If IBM and Apple had a baby today, it would be called UX.

Not very likely, perhaps, but you see the point: UX has a mixed heritage, drawing from engineering traditions as well as big-D design traditions. I would like to characterize briefly what I have come across as typical values in professional UX practices. Then talk about what I see as “designerly” ways of working within interaction design. And then finally put the two together in order to highlight some opportunities for designerly ways of working in UX.

A short history

For UX, the engineering tradition largely means the academic field of human-computer interaction (HCI). This field was founded in a time when computers were used only for instrumental purposes in work settings, and thus the focus was squarely placed on usability, efficiency, reducing user errors and fitting the users’ tasks. In the 1990s, the practical application of HCI knowledge to product development was even called Usability Engineering.

And then computers moved out of the offices and into our pockets, cars, headphones, living rooms and all other aspects of everyday (Western) life. Internet became part of the infrastructure, and huge digital consumer-product markets emerged in the entertainment and leisure sectors. Most computers today are used for pleasure rather than for business; the use is discretionary rather than mandatory; the designers’ focus is on experience and sociality rather than on usability and computer-supported collaborative work.

During that move, HCI crossed paths with Design (via consumer products) and Media (via social and communicative uses). Lots of new methods and concepts were introduced, and today there seems to be consensus that the professional discipline of shaping digital things with a focus on users should be called User Experience, or UX.

Blending engineering and big-D design traditions

Apologies for the brevity of this historical sketch; what I want to illustrate is simply that UX is at a point where engineering and big-D design traditions start to blend. Or, rather, they should be starting to blend, given the tasks that UX professionals are facing. I am not sure they are, though.

I have spent quite a few years as a university-based designer working together with UX professionals, mainly in the ICT and telecom industries. What I tend to find is that professional UX practice is quite heavily influenced by the engineering/HCI tradition. This shows in observations like the following.

• There is a strong preference for fieldwork: To study intended users in their settings to learn about them and perhaps find problems and opportunities for improvement in their current practices;
• Work should generally proceed in stages: First observing and analyzing (for instance through fieldwork), then deciding what to design, and then designing and testing;
• The results of observation, analysis, design and testing are documented and communicated in reports;
• In general, UX is seen as a profession that concentrates on users and their needs and capabilities. It works together with engineering, marketing and design/communication as needed.

The designerly ways of working

Given this state of affairs as I see it, I should now move on to addressing designerly ways of working in UX (as promised in the title). But what does that really mean? What are designerly ways of working?

My sense is that there is a design tradition of working (“big-D design”) that is strongly related to design-school training and the creative industries, and that generally involves four characteristics:

• Design is about exploring possible futures, examining what things might be like, how people could work and play in new ways. It may be based on fieldwork (studying users and settings), or just as well on creating a structure of participation, where there are no “users” to study but rather participants contributing their expertise in a particular field of practice through a co-design process. Exploration in design may also be guided by technical possibilities, i.e., exploring the potentials of the design material at hand;
• Design addresses multiple aspects of quality in parallel. From a design point of view, the instrumental and the technical are inseparable from the aesthetic, symbolic and ethical realms. When designing a way-finding mobile app, for instance, its usability cannot be assessed without considering its performative qualities. In plain English: If you look silly when using it, you will not use it in public, no matter how well the interface performs in the usability lab;
• The understanding of the “problem” grows in parallel with attempts to create “solutions”. Design often starts with partial and unfounded solution ideas, and lots of them. Those ideas in turn stimulate a growing understanding of what the “problem” entails, and new solution ideas emerge. The resulting trail is mapping out a space of possibilities, a design space;
• Design entails thinking through sketching and other forms of tangible representation. Design happens in the moment of drawing a sketch, or building a model, or enacting a future use scenario. It is not about thinking first, and then capturing the thought. The body and the mind, the pencil and the eye, think together. This is one reason why it makes sense to talk about design as experimentation.

Mapping engineering and designerly ways

Even though the design tradition grew up in a more artsy neighborhood, my experience is that blending it with engineering/HCI style UX practice is a worthwhile effort. In order to get a sense of what this blending might entail, let’s start by putting the engineering and the designerly characteristics together in a grid.

Mapping engineering and designerly ways

We can see that there are a few areas of potential friction between engineering and designerly ways of working – for instance, the “fieldwork” preference of studying representative users in typical settings seems to be at odds with the designerly practice of “exploring possible futures.”

Introducing designerly thinking in UX practice

To address the frictions in introducing designerly thinking to HCI-tradition UX practice, I have tried quite a few strategies. Five of them in particular seem to yield good results in various professional UX settings. I have placed them in the grid to indicate which specific friction they address, and next I will discuss each of them in turn.

Diverging in upstream phases: This is probably the most important part of instilling designerly thinking in UX practice. What it means is simply to frame the start of a new design process for yourself or your team as a learning adventure, where the aim is to investigate as many possible directions, ideas, questions and problem framings as you can – while you can still do it at a very low cost. Sketching ten product ideas in pencil thumbnails takes ten minutes and provides you with a whole catalog of different ways to envision the project-to-follow and another catalog of different ways to frame the “problem.” If you spend an hour, you will have fifty ideas or ten very different ideas. This, in turn, might guide you in planning fieldwork and help you steer away from the most obvious incremental-fixes-for-observable-problems framings – assuming that your incentives include innovation, which is quite common these days.
Fieldwork can be geared towards divergence by means of seeking unusual settings, extreme personas and future envisionments, which in turn suggests paths towards other parts of the design spaces. All the while seeking to maximize learning through divergence before having to commit to one direction. Examining ten different design directions rapidly to identify the most promising one provides much better validation than locking onto one without examining the alternatives, no matter how much you iterate on the chosen direction further down the road.

A broad inventory of concepts, trends and ideas that was developed quickly as the foundation for designing a tribal-navigation video service. It provided the basis for five distinct design concepts that were elaborated and then synthesized together with the client into one project direction.

Related to fieldwork, there is the notion of turning users from objects of study to participants in the explorative adventure. There is no room here for details on participatory design or its contemporary cousin, the living lab, but there are proven ways to team up with users in exploring parts of the design space far away from the users’ current practices (which is all you learn about if you study users using conventional fieldwork techniques). Again, early phases may provide room for divergent approaches – which adds a comfortable sense of faith in the chosen direction once it is time to start converging.

Staff members at an Intensive Care Unit during a participatory design process aimed at supporting informal on-the-job learning and knowledge sharing. (image credits: Erling Björgvinsson and Per-Anders Hillgren, by permission)

The big picture is also related to divergence. What it means is broadly that even when you dive into the details of a particular design direction, try to keep a third eye on the overall direction of the work and on what your detailed decisions mean for the product and the use situation as a whole. This can be difficult at times, which is why it is generally a good idea to have systematic big-picture reviews when the team is required to step back and rehearse the overall situation. Good questions might be, for example, “What does that really mean for the user? How does it fit with her everyday media streams and practices? What would she make of it in relation to these other ten things that she likes to do? Are there other groups of stakeholders who might come across this design and what would they make of it?” Asking this kind of questions might sound strange; after all, we have decisions on how to proceed overall, surely we don’t need to spend valuable time revisiting them? I would argue that you do need to, simply because detailing the design changes your understanding of the overall situation, and it is much better to spot big-picture problems at the stage of design detailing than to learn about them the hard way after product launch.

