How to do it

1. Record ideas, quotes, or observations from interviews, contextual inquiry, or other sources of research on sticky notes.
2. Place the sticky notes on a white board (in no particular arrangement). Move the sticky notes into related groups.
3. Use larger notes (or white board markers, if you’re using a white board), to write titles or catch phrases for each group.

How to do it

1. Identify a list of services that would be either direct or related competitors to your service. Pare the list down to four or five.
2. Establish which criteria or heuristics you will use to evaluate each competing service.
3. Break down the analysis of each selected competitor into specific focal areas for evaluation. For example, how relevant are search results?
4. Use a spreadsheet to capture the evaluation and determine how the targeted services and agencies perform based on the identified heuristics.
5. Present the analysis, which should showcase areas of opportunities that you can take advantage of and design patterns you might adopt or avoid.

How to do it

1. Identify a specific user need or user question that you’d like to address.

2. Create an inventory of content on your website. Navigate through the site from the home page and note the following about every piece of content. (For repeated items like blog posts, consider capturing just a sample.)

   1. Title used in the site’s navigation for that page
   2. Title displayed on the page or item itself
   3. URL
   4. Parent page
3. Identify the main entry points for the user need you’re addressing. This could be external marketing, the homepage, a microsite, or another page.
4. From each entry point, trace the pages and tasks a user moves through until they address their need.

5. For every piece of content they might come across on that task flow, note:

   1. Author(s): who wrote or created the page
   2. Content owner(s): who ensures its credibility
   3. How often or when it was last updated
   4. Comments: qualitative assessment of what to change to better address your identified user need

How to do it

1. As a team, identify and make explicit the problem you’re trying to solve. What goals or needs aren’t being met? What measurable criteria would indicate progress toward those goals?

2. As a team, write out the hypothesis for the work you want to do to address the problem(s) you’re trying to solve. You may want to write broad hypotheses at the outset of a project and more specific hypotheses each sprint.

   Here’s a common way to structure your hypothesis:

   We believe that doing/building/creating [this] for [this user] will result in [this outcome].
   We’ll know we’re right when we see [this metric/signal].

3. Once you’ve formulated your hypothesis, consider the following harm prompt to help the team think about and guard against potential unintended consequences of your work.

   But, this could be harmful for [this user] if [this outcome happens].

4. Identify a user touchpoint that will allow you to test your hypothesis, such as external marketing, the homepage, a microsite, or something else. Test your hypothesis. If you learn something unexpected, refine your hypothesis, test again, and continue to work incrementally towards your goals.

How to do it

1. Using internal documents and kickoff activities, gather terms or concepts that seem significant to project goals and organizational culture.
2. Using existing research, list terms or concepts that seem particularly important to customers or user groups.
3. Cluster similar terms and concepts together on a whiteboard or other writing space open to everyone in the project. Name the clusters.
4. Ask the team and stakeholders if they would like to add, change, or edit any concepts or groups.
5. From the groups on the board, create three to five final principles. Using evidence from partner or user research, write one to two sentences in support of each principle.
6. Share the principles in a place accessible to the team throughout the project, and refer to them often while making decisions.

How to do it

An interface audit can be conducted by an individual or in a group setting. Either way, the steps are as follows:

1. Identify the website and take screenshots of all the pages you want to audit
2. Create a checklist of aspects you want to audit on each page—for example typography, header and body copy styles, use of color, buttons, icons, etc.
3. For each page, take notes on each aspect on your checklist.
4. Once all pages have been audited, compare notes and identify inconsistencies (e.g., headers are inconsistently formatted, sometimes bolded, sometimes italicized).
5. Decide how to resolve any inconsistencies by choosing one of the existing approaches found on the site (e.g., make all headers bold) or designing a new solution (e.g., make all headers a different color).

Note: It’s helpful to involve developers, who will be able to advise on the feasibility of potential solutions.

How to do it

1. Document the elements of the project’s design context. This includes:
   • People involved and their related goals
   • Their behaviors in pursuit of their goals
   • Information, devices, and services that support their behaviors
   • Important moments in how they experience a service or major decisions they make
   • The emotions associated with these moments or decisions
   • Potential harms (e.g. financial penalties, anxiety, damaged reputation) associated with these moments or decisions
2. Visualize the order in which people exhibit behaviors, use information, make decisions, and feel emotions. Group elements into a table of “phases” related to the personal narrative of each persona. Identify where personas share contextual components.
3. Discuss the map with stakeholders. Point out insights it offers. Use these insights to establish design principles. Think about how to collapse or accelerate a customer’s journey through the various phases. Incorporate this information into the project’s scope.

How to do it

1. Create one three-columned table per persona. Label the columns “Past,” “Present behavior,” and “Future.”
2. In the middle column (Present behavior), list current user behaviors and pain points broadly related to the project, one per row.
3. In the left-hand column (Past), list the products, services, features, and/or interfaces that the user encounters as they go about what’s listed in the Present behavior column.
4. In the right-hand column (Future), list possible products, services, features, and/or interface elements that in the future might change behaviors and pain points in the Present behavior column.

