy, it’s a good thing.

Two questions. Do you invite friends over to your place when it is a mess, or do you clean it up first? Are people encouraged to walk on a sidewalk before the cement is dry? Search engine marketing (SEM) before user experience (UX) might not be the best decision for your bottom line.

SEM is critical, but so is UX

A great user experience does absolutely no good if no one sees it, so most everyone is aware of the critical role of SEM. However, UX seems to be an add-on if there’s time/budget. The icing on the cake, if you will. Why would you load up your car with your family when you have no idea if your brakes work? Have you tested your navigation with users and are you confident that it’s not frustrating for them? If you haven’t, how much potential downside do you intentionally want to inflict on your users and ultimately your brand?
SEM before UX is an unforced error. A commitment to a balanced, well-implemented UX effort sets up your SEM team with a quality deliverable. A deliverable that you know will work when it is needed.
Your UX team can help to make sure that when users land on your page, they are provided with enough value to move them through to the next page and ultimately to conversion. If they come, it is in your best interest to have already built a brand-enduring experience. UX is about having confidence that you are making a good first and second impression. It’s about maximizing the return on your SEM dollars.

Identify the critical components

Support your UX researcher when they conduct testing that will help you to understand what aspects are critical to your users. The more you see the business goals and the users goals as something to be blended, the easier it might be to use your UX data as a guide to decision making.
We put oil in our cars before we drive, so our engines run more efficiently and last longer. And we study before we take tests. SEM before UX is like taking the test first, and then studying. Work with your UX researcher to shine some light on what is happening for your users. You just might find that sending in your UX team first will maximize all your SEM efforts afterward. UX, it’s a good thing.

Unless your name is James Bond, you might not want your name applied to everything you do.

Ethical guidelines for UX research

The importance of ethics in user experience (UX) research cannot be understated. UX research ethics are in place to protect your participants, but they also serve another very important purpose. You want to conduct research in such a way that participants answer as accurately and honestly as possible. Anonymity can be a critical component for honest answers. When participants are in UX testing or an interview, they are always encouraged to think of their responses as “constructively critical.” For some people, this can be a challenge. Especially for those who have grown up with the mantra, “If you can’t say something positive, don’t say anything at all.”
One way to challenge this social norm, while also maintaining ethical standards, is to ensure confidentiality and anonymity in UX research. The most common procedure is to assign a unique number to each participant’s responses. Think of it like Personally Identifiable Information (PII), which is a corner-stone of HIPAA, the law that outlines privacy standards in healthcare. For UX purposes, no PII data should ever be kept in the same file as the responses. Each name is given a numerical equivalent, and that number is stored with the data.

Individual attributes can be important to your analysis

Psychographic data such as age, workplace title, education, and consumer preferences could all be important filters for researchers to analyze data by. This type of data contains no information on its own that can compromise an individual’s identity. Part of the paperwork to be filled out prior to any UX testing or interviews should stress that all responses will be confidential. It should be reinforced a second time at the beginning of the UX interview or research session to promote a constructively critical environment.
The greatest value the participant can provide is uncensored responses. This can be encouraged with phrases like, “We expect to have some things wrong in what you are about to see, can you help us to find what we missed?” Or, “The reason why we asked you to participate is that we want to hear your own personal thoughts, so please don’t hold anything back; it’s why we thought you would be perfect for this interview.” The extent to which you encourage their perspective to be vocalized might just be the extent to which you get honest responses that you can act on in the future.

Present UX research findings with the right context

When presenting UX research findings to stakeholders, product owners, or the development team, it can be very useful to contextualize some data. An example of that might be, “One of our participants, a service manager of 14 years, found our product to be lacking the filters they would want access to.” Another example might be, “The 20- to 34-year-old segment of our audience found our product very easy to use on a mobile device”.
It’s important that you identify what attributes are important. With this approach, you can take full advantage of what is different and common among your participants in your final analysis. Frequently this information is part of a screening panel sent to participants to qualify them for participation.
So, to abide by ethical standards and to help encourage the most uncensored responses possible by your participants, remind them that unless their last name is Bond, what happens in research, stays in research.

Think about how you organize the utensils in your kitchen. It’s easy for you to find a spoon because you know where you put them. You put them in a place that makes sense to you. When you have relatives over, and they want a spoon, they would know to look in the kitchen, but they probably wouldn’t know what drawer in your kitchen. From the concept of organization, your website shares some common principles with how you organize your kitchen.
How you organize and how your customers organize things are often very different. So, how do you develop confidence that your users will be successful in finding what they want using your website navigation? Simple, a UX card sorting exercise.

Organizing and refining your website navigation

UX researchers have an amazing methodology at their disposal that allows participants to help them refine your navigation through the process of organizing cards into groups. You provide research participants with a stack of small index cards. Each card has printed on it the name of one of the website pages you think belongs in your navigation. You then ask your participants to place the cards into groups that make sense to them. UX card sorting exercises are usually kept to a maximum of 60-80 cards so not to overwhelm your participants. Tests can even be conducted online with special software where you don’t have to have a researcher present.
There are two types of UX card sorting, open and closed. Open means that after a participant has placed the cards in groups, they are asked to give each group a name. Closed means that participants are shown a row of cards at the top of the table. Each of these cards has a category name already printed on it. Participants are then asked to place each card next to the category they think best represents where it belongs. After your participant has finished organizing the cards, your researcher can ask questions to gain additional insights into what kind of navigation would be easy for them to use.
UX researchers then analyze what each participant did and provide an analysis of what cards were more frequently thought to belong together. By performing an open card sort first, participants can organize and name groups based on what makes sense to them and, therefore, would be easy for them to use. Conducting a closed card sort is an excellent way to confirm with participants what your UX team thought were the most common groupings of an open card sort. If the results of the closed card sort match what the team thought would be successful with users, then the development team can move forward with confidence that your navigation is likely going to work for your users rather than against them.

