How to do it

1. Identify specific traits for new or infrequent users of a design solution.
2. Develop a set of representative tasks that emphasize new use or infrequent use.
3. Designate a member of the design team to play the role of a user. That person will use the traits you’ve identified to participate in a moderated usability testing session. (The traits can overlap.)
4. Ask the user to accomplish their goal using a printed or interactive design. As they go, ask what they would attempt to do next or how they would learn.
5. Don’t lead the user through the task, but encourage them to stay focused on what they’re trying to accomplish.
6. Pay attention to expected outcomes and how quickly/easily participants are able to pick up a task.
7. Analyze the walkthrough results to highlight where the user struggled and what needs improvement.

How to do it

1. With permission from a supervisor and from the participant, schedule a time to watch a typical work activity and record data.
2. While observing, ask the participant to act normally. Pretend you’re a student learning how to do the job. Ask questions to help you understand what the person is doing and why.
3. At the end of the session, explain what you have learned and check for errors.
4. Immediately after, write up your notes.

How to do it

1. Invite between six and 12 participants: stakeholders, users, and team members who need to build a shared understanding. Before the meeting, share applicable research, user personas (unless users will be present), and the design prompt for the exercise.
2. Bring drawing materials. At the start of the meeting, review the design prompt and research you shared.
3. Distribute drawing materials. Ask participants to individually sketch concepts that address the prompt. Remind them that anyone can draw and artistic accuracy is not the goal of the exercise. 15–20 minutes.
4. Have participants present their ideas to one another in groups of three and solicit critiques.
5. Ask the groups to create a design that combines the best aspects of members’ individual contributions.
6. Regroup as a whole. Have each group of three present their ideas to everyone. Discuss.
7. After the meeting, note areas of consistent agreement or disagreement. Incorporate areas of consensus into design recommendations and areas of contention into a research plan.

How to do it

1. Bring plenty of sticky notes and colored stickers to the meeting.
2. Gather everyone on the product team and anyone with a stake in the product.
3. Quickly review the project’s goals and the conclusions of any prior user research.
4. Ask team members to take five minutes to write important features or user needs on sticky notes. (One feature per sticky note.)
5. After five minutes, ask participants to put their stickies on a board. If there are many sticky notes, ask participants to put their features next to similar ones. Remove exact duplicates.
6. Give participants three to five colored stickers and instruct them to place their stickers on features they feel are most important to meeting the project’s goals and user needs. If the group is recently formed, or for other reasons has a low level of established trust and equity, consider a set-up where people can vote privately, e.g. on paper. You’ll need a few extra minutes to compile and display.
7. Identify the features with the largest number of stickers (votes). Have the team review the voting for whether familiarity bias is resulting in enshrining the status quo.

How to do it

Select a particular issue or problem from your user research to investigate further. This could be the most commonly occurring problem or a problem that has been prioritized by the team. Ask why the problem occurred and write down an answer. Repeat this process another four times, building off of the previous response each time to drill down to a root cause. As you probe, make sure you remain sensistive to the emotional response of the interviewee. Sometimes asking why multiple times can cause the interviewee to feel frustrated or defensive if they don’t feel as if they are being heard. See example below:

Starting problem: “We didn’t meet our goal for public feedback during the open comment period.”

1. Why?
   “Not enough people submitted comments.”
2. Why?
   “Not enough people made it to the comment submission form.”
3. Why?
   “The comment submission form was hard to find.”
4. Why?
   “The link to the comment submission form was buried on the page.”
5. Why?
   “We didn’t formulate and publish a call to action to submit comments.”

After getting to a root cause, frame or reframe your problem solving approach to address it (e.g., “how might we create a call to action for comment submission?”).

Note: You may ask “why” more or less than five times during this process. The purpose of this exercise is to help identify what is the root cause. Ask “why” as many times as needed to get to what you think the root cause is, while keeping the mental cost of the interviewee in mind.

How to do it

1. Recruit a group of three to five people familiar with evaluation methods. These people are not necessarily designers, but are familiar with common usability best practices. They are usually not users.
2. Ask each person to individually create a list of “heuristics” or general usability best practices. Examples of heuristics from Nielsen’s “10 Usability Heuristics for User Interface Design” include:
   1. The website should keep users informed about what is going on, through appropriate feedback within reasonable time.
   2. The system should speak the user’s language, with words, phrases and concepts familiar to the user, rather than system-oriented terms.
3. Consider what hazards the service or product might hold for its users, and nclude heuristics to evaluate whether the site protects against possible harms.
4. Ask each person to evaluate the website against their list and write down possible problems.
5. After individual evaluations, gather people to discuss what they found and prioritize potential problems.