Another aspect of the big picture has to do with organizational silos. The big picture spans the different functions of the organization in a way that seems disconcerting to some UX teams specializing in studying users in their current settings and wireframing interaction flows: If we were to look at the overall situation, we would be overstepping our mandate to interfere with business development, engineering, visual design, et cetera. This is true, and that is why I note that multidisciplinary (“crossfunctional”) teams have much better chances of keeping the big picture alive throughout the work. Moreover, my strong sense is that multidisciplinary teams actually save money in terms of reducing interdepartmental confusion, communication breakdowns and redundant duplicate work – as opposed to costing money by having people spending hours in activities that are not 100% devoted to their respective fields of expertise.

The final item – using expressive forms that are close to use – follows mainly from a mode of working that promotes sketching. Basically, if interaction sketches such as storyboards, video scenarios and function mockups are the best ways of exploring ideas of future use and learning about the design space, it seems reasonable to use them also for communicating those insights. After all, what UX does is essentially validated visions of future use. Communicating UX results in use-oriented representations (i.e., interaction sketches) not only increases precision by speaking the native language of the topic addressed, but it also saves money by not having to convert use-oriented representations to standard report forms.

The actual design documents (“specifications”) from the concept development phase of a collaborative platform for product information.

To conclude

I need to make the obvious apology that addressing this big a topic in a short piece of text leaves generalization holes large enough to drive a full-scale pervasive game prototype through. I have neither been able to include concrete examples or specific stories, nor to substantiate my claims with academic evidence or sustained reasoning. Still, I hope you find some food for thought on why you work the way you do, and how you could play around with working in other ways.

Interaction 12

Jonas Löwgren will be one of the keynote speakers at Interaction 12. It is the fifth annual conference hosted by the Interaction Design Association (IxDA). Each year, IxDA aims to gather the interaction design community to connect, educate, and inspire each other. This year it is held in Dublin, Ireland.

How does one end up in UX after counseling delinquent girls and brain injured individuals? This question is one I am asked frequently once people find out the somewhat unorthodox route I took towards my career in UX. With some explanation, the connection between the two areas becomes much clearer and there is greater understanding for how my background in psychology has laid the groundwork for a career in UX.

Others Who Have Followed A Similar Path

It is difficult to think of the connection between psychology and UX without thinking of Donald Norman, as he is the person who set the stage for incorporating aspects of Cognitive Psychology within Interaction Design, one area of User Experience.

Certain basic principles of cognitive psychology provide grounding for interaction design. These include mental models, mapping, interface metaphors, and affordances. Many of these are laid out in Donald Norman’s influential book The Design of Everyday Things.

from Wikipedia

Susan Weischenk, “The Brain Lady” also comes from a background in psychology. She has written books, including Neuro Web Design: What Makes Them Click?, online articles such as “The Psychologist’s View of UX Design” and has her own blog “What Makes Them Click” where she applies psychology to understanding people for better design.

What I Did

So, how exactly does Psychology relate to User Experience in the practical sense and why did I make the transition from helping people in one context to designing for them in the other? After earning my Masters Degree from Columbia University, Teachers College, I left New York City and moved back to Philadelphia where I worked briefly with juvenile delinquent girls, between the ages of 9 and 13 years old, living in a group home.  With a great mentor and supervisor, I learned how to provide the specific kind of counseling that these girls needed. Lurking beneath the “tough” girls who often threatened others with violence were artists, poets, and overall creative souls. The tough girl behavior was a defense mechanism and how they survived in their world. The girls learned to trust me and share their more tender side. Skills that I learned and started becoming comfortable with during my training in graduate school such as active listening, observation, empathy, and collaboration, I focused on and improved in this setting as well as in my next job. (For more on what dealing with delinquents can teach you about UX, see Brett Lutchman’s post on that very experience). My other job, and one I held for many years, was as an outpatient case manager and clinician in the Drucker Brain Injury Center’s Community Re-Entry Program at MossRehab Hospital. I managed care, therapies and provided counseling. These clients had transitioned from an inpatient stay and were ready to return to career, school, or activity pattern based on their prognosis and level of injury. Frequent collaborative meetings were held to discuss treatment plans and make changes as necessary. On a daily basis, I observed people in various settings, including their own natural home and work environments, to better understand what they were experiencing and their specific difficulties to develop a plan that would help improve their lives. These are the same approaches I bring to my work as a UX designer.

How I Moved Into UX

After the birth of my first child, I needed to find a career that offered more flexibility; one that did not take as much emotional energy and allowed me to work part-time. Working with a brain injured population was one of the most rewarding, yet difficult experiences I have ever had in my life, so the decision to leave did not come easily. I worked with incredibly smart, talented people from different disciplines, within a collaborative environment, much like the team I currently work with as a UX Designer. As I searched options, I decided that web design could be a fun and flexible career. I began taking classes at Penn State Abington for website design.I learned C++, Javascript, Flash, HTML, User Interface design, and usability (among other classes). Once I finished that program, I began to design and develop websites for small businesses. I learned more about user experience, an area related to what I was doing with web design, but involving what I had learned and practiced in the field of psychology. I realized that the skills I had used in my “other life” in Psychology were so aligned with what is practiced in UX that it was a very natural fit.

What I Brought With Me to UX

Ability to understand people’s motivations

Psychology is the study of people’s behavior. Behind that behavior are motivations why someone is doing what they are doing. UX is very similar. We need to understand the “why’s” to design for the behaviors we are trying to elicit, all while making the user feel good about their experience so that they repeat these behaviors.

Research

To understand behaviors that help make our product useful to our clients and their users, we need to conduct research. My background conducting research almost daily in graduate school helped me ease into this part of user experience.

Problem Solving

There is never just one way to solve a problem. Every problem has multiple solutions. Being able to think quickly and offer useful solutions to accommodate multiple variations and desires of the client while satisfying their users is a skill overlapping psychology and  UX. I had a brain injured client who revealed that following her brain injury, her partner began to abuse her. Helping her to develop a variety of options, quickly was important. While the solutions I am expected to come up with in UX are not life-threatening, they can help improve the interactions with a client’s product.

Listening

This skill is one of the most important to learn in life, and oh, so hard for many of us. To make a proper psychological assessment, use of active listening skills helps gain insight into someone’s motivations. Graduate programs in psychology provide a great deal of training and practice in the use of active listening, indicating the level of importance it brings to assessments and therapy. So too, in UX, listening and assessing what our users are saying (or not saying) is one of the most important skills used to assess their behaviors and motivations for performing certain actions.

Observation

As with listening, being able to observe behavior provides such important clues into what a person’s motivations are. Staying out of the users’ way and allowing them to figure things out is a very difficult thing to do, but necessary to see if our design is doing what it was intended to. The only way to do this is to observe and allow the natural process to occur without our influence confounding the results. Evaluations of incoming brain injured clients allowed me to practice this, as it was solely based on observation. The plan of action that needed to be taken became clear, just by watching someone engage in daily activities, such as trying (and often failing) to cook from a written recipe.