Nailing down your naming conventions

During the card sorting process, the usability and user-friendliness of the card and group names also end up being tested. Names that are vague or confusing are normally discovered during this process. It then becomes the responsibility of the UX researcher to revise the names to align with how users think. A common flaw in website navigation design is to mimic the structure of their company. How your company is organized might not translate easily into a navigation that works for users.
A card sort is a great tool where your Perficient Digital UX researcher can provide your company with qualitative and quantitative data. Qualitative to understand the patterns between your participants thought processes and quantitative data to measure how many times cards were placed together. These complementary data types can help guide your UX decisions about the development of your website navigation.
At the end of this process, you can have confidence that you are providing users with a navigation that is working for them, not against them. In a sense, if they came to your website to buy spoons, you have made it very easy for them to buy all the spoons they want.

The options you have when developing the various aspects of your website can be endless. Sometimes everyone in a team meeting wants to voice an opinion. Sometimes all the opinions are different. In the spirit of efficiency and effectiveness, how can we move forward with decisions and not get bogged down? Your user experience (UX) researcher might be the best asset to help you not get stuck.
Professional development and marketing teams are normally not lacking for different options. That can be a great advantage when you are in the idea phase of the decision-making process. However, moving a project forward during design and development phases can become more difficult when you have an almost endless supply of suggestions.
Frequently though, there is one voice that seems to be missing from the conversation: the customer’s voice. Several members of the team might mention “customer needs” and what they think is best for the customers. But for all their good intentions, do they really know? How can you quantify the voice of the customer? How can you make sure the customer has a voice in what will ultimately be offered? We don’t build products for stakeholders, product owners, development teams, or UX researchers. We build products for customers.
When you get dressed in the morning for work, who should have a voice in what you wear? When you have lunch, who should have a voice in what you eat? I’m guessing that the answer to both of those questions is you. In those situations, you are the customer, and you expect to have a role in the decision-making process.
Involving the customer can help guide the UX decision-making process while also making it more efficient. Conducting formative usability testing can provide insights that can move the decision-making process along faster because of the higher confidence it provides. It’s easier to make UX decisions when you have preliminary testing results.
Sometimes the multitude of ideas from your team is the result of a lack of confidence in knowing what the customer wants. In a situation like that the team can tend to “shotgun” the thinking just to make sure they have all the bases covered. While this covers all the bases, it is inefficient in pinpointing what approach will deliver the most value.
Formative research is focused on gaining short-term insights on where your project is today. It’s an approach to give you “instant gratification,” if you will, for knowing what to do next, as well as confidence in that knowledge. This approach is very different from trying a suggestion from the group that either came from the person with the most seniority in the room or the person with the most convincing pitch. Formative research methods also minimize the politics involved with picking one idea over another.
Working with your Perficient Digital UX researcher to conduct resource-efficient formative usability testing can provide product owners with insight and confidence for decisions to keep you moving forward. Decisions that are driven by research can lower the risk of not knowing what to do. It’s always a little unnerving to walk into a restaurant for the first time and find it empty. You are struck with apprehension and wonder what information you’re missing. Giving customers a voice at the decision-making table and using research to find out what they are saying is like walking into a restaurant where all the tables are full. You know you made the right decision.

“Hey honey, do you know where my old college sweatshirt is? You didn’t throw it away did you?”
Much of what gets the most press in user experience (UX) is finding out what is wrong with a product. What we should change. What isn’t working. But, if we are talking about a UX redesign, it’s also important to know what is working. If it’s not broken, don’t fix it and please don’t throw it away.
UX website redesigns aren’t about doing more work. Engaging UX early on in your website redesign project and throughout the entire process should result in less development time and cost. When you repurpose a building, it’s important to identify the load-bearing elements of your structure. Those are the supports that keep the roof up, or those project elements that are working. Your UX researcher should be testing for and pointing out to you what is working.
No project gets everything wrong, and no project gets everything right. Utilizing the right methodologies in your UX research can show you what is delivering value to users and what is not.
Here are two important words: validation and confidence.
Your UX researcher wants to validate what is working for your users as much as they want to provide you with confidence on what needs adjusting. A seasoned UX researcher is a student of observation. What they saw happen. They build interview questions to understand, and they build questions to discover what they don’t know. They seek to confirm or disprove ideas that stakeholders of the development team hold. A UX researcher can help stakeholders to know what isn’t broken. It’s not a glass that is only half empty or only half full; it’s a glass that is both.
The timeline of when you find out what is broken and what should stay depends on when you enlist the help of a researcher. When do you want to start that process? Seems like the sooner, the better, right? When do you want to find out if you should keep your spouse’s old sweatshirt from college? When it’s in your spouse’s closet or at the bottom of a dumpster?
UX redesign methodologies are employed to give insight into the decision-making process. There are methodologies to provide:

• Validation about how something will perform
• Confidence in why something is happening
• Discovery of what wasn’t thought of
• Measurement of how strongly users feel about something

When do you want to stop having these insights? I hope you can make the case that the answer is never. The UX process has some similarity to windshield wiper blades on your car in the rain. When should you turn them on and how long should you keep them on? Well, how long do you want to see what is in front of you? How long do you want that kind of insight?
Perficient Digital’s team of UX researchers is there to provide you with visibility about what is likely to happen. Don’t get caught fixing what wasn’t broken or throwing out what should have been kept.