How to do it

1. Ahead of the session, establish what you want to elicit hopes and fears about. For example, you could ask participants to focus on the whole project or that day’s workshop.
2. At the beginning of the session, create two columns labeled “Hopes” and “Fears” on a white board or large sticky pad. (In a remote setting, you can do this online using collaboration software such as Mural or Google Docs)
3. Ask participants to take 1-2 mins to write down their hopes on sticky notes (one hope per sticky note).
4. Invite participants to come up one at a time and add their “hopes” sticky notes to the board and say more about what they wrote. Have participants group their sticky notes as they add them to the board to illustrate emerging themes.
5. Repeat steps 3 and 4 with fears.

This format can be adapted to include other categories. For example, asking participants to write down skills and experiences can help contextualize each person’s place in the group.

How to do it

1. Gather four or more participants for 90 minutes. Provide sticky notes and markers.
2. Create a focused question about the project’s needs and select a facilitator to run the exercise.
3. Give participants five minutes to write at least three responses to the question, each on its own note.
4. Give participants 15 minutes to put their answers on the wall, read everyone else’s, and make additions. Have participants cluster similar answers without discussion.
5. Ask participants to write names for each cluster on their own - this is mandatory. They may also split clusters.
6. Put each name on the wall by its cluster. Exclude word-for-word duplicates.
7. Reiterate the question and have each person rank their three most important clusters. Visually tally points.
8. Combine duplicates and their points if the entire group agrees they’re identical. Three or four groups usually rank higher than the rest - these are the priorities for the question.

Considerations for use in government

At 18F, KJ participants are almost always federal employees. If there is any chance your KJ workshop could include participants who are not federal employees, consult OMB guidance on the Paperwork Reduction Act and the Privacy Act. Your agency’s Office of General Counsel, and perhaps OIRA desk officers, also can ensure you are following the laws and regulations applicable to federal agencies.

How to do it

1. Give meeting participants two minutes to write what they would like to talk about on sticky notes (one idea per sticky note)
2. Have meeting participants review the topics generated and dot vote on the topics they are most interested in
3. Decide how much time will be spent talking about each topic
4. Start with the topic that got the most votes
5. At the end of the allotted time, have meeting participants vote:
   • Thumbs up: Continue talking about the topic for a shorter set amount of time
   • Thumbs down: Move to the next topic

How to do it

1. Create a guide for yourself of some topics you’d like to ask about, and some specific questions as a back up. Questions will often concern the individual’s role, the organization, the individuals’ needs, and metrics for success of the project. Consider how the interview could harm the participant, and adjust your questions to avoid those hazards. For example, might your questions trigger thoughts of painful experiences?
2. Sit down one-on-one with the participant, or two-on-one with a note-taker or joint interviewer, in a focused environment. Introduce yourself. Explain the premise for the interview as far as you can without biasing their responses.
3. Follow the conversation where the participant takes it. They will focus on their priorities and interests. Be comfortable with silences, which allow the participant to elaborate. To keep from getting entirely off course, use your interview guide to make sure you cover what you need to. Ask lots of “why is that” and “how do you do that” questions. Consider asking if there are ways the service or product could cause harm to its users if not done carefully, or what assumptions are being made (leaving it ambiguous as to whether we’re referring to our questions or in the service/product).
4. If there are other products they use or your product doesn’t have constraints imposed by prior work, observe the stakeholders using a competing product and consider a comparative analysis.

How to do it

1. Gather the team and, ideally, at least one crucial stakeholder familiar with their organization and how it works from both a technical and an interpersonal point of view.
2. If meeting in person, you’ll need sticky notes and a whiteboard; if meeting remotely, use a virtual whiteboard or tools that support online document collaboration, ideally simultaneously.
3. Divide the whiteboard into four areas, as a grid. Label the x axis influence and the y axis interest.
4. List out stakeholders together. Write down names of people, groups, communities, or organizations that your work may impact, and organize them into the four quadrants based on your understanding of their relative influence and interest.
5. Look at each quadrant to sort who to engage with and how:
   • interested and influential - collaborate with them
   • either influential or interested - keep them informed
   • neither influential nor interested - allow them to drive their own involvement
6. If your map reveals power dynamics that route around policy, consider whether the information poses personal or professional risk to any stakeholders. Avoid possible harm by sharing this map with only the people who need to understand it, and consider the consequences of those you do share with — or share an edited version.
7. Review and update the map as you understand the situation better.