Staying out of the users’ way and allowing them to figure things out is a very difficult thing to do, but necessary to see if our design is doing what it was intended to.

Written and oral communication skills

The ability to communicate clearly and effectively is another skill where there is overlap between Psychology and User Experience. This enables an atmosphere of trust and respect to be created which helps get approval from clients concerning design recommendations that are made. The main difference between the two is in the mode of communication. Where I mostly wrote daily notes and reports in Psychology, I now design wireframes with annotations, prototypes, sketches, personas, and storyboarding to explain my process and thinking.

Empathy

Whether in a therapy session or designing for our users, identifying with them through empathy only makes us better at what we do by stepping outside our mindset and into that of another. Whenever I sincerely empathized with my clients and their particular situation, whether a teen girl trying to protect what she believed to rightfully belong to her or a brain injured person who could not remember a conversation he had the night before, it became evident that I cared about them and wanted to help. By demonstrating empathy, I gained a wealth of information that improved the therapeutic process. This naturally translates to UX as showing we care about how the user interacts with our products helps to improve how they interact with our products.

Whenever I sincerely empathized with my clients and their particular situation, whether a teen girl trying to protect what she believed to rightfully belong to her or a brain injured person who could not remember a conversation he had the night before, it became evident that I cared about them and wanted to help.

Collaboration

Probably one of the most enjoyable aspects has been the collaborative process, both on a transdisciplinary team of therapists and working as the user experience designer on a team with designers, developers, product managers and marketers. There is nothing like many individuals expressing themselves (much like a really large, loud family) in the design process to make it fun while coming up with the best solutions for the users.

Iteration

Any time there is a plan of action, there needs to be the ability to change course when things are not working as planned. This is true both in a therapeutic setting as well as when designing. Life is ever changing, as should our work.

Looking to Make the Move?

With an open mind and a great deal of willingness to learn new skills and improve existing ones, transitioning from Psychology to UX can be smooth. My best advice is to network, find a mentor, participate in local groups, attend conferences and read. No matter what discipline you may be coming from, think about the tasks you performed in a generalized way and how they may transition to the field of UX. —- Brain image CC-by-NC from labguest

The previous article in this series described a step-by-step technique for drawing storyboards to help us as designers understand the issues we try to solve, and to communicate existing issues and potential solutions to others. When it comes to research techniques, the great news is that storyboarding can also help others articulate their own issues and ideas. It’s to this purpose we now turn.

The importance of doing as well as talking

One of the great truths about user experience design is to observe what people do, rather than only listen to what they say. This is why user-centred design techniques like contextual inquiry, job analysis and usability testing are so valuable. But when it comes to user research workshops, we know that we’re up for a lot of listening, and that people have a habit of putting on their ‘Sunday best’ when giving opinions and describing their experiences.

Thankfully, there’s a whole host of various activities we can do with workshop participants to reveal user requirements and behaviours, beyond talking and listening. These activities tend to be easy to understand, easy to do, and (hopefully) easy to derive insights from participants that can be used to formulate the project’s solution.

When to use storyboarding as a workshop activity

At Digital Eskimo, we have had great success with using storyboarding as an activity in workshops. Storyboards have very broad appeal, for many of the reasons described in the first article in this series. They are easy – even entertaining – to consume, because they bring together many different aspects of story, character, problems and resolutions, all in a familiar format of images and words, to make even complex ideas much clearer. They are also easy to draw, even at a very basic level, because everyone understands the sequential nature of telling a story through simple pictures.

Storyboarding is useful in the following specific instances:

• When participants need to tell detailed experiences – storyboards provide an easy framework to help people be specific about relating an experience, including     expectations, decisions and feelings, rather than just vague commentary;
• As a co-design exercise to generate ideas – we at Digital Eskimo are big proponents of co-design, or participatory design. Participatory design actively involves all parties – client stakeholders, researchers, designers and public alike – in the design process, to ensure the end result is as useful and desirable as possible. This approach suits us designers, because we’re used to thinking conceptually, whereas many others have trouble thinking this way. Allowing people to express their ideas through a story that they can relate to, can be much more effective;
• When it’s important to keep emotion in the experience, but not in the telling of the experience – sometimes in workshops there are many complex and sometimes conflicting emotions involved in relating experiences relevant for user requirements. Or     sometimes the mix of participants in a workshop is such that some might feel inhibited to share certain experiences. It’s hard for some to be completely honest, for example, if their superiors are in the same workshop. Storyboards give them permission to keep emotions out of verbal communication, but lock them into the story on the paper;
• When participants are children – the comic-style conventions of storyboards, such as simple stick figures and emoticons, help children articulate more than their limited verbal abilities usually allow. Some researchers, such as Hannah Chung and Elizabeth Gerber (Emotional Storyboarding: A Participatory Method for Emotional Designing for Children, Northwest University, Illinois), have had great success with this approach.

A workshop participant drawing a storyboard to express her experience of using various types of office software. Notice the use of a 6-frame template on A4 paper, and simple use of figures and text.

A practical guide to storyboarding as a workshop activity

The following steps and ideas describe how you could use storyboarding as an activity in your user-centred design workshops. You can use these steps whether you’d like to use the storyboarding format to gather requirements from your participants, or to gather ideas.

Be clear about the purpose

Like all workshop activities, it’s important that you know exactly why you’re conducting the storyboarding activity. You may end up with a range of lively attractive storyboards, but without a clear goal, they may not give you the insights you’re hoping to derive.

Materials

Here’s a list of materials that have proved valuable over and over again in the storyboarding activities we have conducted:

• A4 ’6-up’ storyboard template – It’s usually sufficient to give people one A4 template, with six frames drawn on it, in landscape format (pictured above). You may want to also try including some lines under each frame for people to add notes;
• Pens, pencils, textas – Drawing materials can include anything from pens and pencils, to lots of different coloured textas. Even if you’re conducting a workshop with conservative business types, coloured textas sends a message that it’s OK to be creative and playful;
• Icons – It can still be a little daunting for some to start drawing with just the template and a pencil. Depending on the context of your workshop, it’s a good idea to include a pack of prepared cut-out icons, including pictures to indicate channels (mobile phone, call centre, store, laptop, tablet, television, radio), transport (walking, car, bus, bike), common websites (Facebook, Youtube, Flickr, webmail) and emotions (anything ranging from happy, curious and hopeful to bored, confused and angry). Icons like these help to accelerate participants’ thinking and demonstrating their experience on paper. Remember to include glue sticks to stick the icons on the storyboards;
• Prompt sheet – it never hurts to hand out a simple one-page instruction sheet about what it is you want your participants to do.

The process during the workshop

Set the scene

When it comes time to do the storyboarding activity in your workshop, frame the activity by telling everyone what the purpose of the exercise is. Refer them to the prompt sheet and materials. If you think it will help, model the behaviour you’re after by drawing one frame on a template sheet, so that people are clear about what you’d like them to do.

