I recently spent a week as a UX intern working alongside Leisa Reichelt, Andrew Travers and Mark Boulton on a project for StartHere. It was a highly intensive project that involved sketching, strategising, experimenting, designing, wireframing, prototyping, researching, iterating and testing (did I mention already that all of this happened in a week!). I felt privileged to be selected to work with such a professional and knowledgeable team of people; the experience was invaluable.
Here are a few of my takeaways...
- Writing an elevator pitch early on helps to keep a project focused; What is it that we are doing and why? Who is it for? What are the accessibility requirements? What content do you have? Regular retrospectives are also important as well as team catch-ups and gigantic cookies!
- With an intensive project like this you need to start getting concepts in front of your audience as soon as possible. After all these are the people that you are designing for and their feedback really matters; there is no doubt that it will make a difference.
- Whilst undertaking and observing interviews it was just as revealing to note the nonverbal expressions as much as the verbal ones. It was great to see someone smiling when presented with a prototype but it was more important that we found out why. To do this we needed to ask things like: Why do you prefer this version? What makes this one easier to understand? Not all feedback is verbal but needs to be understood to be useful.
- It was essential that we made the most out of the research sessions as possible so we had to be flexible and adaptive in our approach. We followed an iterative workflow that went as follows: Test, evaluate, refine and repeat. The prototypes didn't have to be perfect, this was about taking the feedback (both positive and negative) and refining the concepts on the fly to guide our decision making process.
- Working on a project with such a tight timescale meant that we remained focused. Even so it was vital that we recorded and documented everything that we could as soon as we could. The brainstorms, sketches, post-it notes and observations that we made along the way proved invaluable when we were digesting and evaluating everything that had happened at the end of a long day.