10 Usability and User Experience Tasks
I have compiled a list of 10 Usability and User Experience related tasks. You may be familiar with some of these tasks but likely are not familiar with the specific activity or deliverable for each.
- Tasks 1-2 are research / discovery
- Tasks 3-6 are analysis / validation
- Tasks 7-9 are requirements / concepting
- Task 10 is development / QA
- 3-6 and 7-9 may be an iterative process.
Research / Discovery
- 1) Competitive Website Analysis
- Activity - Discover features and content related the project website's goals. Discover demographics and behaviors from competitor sites to inform creation of personas (virtual customers/users).
- Deliverable - report on UI and content features, personas, site maps / IA, use cases - e.g., path to purchase. May include screenshots, charts, examples - e.g., wireframes
- 2) Personas
- Activity - Develop profiles representing each major target audience segment - demographic info, background (schools, location, parents, childhood hobbies, work history), current lifestyle (job, relationship status, work and personal schedules, hobbies, interests, etc), shopping habits (year round and holiday), internet habits (home and work), general motivations and interests (family oriented or status driven or peer driven or...)
- Deliverable - Detailed profiles for each major target audience.
Analysis / Validation
- 3) UI Analysis - Heuristic
- Activity - Analyze existing UI for usability, user experience, features and content related to user experience
- Deliverable - report including screenshots with annotations of what is working and what is not based on standardized heuristics
- 4) UI Analysis - Qualitative
- Activity - Small to large focus groups or surveys regarding an existing website or a demo of a website using questions such as: "What did you see first on the page?", "Was the navigation easy to use?", "Was the photography of the product helpful in your purchase decision?" Can include A/B comparisons.
- Deliverable - report with raw results of open ended questions, interpreted results based on a qualitative scoring system (e.g. if the user provided a positive answer to questions 1-5 the home page was successful in engaging the user, if positive on questions 6-10 the user was able to utilize search effectively", etc.
- 5) UI Analysis/Testing - Quantitative
- Activity - Small to large user tests on an existing website or demo or a website, performed in a lab or remotely using a quantitative collection method such as: web browser analytics, eye-tracking, video recording. Can include A/B comparisons.
- Deliverable - Report identifying specific problem areas for individual users and trends across users - some segmentation analysis. Raw data with analysis overlay - click maps, heat maps or video with annotations.
- 6) UI Live Testing - Quantitative
- Activity - A/B or Multivariate tests on a live site with a controlled percentage of customers/users participating.
- Deliverable - Report identifying problem area trends with potential segmentation analysis.
Requirements / Concepting
- 7) Site Maps
- Activity - Card sorting and diagraming of relationships between pages/screens within a website or application.
- Deiverable - Diagram(s) showing page/screen relationships within a website.
- 8) Wireframes
- Activity - Execute wireframe (box and text) layouts for key pages and / or features within the project using information collected in prior discovery tasks as well as any other requirements or concepts available.
- Deliverable - PDF of wireframe layouts with annotations to describe features of the layout.
- 9) Use Cases / Task Flows
- Activity - Develop flow charts of typical user tasks within the site for each persona - highlighting user decisions, high risk drop out points and other identified areas of interest (security checkpoints, etc).
- Deliverable - PDF of use cases organized by persona with annotations describing why a persona would take a particular path.
Development / QA
- 10) Usability, Web Standards and Accessibility QA
- Activity - Reviewing work in development to ensure it is meeting usability, W3C and WCAG standards and proposing solutions if problems are found