If your workshop has several activities, they’re probably coordinated in some way to work as a whole. Tell your participants how the storyboarding activity relates to any other activities that have preceded it. For example, our workshops often have an activity to come up with the desired audience types that will use the product that the workshop is focused on. We then use those audience types as the characters in the storyboards.

Two examples of instructions:

1. Think about an experience you’ve had with booking a flight online. What sort of flight were you after and why? Where did you start, and what did you do? Using the storyboard template, sketch your experience step-by-step, including anything that went well or went wrong.

1. Now that we’ve described our three target audiences, choose one and sketch on your storyboard template what an ideal experience would look like for that audience to book a flight online. What exactly are they after? Where do they start? What ideas for website features can you think of that would make their experience ideal?

Draw the storyboards

Decide whether you’d like each of your participants to draw their own storyboards, or if they will work in small groups. Allow at least ten minutes to let them think and draw.

Get everyone to focus on the same sorts of elements that were discussed in the first and second articles in this series; get them to think about triggers (what has happened to start this story in the first place), the single goal that the character wants to achieve, and what the final outcome is. Should it show a clear benefit of a solution? Or an existing problem?

One of several storyboards drawn in a workshop about designing a better museum visit experience for teachers and students. Notice the use of colour, and how simple figures and drawings can actually convey a lot of ideas.

Present to the group

After they have drawn their storyboards, it’s always great to invite each participant up to present their storyboard to the rest of the group. Depending on the context of your workshop, you can then invite some discussion about the experience illustrated, or some critique about the ideas put forward.

This storyboard was actually done by a group of participants as a simple timeline, pinned to the wall. The detail isn't important, but notice the use of 'I' information icons for wherever system information was needed in this process, and the set of speech balloons pinned to the side.

Try storyboarding in your next workshop

Try storyboarding as one of the activities in your next workshop, even an internal brainstorming session. You should find that people will appreciate the hands-on nature of the exercise, and the opportunity to express themselves in another way other than verbally. It’s rewarding for both participant and user experience designer alike.

When thinking about storyboarding, most people fixate on their ability — or perceived inability — to draw. What is far more important is working out the point you wish to make with your storyboard, and the actual story that will carry that point from your storyboard across the room and into the hearts and minds of your audience. In this article explores the value of establishing a reason for the storyboard first, and then how you can create a storyboard using the thinking you’re already using and the skills you already have.

Get your story straight

During a recent move, I discovered a whole book filled to the brim with comics that I had drawn during my primary school years. They were typical fare: myself and my schoolmates cast as a band of affable brigands, lurching from one side of the galaxy to the other having all sorts of unlikely and – let’s be honest – highly illogical adventures. In reading them as an adult I realised how rich they were in character development, but how hopeless they were in plot: truly, they rambled all over the place.

Establish if a storyboard is the best way to tell your story

If you’ve read this far, I assume you’ve bought into the value of storyboarding as an exercise to help you think and create, or as communication technique. But to ensure that your storyboard is an instrument of ideation or persuasion, rather than just light entertainment — like my childhood comics — it is worth comparing it to other means of getting your message across.

If everyone involved already has a solid shared understanding of the issue at hand, and if everyone has a shared sense of urgency for the same solution to be implemented, then the time for a storyboard has probably passed. In all other cases, a storyboard should be effective.

What’s your point?

It’s essential that you’re clear on what message your storyboard is to communicate. If you’re using it as a thinking exercise, knowing exactly who your character is, and what goal is to be achieved will give a better outcome. There’s something to be said for aimless fluid brainstorming, but ideas generation, scrutiny and validation will be more efficient if you have these elements ready.

If you’re using storyboarding as a communication exercise, ensure you have a compelling message to communicate first, for example:

• An existing user experience problem to be solved
• An impact on user experience caused by an existing situation, or if something isn’t fixed
• A desired user experience based on a particular solution

Work out your story structure

If we’re to construct visual representations of stories to communicate customer issues or solutions to others, there’s some preparation to be done to make them logical, understandable and convincing in their arguments.

Much thinking and analysis has been conducted about stories and storytelling, yielding different theories, methods and structures. The first article in this series referenced the Hero’s Journey and Freytag’s Pyramid as being a useful place to start for translating an issue or solution into a story. The earliest recorded analysis of story (‘Poetics’) was by none other than Aristotle, and Jeroen van Geel’s interpretation of Aristotle’s ordered framework for interactive products is also really useful for applying to structuring a storyboard’s story.

The elements most important for storyboards are:

• Character – the specific customer or persona involved in your plot. Their behaviours,     appearance, and expectations, as well as any decisions they make along the way, are very important;
• Script – (or Diction, in Aristotle’s framework) this covers the character’s internal train of thought, as well as what they say and what others around them say. Revealing what is going on in your character’s mind is integral to a successful illustration of their experience in the storyboard;
• Scene – (or Theme) the scenario that our character finds him/herself in. It could be a single room, or switch across several environments and channels, or even just within a single website;
• Plot – the narrative that unfolds in your storyboard should focus on a goal for the character, and the key moments involved in achieving – or not achieving – that goal (more of this below). It should start with a specific trigger and end with either the benefit of the solution, or a problem that the character is left with. Try using Freytag’s Pyramid (from the first article) in structuring your plot.

To help your story to be powerful and enduring, here are some points to think about:

• Authenticity – make your character and their scene, script and plot as real as you can, and your audience will empathise with him/her. Bring out your character’s back-story, speech patterns, and any rough edges. Also, ensure that the way you represent the story has its own internal logic. In other words, in the world of this story, it has to ‘make sense’ for your audience to take your message seriously.
• Moments – there are     always several touchpoints or events in an experience where     triggers, decisions, actions, changes in emotional state, and behaviour reinforcement occur. Think about your character and plot in terms of these ‘moments’; whatever particular moments you come up with are great to illustrate.
• Emotion – it’s essential to communicate the emotional state of your character     throughout their experience. Even simple iconography like smiley faces and angry faces can add the character and emotion your story needs to come alive in the hearts and minds of your audience.

Steps for drawing your storyboard

Just like setting out to design interfaces with a blank piece of paper, starting the storyboard can be a little daunting, especially if you’re not confident in your drawing ability. However confident you are, these steps can help you turn out a better scenario storyboard.

Try text or boxes and arrows first

If you’re more used to visualising with the boxes and arrows of process rather than a comic-style format, that’s fine: go with that first. Or if you’d rather write it out in point form, that’s fine too. The main thing is to break the story up into the trigger, moments, the decisions the character makes along the way, and end with the benefit or the problem.

First pass at a storyboard, just writing out the sequence of moments first.

Get your storyboard in touch with its emotions

If you’re following the process above, try just adding emoticons to each step, to help others get a feel for what’s going on inside the character’s head. Remember to illustrate any reactions to pain points along the way; what is the character expecting to happen, and how does the result affect him/her when it happens that way or not? Try drawing in each emotional state as a simple expression, or even drawing a whole set of different expressions, then scan, copy, print, cut them out, and stick them on.

The same sequence of moments as before, but with added emoticons, to help get a sense of what’s going on for Penny’s emotional state.

