Universal Methods of Design

Surveys

Are a method of collecting self-reported information from people about their characteristics, thoughts, feelings, perceptions, behaviors, or attitudes.

Literature Reviews

Are an integral part of academic papers, but are also a useful component of any design project, to collect and synthesize research on a given topic.

Creative Toolkits

Are collections of physical elements conveniently organized for participatory modeling, visualization, or creative play by users, to inform and inspire design and business teams.

Simulation Exercises

Are deep approximations of human or environmental conditions, designed to forge an immersive, empathic sense of real-life user experiences.

Scenario Description Swimlanes

Are deliverables that visualize the activities of multiple actors in a flow of events and prove that a holistic perspective is greater than the sum of its parts.

Cultural Probes

Are provocative instruments given to participants to inspire new forms of self-understanding and communication about their lives, environments, thoughts, and interactions.

Questionnaires

Are survey instruments designed for collecting self-report information from people about their characteristics, thoughts, feelings, perceptions, behaviors, or attitudes, typically in written form.

Territory Maps

Are visual artifacts that represent the shared focus of the design team for anticipated design activities, including the identification of suggested stakeholders.

Collage

As inspiration for design teams, this technique allows participants to visually express their thoughts, feelings, desires, and other aspects of their life that are difficult to articulate using traditional means.

Experience Prototyping

Facilitates active participation in design through subjective engagement with a prototype system or service, product, or place.

Usability Testing

Focuses on people and their tasks, and seeks empirical evidence about how to improve the usability of an interface.

Eyetracking

Gathers detailed technical information on exactly where and for how long participants are looking— and not looking— when using an interface or interacting with products.

Generative Research

Generative design exercises engage users in creative opportunities to express their feelings, dreams, needs, and desires, resulting in rich information for concept development.

Flexible Modeling

Given a component kit of parts, users can provide insight into product or interface configurations as guiding information for designers.

Stakeholder Maps

Help to visually consolidate and communicate the key constituents of a design project, setting the stage for user-centered research and design development.

Time-aware Research

Intercepting people at the precise moment they choose to complete a task provides keen insight into how they accomplish self-directed goals.

Photo Studies

Invite the participant to photo-document aspects of his or her life and interactions, providing the designer with visual, self-reported insights into user behaviors and priorities.

Evaluative Research

Involves the testing of prototypes, products, or interfaces by real potential users of a system in design development.

Contextual Design

Is a customer-centered process that makes the ways in which designers work concrete, explicit, and sharable so that every step is anchored in customer data and feels less like design "magic." This has 5 steps: • Contextual Inquiry • Interpretation Sessions • Work Models and Affinity Diagrams • Visioning and Storyboarding • User Environment Design • Paper Mock-ups

Participatory Design

Is a human-centered approach advocating active user and stakeholder engagement throughout all phases of the research and design process, including co-design activities.

Weighted Matrix

Once your team has generated multiple design concepts, a weighted matrix can help identify and prioritize the most promising opportunities.

Participatory Action Research

PAR is a cyclical, collaborative research process that seeks to intentionally change the community or other aspects that are the focus of the inquiry.

Mental Model Diagrams

People tend to behave in ways consistent with dearly held beliefs. The mental model diagram can help you articulate root causes behind behaviors and develop solutions that deeply resonate with people.

Storyboards

Provide a visual narrative that generates empathy and communicates the context in which a technology or form factor will be used.

Graffiti Walls

Provide an open canvas on which participants can freely offer their written or visual comments about an environment or system, directly in the context of use.

Ergonomic Analysis

Provides an assessment of tools, equipment, devices, workstations, workplaces, or environments, to optimize the fit, safety, and comfort of use by people.

Shadowing

Provides key insight into a participant's activities and decision patterns as the researcher follows him or her closely throughout his or her daily routines.

Design Workshops

Are a form of participatory design consolidating creative co-design methods into organized sessions for several participants to work with design team members.

Interviews

Are a fundamental research method for direct contact with participants, to collect firsthand personal accounts of experience, opinions, attitudes, and perceptions.

Web Analytics

Are a gateway for your organization to become deeply invested in what your customers are doing online, and why.

Secondary Research

consists of information collected and synthesized from existing data, rather than original material sourced through primary research with participants.

Personas

consolidate archetypal descriptions of user behavior patterns into representative profiles, to humanize design focus, test scenarios, and aid design communication.

Picture Cards

contain images and words that help people think about and tell true stories of their life experiences, grounded in context and detail.

Image Boards

A collage of collected pictures, illustrations, or brand imagery can be used to visually communicate an essential description of targeted aesthetics, style, audience, context, or other aspects of design intent.