How to do it

1. Gather research from earlier activities like contextual inquiry or stakeholder interviews in a way that’s easy to review. You can create placeholder personas without research to teach user-centered thinking, but because they’re effectively stereotypes, avoid using them for implementable design decisions.
2. Create a set of user archetypes based on how you believe people will use your solution. These typically get titles (for example, “data administrators” rather than “those who submit data”). Review the archetypes with “who questions:” Who is included? Who is being overlooked? Who is deciding whom to include?
3. Analyze your records for patterns as they relate to user archetypes. Specifically note frequently observed goals, motivations, behaviors, and pain points, and potential harms (e.g. lack of consent, physical danger, being retraumatized).
4. Pair recurring goals, behaviors, pain points, and potential harms with archetypes. Give each archetype a name and a fictional account of their day. Add a photo of someone who fits the description, but ideally not an image of someone you’ve actually interviewed and who may be recognized.
5. Link your personas to the research that inspired them. This is useful when researchers are interested in challenging the way a persona stereotypes a user.

How to do it

1. Gather information on the service through desk research and interviews with users, frontline staff, and support staff

2. Create a diagram with four rows:
   • User steps: The primary action someone takes when interacting with the service
   • Frontstage actions: The online and offline interactions that users have with the service, including people, places where interactions occur, and physical or virtual objects which users interact with, like forms.
   • Backstage actions: Activities in the systems and processes that support the frontstage experience, but are not visible to users
   • Support processes: Activities executed by the rest of the organization or external partners — such as ongoing data management or software licensing — that don’t fall into the other rows
3. Map the flow of each user interaction through the service. Note critical points and interactions in delivering the service, as well as any opportunities to handle interactions more efficiently or that would result in a better user experience.

How to do it

1. List each page of a website or section.
2. Take a screenshot of each page. Create a thumbnail for each screenshot.
3. Print the thumbnails on individual pages if completing this exercise in person. Remote teams can use a shared whiteboard tool. Arrange the page thumbnails into a hierarchical diagram. Focus on the logical relationships between pages. If you’re evaluating an existing website, focus more on these relationships than on the URL structure. If some pages function as sub-pages to another, the site map should reflect that.
4. Use the diagram to guide choices about things like information architecture and URL structures.

How to do it

1. Gather any documents that describe the different use cases or scenarios in which users will interact with your service.
2. Sketch scenes that visually depict a user interacting with the service, including as much context as possible. For example: Are they on the move? Where are they? What else is in their environment?
3. Annotate each scene with a description of what the user is attempting to do. Describe what general feeling or experience the team wants the user to have.
4. Review this storyboard with the product team and stakeholders for feedback. Iterate until the storyboard represents a shared vision of the scenario and progression of scenes.
5. Create a polished version of the storyboard if you plan to use it for future work or in other external contexts.

How to do it

1. Gather all the feedback and information that was provided during the initial kickoff of the project.
2. Distill the information into different directions a solution could take. Label these directions based on what kinds of interactions and brand identity they represent.
3. Create the appropriate number of style tiles based on the defined directions, which establish the specific visual language for the different directions.
4. Gather stakeholder feedback. Iterate on the style tiles, eventually getting down to a single style tile which will be the established visual language for the project going forward.

How to do it

1. Based on user research, identify target users’ goals that need to be analyzed.
2. For each goal, identify common scenarios and the tasks and decisions that the user or system will perform in each scenario. Don’t assume you and your stakeholders share the same understanding of the tasks. The idea is to make the flow of tasks explicit in the diagram, so that you can check your understanding by walking through the diagram with users (steps 4 & 5).
3. Produce a diagram that includes each task and decision point that a user might encounter on their way toward their goal. While there are several diagrammatic languages that can be used to produce task flow diagrams, the basic look is a flow chart of boxes for tasks and decision points and arrows showing directionality and dependencies among tasks. The diagram should cover the common scenarios identified in step 2.
4. Present the diagram to a subject matter expert who knows the task(s) well enough to check for accuracy.
5. In collaboration with users and/or subject matter experts, annotate the task flow diagram to pinpoint areas of interest, risk, or potential frustration.

How to do it

1. Determine a few personas or user groups to focus on. Consider what scenario(s) might be the most critical for that user, including scenarios in which users face limited accessibility.
2. For each user, list out their goals, motivations, and the context/environment in which they interact with your product, service, or website.
3. Put the details you came up with in step 2 into a story format that includes the following information:
   • who they are (persona or user group)
   • why they are using your site (motivations)
   • where they are (context)
   • what they need to do (their goal)
   • how they go about accomplishing the goal (tasks)

   Keep in mind, the more realistic details you add, the richer and more useful your story becomes for helping to understand your user’s behaviors.

4. Share the user scenarios that you’ve written with the user group (and other relevant team members) for validation, feedback, and refinement.
5. Examine your product, service, or website in light of these user scenarios and identify opportunities to make adjustments that would improve users’ experiences.