Roll camera

By now you should have a sense of the steps involved in your story. Flesh out your storyboard by translating each step – or moment – into a storyboard frame. Allow yourself room for the other familiar aspects of sequential art:

• Storyteller commentary – the text that sometimes     appears at the top of frames to advance the narrative (“Meanwhile…”)
• Speech and thought bubbles – position these under any commentary, and consider how your audiences will read them (e.g. western audiences read left-to-right, top-down)
• Character(s) and scene –     show just enough to indicate what’s significant to your story

The same sequence as before, but roughly translated as frames in a storyboard. The emphasis at this point is just telling the story, starting with Penny’s goal and ending with the state that the situation has left Penny in.

Go back over your storyboard and think about how you can use the character’s pose, and the space in each frame to emphasise each moment, and how your character is feeling about it.

Second pass at the storyboard. Some of the text has been tightened up, and drawing technique is used to bring out more of the story, e.g. using the ‘weight’ of the search results to emphasise the volume of information, and the clock faces to show the passing of time.

End well

Make sure your storyboard leaves your audience with no doubt about the outcome of the story. Are you describing an unfavourable existing situation? End with the full weight of the problem. Are you selling a solution? End with the benefits of that solution to your character.

The same storyboard, but embellished with some extra weight of ink to increase contrast, and colour.

Storyboarding styles and techniques

You don’t need to be good at drawing

The good news is that you don’t need to be good at drawing before you start drawing scenario storyboards. Although experience in drawing helps, the main thing is to make the character, their goal, and what happens in their experience as clear as possible. How you render this is up to you and your skills and taste, but in the case of storyboards, less is definitely more. Like many UX artefacts, we need to know when enough detail and finessing is enough.

Storyboard fidelity

Think about your storyboarding style and technique as a point on a spectrum of fidelity, or level of abstraction. Scott McCloud explains that comics sit on a resemblance/meaning continuum, from full realistic to iconic images, with an increasing amount of abstraction. Low fidelity means schematic boxes, circles and stick figures, and high fidelity means photographic reality.

A visual example of the sort of resemblance/meaning spectrum that Scott McCloud describes. The example above obviously only represents part of this spectrum – there’s nothing approaching photographic reality – but this is the visual territory I regard for storyboards. Note: I haven’t included stick figures, because I just can’t bring myself to draw something like that, when a simple schematic figure (far left) does the trick.

There’s no harm in aiming for the more schematic end; it’s amazing what just stick figures and dialogue can communicate, as readers of xkcd and Cyanide & Happiness know all too well.
To help you aim for the right point on the scale, think about:

• What suits your audience – is it just for yourself and your team, or for the client? Is the client conservative, or open to something more comical or whimsical?
• What suits your story – the story you’re illustrating might command a certain visual character and tone that needs to be further along the scale than a schematic style
• What suits your ability – consider your own level of ability, but aim higher; you’ll be     surprised at what you can achieve

Showing your storyboards to others

Storyboards deserve to be up for everyone to see. How you do this obviously depends on the project context and what your client can handle, but here are some ideas:

• Project walls – Mark out an area on a wall in your workplace to stick up the sketches,     schematics and storyboards generated throughout your project. At Digital Eskimo, each project has a dedicated project wall,     which stimulates thinking and solution generation.
• Presentations – Prepare the room in which you will conduct your client presentations by sticking up the storyboards, then walk your audience through each one. Be prepared to allow plenty of time to do this, including handling questions. You’ll know your storyboards are effective when they provoke plenty of discussion.
• PowerPoint and Keynote decks – By their nature, storyboards can get quite long. They will probably be too long if you try to reduce their size to fit in a PowerPoint/Keynote slide, but you can slice them into several sections and include a key at the top of each slide.
• Intranets and wikis – Try embedding your storyboards in intranet/wiki web pages. This is one time where horizontal scrolling is actually OK.

Go tell your story

The next article will focus on using storyboarding as an activity in research workshops, to gain insights from others about issues relevant to your project.

In the meantime, set yourself the challenge of trying scenario storyboarding to help you ‘think out’ a user experience solution for a given character and a given goal, and see what ideas it helps you form. Or set yourself the challenge of illustrating a given persona, their goals and their background as a storyboard, then use it as part of a client presentation.

The fields of user experience and service design typically use storyboarding to sell design solutions. They do this by casting personas in stories, showing the benefits of those solutions. They often look quite polished and professional, and can be daunting to some in these fields to pick up a pencil and try it for themselves. But not only can you draw these scenario storyboards yourself to sell your solutions, you can also use them as a powerful method for devising those solutions in the first place.Storyboards are part of the intriguing world of sequential art, where images are arrayed together to visualise anything from a film to a television commercial, from a video game to a new building. They’re an effective communication device, bringing a vision to life in a way that anyone can grasp and engage with, before investing in producing the real thing.

Storyboarding is also catching on fast as a practice in experience design, because of the way it can combine so many disparate elements — such as personas and their behaviours, requirements and solutions — to achieve those ‘a-HA’ moments we want from team members and clients. Not only can you draw storyboards yourself to sell your solutions, you can also use them as a powerful method for devising those solutions in the first place.

In three articles I will introduce you to the world of storyboarding:

1. In this first article in the series focuses on storyboards as a medium to help explore solutions to UX issues, as well as communicating these issues and solutions to others;
2. The second article gives you a detailed look into how to create storyboards, using the skills and materials you already have;
3. The third article explores how to bring storyboarding into research workshops, to help participants articulate themselves, and to reveal more valuable insights about their experiences and behaviours.

Introducing storyboarding…

I remember watching one of those extras included on a Pixar DVD that showed some animators taking the rest of their team through a sequence in the film as a conceptual storyboard. It was entertaining to watch; it felt like being in the room as each artist took great delight in explaining the sequence to everyone. But what really struck me was the similarity to user experience practice: here was the architect of an experience, pitching an idea to a set of peers, using a story, illustrated by something that everyone could see and relate to. And it occurred to me: why can’t our practice and our use of storyboarding be as moving as that?

Yet another UX silver bullet?

In user experience design we’re familiar with user research techniques like workshops, contextual inquiry, and interviews. We synthesise our research into audience archetypes, user stories and process flows. We communicate our thinking and solutions to our teams and clients with artefacts like personas, flow diagrams, and wireframes. And if we’re feeling really fancy we can even shell out experience prototypes and service blueprints. Somewhere in all of this lies the people for whom we’re designing, what’s going on in their worlds, and how we’re making their lives better. As practitioners in the science and craft of UX, we innately get it, we see the narrative that threads all of these artefacts together – the spirit of the solution breathing through it all, that we want our clients to be captured by.

But clients tend not to be conceptual thinkers like us; they need us to connect the dots. And that’s where storyboards come in. Storyboards – indeed all forms of conceptual illustration – work well because of two truths: firstly that the act of drawing (and even seeing others draw) can help us think, and secondly that images can speak more powerfully than just words by adding extra layers of meaning.

The power of storytelling

Ever since the horses danced across the cave walls of Lascaux, and the Egyptians regaled their monarchs’ triumphs in tomb frescoes, we’ve been telling stories to each other through sequential art, or pictures chained together as a narrative. As Nancy Duarte says in her book Resonate, “Stories are the most powerful delivery tool for information, more powerful and enduring than any other art form”.

