Articles

Peak Usability is now PeakXD

I am excited to announce Peak Usability has now been renamed PeakXD (short for Peak eXperience Design). Why?

When I started Peak Usability 15 years ago I actually named it UX consulting but no one knew what UX meant (User eXperience for those of you who don't work in the industry). Back then most people’s understanding of user centred design went as far as ‘usability’. And let’s face it, in 2003 there were a lot of really bad websites offering poor user experiences due largely to usability issues. User experience is so much more than usability and people understand that now.

Collaborative Design in Government - The importance of engaging stakeholders

Anyone working in or for government in the digital space should be aware of the wide range of standards, guidelines and methods such as Australia’s Digital Service Standard, UK’s Digital Service Standard and USA’s usability.gov and Web design standards. These standards and frameworks provide excellent resources for providing customer centric websites and systems. One of the common themes across these standards is the importance of having a multidisciplinary team including product managers, business analysts, user researchers, designers and technical roles. However, little is mentioned in these standards about how these multidisciplinary teams should actually work together. Having worked in or for government and many large organisations over 17 years I have learnt hard way about the importance of engaging stakeholders. In this article, I want to outline some of the methods we typically use to take stakeholders on the journey. This article is relevant for anyone working in large organisations as well as in or for government.

Tools & methods / Usability testing / User research / UX Training - 09/28/2017 - Tania Lang

Moderating usability test sessions: Are you Darth Vader or C-3PO?

Helping participants' complete tasks; tipping them off that they have made a mistake; giving them too much freedom or leading participants; these are all things inexperienced test moderators might find themselves doing when moderating a test session. This article explores some of the common mistakes and why they're damaging to the test outcomes presented through 5 Star Wars archetypes. Learn how to be a good test moderator and how to avoid being one of these 5 archetypes.

Tools & methods / Usability testing / User centred design - 08/23/2017 - Miranda Wee

Planning usability testing – Writing test plans

“In preparing for battle I have always found that plans are useless, but planning is indispensable.” – Dwight D. Eisenhower

Planning is a critical part of the usability testing process. Without planning, your testing activity runs the risk of disorganisation at best and misleading or useless results at worst. Spending time planning will reduce the risks of the testing going off the rails and enhances the potential for great insights. This article explores the reasons for planning your usability testing process and just what you should think about. Hint: we mention checklists quite a bit.

Content / User centred design - 07/28/2017 - David Humphreys

UX Stands on the shoulders of Content Strategy

Content is one of the main touchpoints between the user and the business. It is a core and critical part of the user experience. Content strategy and UX share similar goals and challenges. Content strategy forms a foundation layer for UX activities, and UX activities (especially research and testing) serve to strengthen and improve content, thereby in turn improving the user experience. This article explores some of the key overlapping themes between UX and Content Strategy.

Content / User centred design - 06/02/2017 - Tania Lang

Collaborative journey mapping

You’re probably all familiar with customer journey maps as a user research output and/or design tool. But their usefulness can also extend to the research process, especially when you are trying to understand user decision-making. That is, the journey map can be a useful visual tool for both participant and moderator in a one-on-one interview.

Journey maps can be used to map out users’ behaviour and delve into the beliefs, attitudes and emotions that underpin this behaviour. When coupled with some research techniques grounded in cognitive psychology, you have a very sound and rigorous approach to understanding your user’s decision-making.

Design patterns / User centred design / User research - 05/09/2017 - Tania Lang

Analyse early, analyse often

As UX researchers, whether we are working on some early exploratory user research, or working on a quick and ‘lean’ usability testing project, due diligence in analysis is a necessary part of our trade. But have you ever experienced ‘paralysis by analysis’ or felt overwhelmed by the amount of data collected? You may have just spent a month conducting contextual enquiries with your user base, and now face the seemingly impossible task of pulling it all together. Or you may be working in an Agile / Lean UX environment and have just finished 4-6 test sessions and now need to quickly work out what the key insights are – due tomorrow. How do you get a handle on all this information and distil it into some meaningful insights?

User centred design / User research - 03/31/2017 - Tania Lang

Real world UX vs. University UX 101

For those who want to foray into the field of User experience (UX) design, it should be noted that the elements of UX that you learn at university are very different to real life experiences in the industry.

Incorporating UX design into the structured university curriculum is hard when every student is privy to your projects. Nearly all courses where usability testing was a component, were structured in a way that testing with people outside the student cohort was not always feasible.

User centred design / User research - 02/23/2017 - Akanksha Hirokawa

UX lessons from the 2016 Census

The main issues which had a dramatic effect on data quality and the user experience of the 2016 Australian census were largely related to the design of the delivery and distribution process, offline support and technical issues but we can still learn a lot from the #censusfail both in terms of process and UX design.

Service design / User research - 08/11/2016 - Tania Lang

Research & testing: the importance of context. The Soviet bomb dog story.

How the Soviet Unions military training from the 1930's (aka The Soviet bomb dog story) is informing usability testing and research in 2016.

Service design / User research - 05/12/2016 - David Humphreys

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