Observation

A fundamental research skill, observation requires attentive looking and systematic recording of phenomena— including people, artifacts, environments, events, behaviors and interactions.

The Love Letter & the Breakup Letter

A personal letter written to a product often reveals profound insights about what people value and expect from the objects in their everyday lives.

Artifact Analysis

A systematic examination of the material, aesthetic, and interactive qualities of objects contributes to an understanding of their physical, social, and cultural contexts.

Role-playing

Acting the role of the user in realistic scenarios can forge a deep sense of empathy and highlight challenges, presenting opportunities that can be met by design.

Personal Inventories

Allow the designer to see and understand the relevance of objects in a user's life from the participant's point of view, to inspire design themes and insight.

Directed Storytelling

Allows designers to easily gather rich stories of lived experiences from participants, using thoughtful prompts and guiding and framing questions in conversation.

Experience Sampling Method

Allows the designer to collect snapshots of behaviors, interactions, thoughts, or feelings from people who self-report in real time when signaled at random or timed intervals.

Fly-on-the-Wall Observation

Allows the researcher to unobtrusively gather information by looking and listening without direct participation or interference with the people or behaviors being observed.

Heuristic Evaluation

An agreed-upon set of usability best practices can help detect usability problems before actual users are brought in to further evaluate an interface.

Site Search Analytics

Analyzing the words and phrases entered into a site search gives organizations insight into what people are looking for, which is an opportunity to evaluate how well site content meets those needs.

Brainstorm Graphic Organizers

Beyond creating lists of new ideas and concepts, brainstorm graphic organizers help in the creation of new knowledge by visually structuring a deep dive into a problem space.

Task Analysis

Breaks down the constituent elements of a user's work flow, including actions and interactions, system response, and environmental context.

Stakeholder Walkthrough

Brings end users, stakeholders, and the design team together to evaluate early prototypes, providing actionable recommendations for improvements and building empathy.

Thematic Networks

Building these is a step-by-step process that helps to identify, organize, and connect the most common themes in rich, qualitative data.

Diary Studies

Diaries or journals are guiding artifacts that allow people to conveniently and expressively convey personal details about their daily life and events to design teams.

Business Origami

Enables teams to paper-prototype the interaction and value exchange among people, artifacts, and environments in a multichannel system.

A/B Testing (Split Testing)

Is a method of comparing two different concepts such as buttons, CTAs, color schemes, and banners. The aim of A/B testing is to find out which of various options is the most successful; for example, which button gets the most clicks. Each case of A/B testing is unique. What elements you test depends on your business goals.

Automated Remote Research

Is a method that can reveal statistically relevant data about what people are doing on your website, to help identify the usability enhancements with the biggest impact. Remote Research comes in two flavors: Automated and Moderated.

Cognitive Walkthrough

Is a method that evaluates whether the order of cues and prompts in a system reflect the way people cognitively process tasks and anticipate "next steps" of a system.

Think-aloud Protocol

Is a method that requires participants to verbalize what they are doing and thinking as they complete a task, revealing aspects of an interface that delight, confuse, and frustrate.

Scenarios

Is a narrative that explores the future use of a product from a user's point of view, helping design teams reason about its place in a person's day-to-day life.

Affinity Diagramming

Is a process used to externalize and meaningfully cluster observations and insights from research, keeping design teams grounded in data as they design.

Case Studies

Is a research strategy involving in-depth investigation of single events or instances in context, using multiple sources of research evidence.

Concept Mapping

Is a visual framework that allows designers to absorb new concepts into an existing understanding of a domain so that new meaning can be made.

Cognitive Mapping

Is a visualization of how people make sense of a particular problem space. It is most effective when used to structure complex problems and to inform decision making.

User Journey Map

Is a visualization of the experiences people have when interacting with a product or service, so that each moment can be individually evaluated and improved.

Evidence-based Design

Is an approach that bases decisions for effective design on the implications of credible research and assessed outcomes, rather than sole reliance on intuition and anecdotal information.

Contextual Inquiry

Is an immersive, contextual method of observing and interviewing that reveals underlying (and invisible) work structure. There are four principles that define the this method: 1. Context 2. Partnership 3. Interpretation 4. Focus

Participant Observation

Is an immersive, ethnographic method for understanding situations and behaviors through the experience of membership participation in an activity, context, culture, or subculture.

Hallway Testing

Is an informal way to test your design with real users. A hallway test involves going to a crowded area and simply asking passers-by to test and evaluate an interface.

Triading

Is an interviewing technique that reveals deep-seated attitudes, perceptions, and feelings toward brands, products, and services.