The analysis of stories reveals regular patterns that we can use for our own benefit when communicating solutions through storytelling. In the Technique of Drama (1863), Gustav Freytag rationalised stories into five acts: exposition, rising action, climax, falling action (or final suspense and resolution) and dénouement (conclusion).

Freytag’s Pyramid, showing the five parts, or acts: Exposition, Rising Action, Climax, Falling Action and Denouement. The diagram seemed a bit dry by itself, so I’ve added a quick story into the pyramid about a guy and his phone that won’t work.

Another common pattern is the Hero’s Journey, a narrative convention made popular by Joseph Campbell in his book The Hero with a Thousand Faces (1949). While it’s important to honour the real experiences of the people for whom we are designing, we can often reframe them – or a persona in a contrived experience – in the role of that hero, on a quest in the structure of the pyramid above.

Harnessing these conventions helps us make our stories resonate more with others, and make complex concepts crystal clear.

There are lots of other ways for using storytelling to help design and communicate better experiences. Francisco Inchauste and Cindy Chastain have written marvellous descriptions about how approaching UX with storytelling inspires design concepts and brings teams closer together around a clearer picture of what’s being designed.

The history of storyboarding

Nowhere is storytelling through images more obvious than in comics and graphic novels. The venerable Scott McCloud is a master of the medium and his books are an excellent place to start if you’re into communicating stories through sequential art.

This art form is essentially storyboards as end product, rather than the means to specify the end product. What’s particularly inspiring about comics is the way they use text and pictorial expression to immerse us in the world of the characters. Indeed, comics exploit all our senses, “to be an art of the invisible”, as Scott McCloud says in Understanding Comics.

Storyboarding has of course been central to motion picture production. The Walt Disney studio is credited with popularising storyboards, using sketches of frames as far back as the 1920s. What’s interesting is that storyboarding was always very much a team-based activity: each scene would be drawn on separate sheets of paper, pinned together on a board to form the storyboard, and then presented and critiqued with the director and/or peers.

Disney Story Supervisor Joe Ranft pitching storyboards from Tim Burton's "The Nightmare Before Christmas." (via Jim Hill Media, copyright Disney Enterprises, Inc. All rights reserved)

Many studios such as Pixar rely heavily on storyboarding in conception stages as well as production. What might come as a surprise to many is that Pixar does not begin new movies with a script; instead the story is fleshed out under the director’s leadership through storyboarding. In some cases, storyboards become the ‘source of truth’ for production rather than just for pre-visualisation: the Wachowski brothers (of Matrix trilogy fame) were (in)famous for not letting cinematography deviate from the storyboard. This slideshow by Catherine Lewis offers a glimpse of how close the final cut is to their storyboards.

Stories in pictures for UX

The ‘pitch and critique’ technique is familiar to many in user experience design, but this isn’t the only similarity between film storyboarding practice and UX practice. Both disciplines rely heavily on an iterative approach. Pixar cofounder and President Ed Catmull and Pixar’s directors find it better to fix problems than to prevent errors. “My strategy has always been: be wrong as fast as we can,” says Andrew Stanton, Director of Finding Nemo and WALL-E, “Which basically means, we’re gonna screw up, let’s just admit that. Let’s not be afraid of that.”

In a way, storyboarding has always been the low-fidelity prototype of film, bringing together the elements of script, plot, scene, and characters. And just like the sorts of prototypes favoured in UX, film storyboards are useful for directors to visualise the solution, define where investment is needed for various resources, and foresee potential issues. Some studios even work storyboards together as reels — or animatics — with temporary voices, sound and music.

If you often find yourself in the role of visualiser for your client, teasing out their requirements and reflecting them to ensure a shared understanding, you’re not alone. Directors rely on storyboard artists to do exactly that. Indeed, there is an interpreter role that the storyboarder plays, becoming just as part of the instrument of visualising as the storyboard itself. As J Todd Anderson explains, about working with the Coen Brothers, “I go inside their heads, try to understand what they are thinking, and put it on paper. I always try to make the drawings theirs, not mine.”

So it makes a lot of sense for user experience designers to use storyboarding as a practice. Storyboards bring our solutions to life, so that clients can walk in the shoes of their customers/staff/community, and see solutions as we see them. But more than that, we should seek not only to inform; we should seek to move our clients, to affect them at such a level that they really do connect with the characters, just like film storyboards can allow.

There are a few specific uses for storyboarding for UX to explore in detail: helping us to think, helping others to communicate to us, and helping us to communicate to others.

Storyboarding helps us think

As a modelling tool, storyboarding helps us string together personas, user stories and various constraints. It helps to almost literallu walk through a scenario as a persona and see the triggers that occur, the channels that are used, the process that is followed and decisions that have to be made along the way. In effect, we can wind up a persona, then let him/her go, and watch what happens by sketching it out.

More than that, the action of sketching out role-play tests our concepts, lets us experiment at little or no cost, allows for fluid team-based brainstorming, reveals more ideas, and scrutinises them for authenticity.

Part of an initial sketched role-play looking into how a particular persona would go about diagnosing an issue with their mobile phone. The key here is quickly mapping out an experience to expose questions, decisions, and problems that would need to be solved along the way.

Storyboarding helps us to understand existing scenarios, a well as test hypotheses for potential scenarios.

Storyboarding helps others communicate their experience

Storyboarding makes for a very engaging and thought-provoking activity in research workshops. It’s often easier (and more fun) for people to articulate their experiences relevant to a particular objective in a workshop, by storyboarding it. This will be the topic of the third article: Storyboarding: using storyboarding as a workshop activity.

Storyboarding helps others understand

There are times where it’s crucial that clients feel the full weight of their customers’ issues with their products and/services, before galloping into solution mode. Storyboards are an evocative way of expressing these sorts of issues, whether or not clients have known them for a long time, or are seeing them for the first time. Often many of these issues are derived from research, and can be a bit dry and esoteric if presented only as words and charts. Presenting them as a story, with pictures of people in places, with real behaviours and real reactions puts the heart of the issue back in to our communications.

We are hardwired to respond to stories: our innate sense of curiosity draws us in, we engage more when we can sense a meaningful achievement about to be had, and we empathise with characters who have real-life challenges similar to our own. Indeed, when we listen to a story, we can enter what some call a ‘storylistening trance’. Among the documented characteristics involved in this fascinating altered state of consciousness include realism (the sense that the story environment or characters are real or alive) and ‘placeness’ (the sense that the listener ‘goes somewhere’ into another space).

Stories, represented as storyboards, link our facts and ideas with our audience’s experiences and emotions; their imagination fills in the spaces we create, providing a far more engaging, memorable and persuasive experience.

And when it is time to be in solution mode, expressing our solutions as storyboards is an efficient, and equally entertaining way to gain a shared understanding of a proposed approach, especially if presented in contrast to the existing experience.

Next up: a practical guide

The next article in this series will explore how you can create storyboards to help others understand issues and solutions using the skills you already have.

For a long time, using a computer was a merely cognitive thing to do – a dialogue. Those were the times in which computers were sitting at desks, and were merely operated through buttons and mice, and displayed information either as text or graphics. This paradigm has already fallen, now that computers are ubiquitous in our everyday lives, and other paradigms are perhaps soon to follow.

