It often pays NOT to be pixel-perfect!
It often pays NOT to be pixel-perfect! Yesterday I taught the first of 10 user research corporate workshops to a team in Japan. What an incredible opportunity and experience. In this first session, three approaches seemed to stick out to them the most:
The power of asking participants to draw something during 1:1 sessions. Simple drawings can communicate emotions and expectations quickly and powerfully. They also add richness, strength, and diversity, to your final research shareouts too. We had fun doing some quick “draw X for me” activities together. Examples of how you may add this into a 1:1 interview: “please quickly draw for me how that made you feel/what that process looks like” or “please quickly sketch what you envision”.
The benefits of gathering feedback on paper prototypes. Participants find it much easier to interpret and communicate expectations about loose drawings compared to images that are rendered in higher fidelity. Paper prototypes are an excellent way to gather initial feedback on intent, layout, hierarchy, nomenclature, and simple functionality before investing in wireframes, visual design, and development.
Sentence completion activities can be fun and creative. I love my MadLibs approach however I learned they don’t have MadLibs in Japanese! I like to match my fill-in-the-blanks according to the empathy mapping quadrants (think, feel, say, do). This allows me to capture full participant stories as well as analyze and synthesize each quadrant of responses independently and together across the samples. I was able to find a third-grade sentence completion activity to demonstrate the concept in Japanese.
It’s fun and effective to design and add creative activities to your user research sessions. It also keeps the participants and stakeholders engaged. When approached and applied in meaningful and relevant ways, they also result in a collection of unique artifacts that help teams (who need to act on the learning) acquire a better understanding of the audience they are designing for and thus move them into action more quickly by bridging the divide.
The bottom line, it often pays NOT to be pixel-perfect!