AEIOU

Is an organizational framework reminding the researcher to attend to, document, and code information under a guiding taxonomy of Activities, Environments, Interactions, Objects, and Users.

Usability Report

Is informed by empirical evidence, helping teams decide whether a product is usable enough to release, or needs revision and further testing with more participants.

Triangulation

Is the convergence of multiple methods on the same research question, to corroborate evidence from several different angles.

Competitive Testing

Is the process of conducting research to evaluate the usability and learnability of your competitors' products.

Prototyping

Is the tangible creation of artifacts at various levels of resolution, for development and testing of ideas within design teams and with clients and users.

Elito Method

Is used to develop solid design arguments grounded in research observations and anchored to business directives.

Behavioral Mapping

Is used to systematically document location-based observations of human activity, using annotated maps, plans, video, or time-lapse photography.

Kano Analysis

Not all product attributes are equally important to the customer. Use this technique to determine which product attributes have the greatest impact on customer satisfaction.

Crowdsourcing

Occurs when an undefined, large group of people (a "crowd") voluntarily responds to an open call and completes tasks and microprojects.

Rapid Iterative Testing & Evaluation

RITE is a powerful formative usability inspection method that helps teams identify and remove major problems in an interface early in the design process before costly prototypes are built.

Research Through Design

Recognizes the design process as a legitimate research activity, examining the tools and processes of design thinking and making within the design project, bridging theory and building knowledge to enhance design practices.

Remote Moderated Research

Remotely observing users completing tasks on their own electronic devices can reveal rich insights into contexts of use that cannot be replicated in a controlled lab environment.

Parallel Prototyping

Simultaneously exploring multiple design opportunities can help teams keep from fixating on a design direction too early, improve the nature of design critiques, and lead to more effective design results.

Bodystorming

Situates brainstorming in physical experience, combining role-playing and simulation to inspire new ideas and empathic, spontaneous prototyping.

Five-Second Testing

The aim of 5-second testing (also called impression testing) is to elicit the user's first impressions of an interface and find out if a website or an app communicates its purpose to its visitors.

`Content Inventory & Audit

The content inventory tells you what your content is. A content audit makes recommendations as to what your content should be.

Focus Groups

The dynamic created by a small group of well-chosen people, when guided by a skilled moderator, can provide deep insight into themes, patterns, and trends.

Touchstone Tours

The guided tour is designed as a conversation that uses artifacts and the environment as touchstones for questions and insights.

Design Ethnography

This technique approximates the immersion methods of traditional ethnography, to deeply experience and understand the user's world for design empathy and insight.

Customer Experience Audit

This technique capture the day-to-day context in which people engage with your product or service.

Critical Incident Technique

Understanding how users experience your product at critical moments can help you optimize your designs for future users. This technique will help you to identify: • The incident cause • User actions • User sentiment • Incident outcome • Ideal outcome

Unobtrusive Measures

Unobtrusive methods are used to acquire information without direct contact with participants, through nonreactive physical traces, archives, and observations.

Laddering

Use laddering to reveal the connection between a product's obvious physical characteristics and the deeper, more profound personal values that it reinforces in a customer's life.

Mind Mapping

When a topic or a problem has many moving parts, mind mapping provides a method of visually organizing a problem space in order to better understand it.

Speed Dating

When people compare multiple design concepts in quick succession, design teams can learn how people react to new technology while also taking into account existing contextual and social factors.

Design Charette

When superior design features and characteristics inspire subsequent rounds of ideas, the end result is more likely to be an optimized design solution.

KJ Technique

When the traditional meeting format fails to achieve group consensus, the KJ Technique can be used to help teams work through a problem space and prioritize what should be focused on first.

Desirability Testing

When there is disagreement about which design direction to pursue, desirability testing shifts the conversation from which design is "best" to which design elicits the optimal emotional response from users.

Card Sorting

When user comprehension and meaningful categorization is critical, this technique can help clarify.

Key Performance Indicators

When you need to keep a pulse on critical success factors for your product or service, a few well-selected KPIs can keep you informed and guide you when you need to course-correct.

Semantic Differentials

can help reveal "felt" meanings that are a direct product of one's experiences, culture, and dearly held beliefs.

Exploratory Research

is defined by user and product studies, intended to forge an empathic knowledge base, particularly when designers may be working in unfamiliar territory.

Value Opportunity Analysis

maps the extent to which a product's aspirational qualities align to people's idealized lifestyle or fantasy version of themselves.

Experiments

measure the effect that an action has on a situation by demonstrating a causal relationship or determining conclusively that one thing is the result of another.

Content Analysis

s the systematic description of form and content of written, spoken, or visual materials expressed in themes, patterns, and counted occurrences of words, phrases, images, or concepts.