Recent developments in the research field of Human-Computer Interaction point to emerging styles of interaction that make use of our very abilities as human beings, putting us directly in touch with the digital world.

Embodied interaction

If we look at the ways in which we interact with computers across the last three decades, a number of major changes become evident: In the 1980’s, we have interacted with computers in textual ways. In the 1990’s, we have changed to graphical interaction – and in the most recent decade, again, these ways are changing.

One theory, as proposed by Paul Dourish in 2001 in his book ‘Where the Action is’, to conceptualize these recent changes, is ‘Embodied Interaction’. Dourish points out that computing is moving into the social and the physical space, and he proposed the term ‘Embodied Interaction’. Advantageously, these new styles of computing draw upon skills that we already have, skills that we, as human beings, embody.

In this article, we will look at three series of prototypes that illustrate what ‘Embodied Interaction’ is – in the different physical and social spaces that we live in.

How can we make digital content graspable?

Nowadays, our lives take place in two worlds: on the one side in the digital world, and, on the other side, in the physical world. While many things happen in the digital world, and while it is in many ways an influential place, things in the digital world are not tangible for us. Many people do not understand the digital – it is hard to grasp.

As humans, we are very skilled in engaging with the physical world. So the question is: How can we use our everyday, real-world skills to interact with digital contents? How can we move things from the digital world into the physical world? If we look at emerging interaction techniques, it is obvious that this is already the trend: the iPhone’s touch and the Wii’s bodily activity make clear that interacting with the digital is getting more and more physical. The question is: what’s next?

In our research, we have developed a series of three prototypes that provide a tangible glimpse on how the digital could be made graspable.

The first prototype involves weight as a representation for digital content. It is a mobile phone-shaped box that, on its inside, features a motorized weight. This weight can be moved, and thereby the device’s center of gravity can be moved. This allows for a variety of applications:

Firstly, the device’s ergonomics can be changed. If it would usually fall out of the user’s hand, the center of gravity can be moved to balance the device automatically. Secondly, content on the device’s inside can be made feelable – especially the distribution of content ‘in the device’ can be represented, e.g. if the majority of content is on the device’s right side (for instance, in a list of songs), the device would also be heavier on the right side. Thirdly, a shifting weight can be used to represent contents that are external to the device, in a certain direction. This could be useful for navigation, in which the device would physically point, by shifting its center of gravity, into a direction that would remain the same when the user turns: as a haptic compass.

The second prototype draws upon shape change as a means of displaying digital contents. It is equipped with a set of motors that allow for the actuation of the device’s geometry. In doing so, they allow for making the device thin in the pocket, and thick, ergonomically shaped when held in hand. Furthermore, they allow for the physical display of content amount or direction, similar to the previously described weight-based variant. More content can simply be thicker, as in an e-book that has, when read from the beginning, all of its pages on the right side (resulting in a feelable thickness on that side), slowly moving over to the left side while progressing through the book. Also directional information can be conveyed, shifting the device’s thickest point into the desired direction.

The third prototype of this series draws on our human ability of empathy – as social beings, we are well able to feel how other people or beings are. Inspired by this ability, the ‘living mobile’ provides information about missed calls or text messages through breath and pulse. The device vibrates in a heartbeat-like manner, and has a motorized chest that moves in a breathing-like movement. In cased of no missed calls or events, the phone will behave calmly, while it will utter excitement in its movement if it needs the user’s attention.

How can we make mobile phone calls more polite?

The blurring of the digital and the physical can be observed not only in interacting with content – it is also visible when it comes to interacting with other people through digital channels. Here, these channels may interfere with the ways we normally communicate, and thereby result in impoliteness.

A particular social problem of mobile phones is the issue of incoming calls in busy situations. Even though users are able to tell who is calling, they generally do now know whether the matter at hand is important or not. Similarly, users may find it inappropriate to call just for a chat, as they are unable to express that their call is not important.

Users often find themselves in a conflict when noticing an incoming call – should they interrupt what they are doing, and take the call? Or should the reject the call? The latter is often considered impolite, given the fact that the caller not even had a chance to express what the call is about.

To overcome this issue, we have built a prototype that employs a pressure-sensitive dial button. A more important call can be placed by pressing the button stronger, while also gentle calls can be placed – by pressing the dial button only gently. The prototype also has a filter, allowing to change vibration, ringing and also voicemail behaviour depending on the urgency of the incoming call.

How can we make phone calls more emotional?

Giving users a feeling for digital content in their device shows that there is great potential in making the digital physical. But in mobile phones, the even more relevant field of research could be another one: giving two users a feeling for each other.

In their current form, mobile phones are well-suited for one of the major reasons of telecommunication: to exchange information. For the other major reason of telecommunication – the whish for nearness – speech, video and text might be not all we can do: sometimes, we just want to be in touch. We developed a series of prototypes that explore this field.

The first prototype, the ‘grasping mobile’, telecommunicates pressure and potentially allows for an experience of holding hands over a distance. It is equipped with a strap on its backside, into which the user’s hand is placed. The pressure exerted by the telecommunication partner’s hand on their phone is then telecommunicated through a motor that pulls the strap tighter, and vice versa.

The second prototype, the ‘kissing phone’ telecommunicates moisture. While there are many people one may not want any kind of ‘moisture-enabled telecommunication’ with, there may be some exceptions worthwhile exploring. The technology used in the prototype is a semi-permeable membrane that lets liquids out, but not in, and a motorized sponge that is wettened and pressed against the membrane.

The third prototype, the ‘whispering phone’, telecommunicates airstream. In normal speech, airstream is generally involved, but only felt in close-by conversations, like whispering or sighing. The prototype involves a set o air jets on the phone’s surface, allowing for different styles of airstreams.

These prototypes render a certain future vision of telecommunication tangible – and in doing so, they provoke questions: how much nearness do we want? What kinds of privacy protection will we find ourselves needing in the future? They also demonstrate the value of prototyping – in making a future vision experienceable today they provide concreteness to an otherwisely abstract thought, and thereby allow for discussion.

A new world of interactions

The works described here are only a small section of the current developments in interaction design. What is obvious, though, is that the new omnipresence of computation brings along a whole new world of interactivity. The ways in which we manipulate and experience the digital have undergone radical changes in the last decades, and it will be exciting to see how these ways will change in the future. In the end, it’s probably not humans that should get more technical.

It’s technology that should get more human.

Interaction 12

Fabian Hemmert will be one of the keynote speakers at Interaction 12. It is the fifth annual conference hosted by the Interaction Design Association (IxDA). Each year, IxDA aims to gather the interaction design community to connect, educate, and inspire each other. This year it is held in Dublin, Ireland.

As a user researcher, I’m not proud to admit that there have been times I’ve nodded along and pretended to understand a participant, while actually thinking, “What the heck is this guy talking about?” Of course, it’s a rare occurrence, but when dealing with very complex subject matter, it sometimes takes several research sessions before my “ah-ha” moment happens, and I begin to fully understand what the participants are talking about.

