Ux with little money

talk at UXcamp+ Vienna

Use data, that is already there

• Stick to standards
• Look for problems in your app/website/software at review services and social media like Yelp, TripAdvisor and other
• Look at reviews in app stores - what problems people complain about most often
• Analyse your support requests, categorize them to see if a problem occurs more often. Train people on support desk to look out for these problems and what questions to ask.
• Look at analytics data or usage data. Some examples how to use this data: 
• If one page isn't visited often, look at sitewide searchterms if people look for other words
• check if findings from qualitative tests occur in big scale, read more here
• Another suggestion from the discussion was that you can look up which features are most used (for example on your web app) and start with them if you are building something new - for example an android app 
• Use photography for communicating ideas of the users environment to the team

Check the problems you found here in a guerilla usability test and see why something isn't working. 

Get information in your team

• Work with the add-hock personas method (by Tamara Adlin) 

          In short the method works like this: 

1. get people together that work with customers and people who can make decisions (!)
2. write down the business goals (important!)
3. write down what your current customers need
4. order the needs and then categorize them -> add-hock personas
5. prioritize these add-hock personas

See a video by Tamara Adlin to ad-hoc personas here.

I did this add-hock persona workshop for the relaunch of a survey tool in a very small company. The output was very general, the add-hoc personas were more or less market shares and they had not very distinct goals. So we didn't use them a lot. I think this method is good for getting the whole (maybe a bigger) team on board so that all "ideas" of the customer are spoken out loud and all have the same persons in mind.  

• Do heuristic evaluation workshops with developers
  Train developers how to do an evaluation, but don't use your own software for it

Get feedback remotely

• Use standardized questionnaires, for example the Computer System Usability Questionnaire 
  Use it in an app or software, or send it by e-mail. This gives you information if something is wrong or if changes made were successful. To find out WHAT is wrong, do a (remote) usability test.
• Remote Usability test
• A/B testing

Guerilla usability testing

• Test your colleagues, people on the street or people in a similar environment
• Let people from your team watch (or help with notes etc) - so they can see how users struggle
• Use the Rainbow Spreadsheet for making a collaborative report with your team