Learning the subject matter is a special challenge for consultants and freelancers who work with a variety of clients in different industries. There’s often very little time to get up to speed on the subject matter. It’s no wonder that clients are often skeptical that someone from the outside can come in and understand their business in such a short time.

Depending on the kind of projects you work on, learning the subject matter can be one of the most difficult aspects of starting a new project. Websites and applications aimed at a general audience are easy to understand and relate to because they don’t require specialized knowledge. For example, a photo site like Snapfish is fairly self-explanatory. That doesn’t mean that you don’t need to do user research, but at least you have enough familiarity to understand and identify with the subject matter.

But what happens when you’re designing an application to track biomedical research data, an electronic medical record, an investment banking application, an energy grid display, or some other complex subject matter? How do you know enough to ask the right questions and understand the answers if you have no prior experience with the subject?

Set the clients’ expectations

At the beginning of a project, clearly set expectations about your knowledge of the subject matter and how much you need to learn to do the project effectively. Don’t be surprised if clients are skeptical that you’ll be able to absorb what’s taken employees months or years to learn.

Admit your ignorance

Clients sometimes expect you to have more knowledge than you do. When the project was sold, you may have been portrayed as, or assumed to be, an expert in the domain. But don’t be afraid to admit your ignorance. Being completely honest about your level of knowledge gives you freedom to ask questions, and it gets people to talk with you about the subject matter at an appropriate level.

Clarify who’s an expert in what

From the beginning of the project, make it clear that you’re an expert in user experience research and design, your clients are experts in the business needs, and the users are experts in their needs. All three groups must work together throughout the project, each using their expertise to best inform the design.

…don’t be afraid to admit your ignorance. Being completely honest about your level of knowledge gives you freedom to ask questions…

Clarify that you will never become a subject-matter expert

Make it clear that you do not need to become an expert in the subject matter. You need to learn enough to plan and understand the research, but you’ll rely on the clients and users to fill in the gaps in your understanding.

Ask stupid questions

Being honest about your level of knowledge allows you to ask questions as needed without worrying if they seem like “stupid” questions. Don’t be afraid that if you ask questions, people will think that you didn’t understand the material the first time around.

Don’t be afraid to be wrong

As you conduct research, you make assumptions, and some of those may be wrong. Make it clear that your findings are a work in progress, you may be wrong occasionally and that you welcome feedback. You are working with the clients and the users to understand and you will revise your findings and recommendations as needed.

Do subject research before user research

Learn as much as you can about the subject matter, the business needs, the users, and their tasks before conducting user research. You need background knowledge to plan the research and to understand what people are talking about and showing you during the sessions. It’s often best to learn about the subject matter in the following small steps to go from a high-level overview to more detailed information. Each step takes you gradually into the subject matter, building on previous knowledge, rather than drowning you in information overload.

Conduct some initial research

Before the project kickoff meeting, it’s helpful to examine online references, client documentation, training and support materials, and to talk with subject matter experts. At first this reference material may be difficult to understand, but it will make more sense and be more useful later in the project. So don’t forget to read it again after you’ve done your stakeholder or user research sessions.

Get a high-level overview at the kickoff meeting

Kickoff meetings usually give a very high-level overview of the project and the subject matter. This is the time to ask general questions about the business, the users, and the system involved in the project. With the large number of people attending and the short time frame, it’s not the time to get too detailed.

Get a demo of the system

Whether it’s a website, application or a physical product, it’s best to become familiar with the system before you conduct the user research. If it’s a website, you can go through it yourself. If it’s a more complex application, it’s better to have someone walk you through a demonstration. Gaining familiarity now will make it easier to understand what you observe later during the research sessions.

Play around with the system yourself

There’s no better way to get to know a system than by trying it out. After a guided demonstration, get access to the system and play around with it.

Conduct stakeholder interviews

Stakeholders are your best source of initial information about the business needs, users, the subject matter, and the system. These are often your clients and other subject matter experts working on the project team.

There’s no better way to get to know a system than by trying it out.

Stakeholder interviews can be conducted as a group working session, but individual interviews are usually more helpful. With a group of stakeholders, there are too many people in the room with the same level of experience and knowledge, making it easy for them to slip back into organizational jargon instead of speaking down to your level of knowledge. In individual interviews, people are more likely to be conscious of your level of understanding and adjust the discussion accordingly.

Individual interviews take longer than one group session, but you benefit from the repetition of multiple interviews. It also gives you time to reassess your understanding after each interview and make changes for the following sessions.

Set the participants’ expectations

Regardless of how much you know about the users and their tasks, conduct yourself as if you’re a beginner. Remind the participants that you’re not familiar with their domain, their tasks, their company structure, or their terminology. Ask them to talk with you as if you were a beginner and take you through their process step by step. Stop them if they get too far above your level or if they revert back to using jargon or unfamiliar concepts.

Gain understanding through the user research

You can learn a lot before the user research, but it isn’t until you begin observing and talking with users that you really understand the subject matter:

Discuss tasks before observing them

Before participants begin performing their tasks, ask them to give you an overview of what they will be doing and how the tasks fit into the larger work process. Having this context up front will help you better understand what you observe during the task.

Learn by repetition

You normally observe several participants from each user group to see patterns in their behavior and hear comments that indicate common characteristics, problems and needs. The repetition of hearing the same information and seeing the same tasks performed by multiple participants is especially helpful for understanding complex subjects. Because it takes a few sessions to develop this understanding, be sure to include enough participants from each user group to learn through repetition.

Record everything and type up your notes

Recordings allow you to review sessions a second time, when you can focus on the information and pick up things you might have missed. During a user research session, your attention is divided between listening and observing, taking notes, thinking of the next question to ask, and maintaining social norms of politely listening to the participant.

The repetition of hearing the same information and seeing the same tasks performed by multiple participants is especially helpful for understanding complex subjects.

Reassess between sessions

It’s helpful to take off a few days in the middle of your research sessions to review what you’ve learned so far and to make any necessary adjustments. Reflect on what you’ve heard, how well the research is going, and whether to make changes to the study, such as additional questions or actions to observe.

Confirm your understanding

Inevitably, additional questions come up after the research is over. You don’t know what you don’t know until you begin analyzing your notes. That’s when you find holes in your knowledge, concepts you don’t understand, and questions you wished you had asked.

Follow up as needed

Ask your clients, the stakeholders and the users follow-up questions to clarify and confirm your understanding. Most people don’t mind, and even appreciate, answering additional questions. If necessary, you can go back to the users and observe certain tasks again.

Partner with an expert

Because technology sometimes limits what’s possible, it’s important to provide realistic recommendations. You don’t always know enough about the technology to determine this on your own. That’s why it’s helpful to have a trusted technology expert review your recommendations to alert you to those that might not be feasible. A technology expert is also helpful to defend your recommendations against those who may incorrectly say that they are not possible.

Get feedback on your findings and recommendations

Remind your clients that you want their feedback on the user research findings and recommendations. Remind them again that the findings and recommendations are not set in stone. There may be errors in your understanding and you welcome their feedback in order to make corrections. This is a team effort and you want their collaboration and input on the findings and recommendations.

Now go out and learn the subject matter.