CMD Methods Pack
This pack supports your design research planning in any CMD project. Browse through the cards to find methods that suit your needs. Pick a combination of methods belonging to different research strategies to balance your research plan. You can use this card set in many ways. It is really up to you!
Library
Standing on the shoulders of giants
To ensure rigor in your design explore what is already done. Watch what competitors are doing or get an overview of existing guidelines, patterns and theories. Sometimes called deskresearch.
Benchmark creation
Why?
Existing products in your niche can be a valuable reference and source of inspiration.
Best, good & bad practices
Why?
Why invent the wheel again? Incorporating what others have learned is an important practice.
Competitive Analysis
Why?
Find a niche or unique selling point competitors are not filling.
Design Pattern Search
Why?
Find common solutions for recurring problems and a description of the context in which these solutions work best.
Expert Interview
Why?
A domain or content expert can put you on track when you enter a new domain or field of expertise. The expert can point out sources, give you a sense of direction or point to common pitfalls.
Literature Study
Why?
Find contextual information, guidance and best practices.
Trend analysis
Why?
Catch up with novel developments before your competitors do.
Field
Understand your users
Explore the application context. You apply a field strategy to get an overview of your users, know their needs, desires and limitations so your design is relevant to them.
Bag tour
Why?
As a low threshold introduction to the user, which still gives valuable insights, the bag tour asks users to report about themselves based on the content of their bag.
Card sorting
Why?
Find out what information organisation structures are considered intuitive by users.
Context mapping
Why?
Get an understanding of the context and personal experience of users with a product or service.
Cultural probes
Why?
Probes can be used to gather inspirational rather than factual information from users. They give insights in peoples lives, values and thoughts.
Day in the life
Why?
Gain insights in the life of your users. To gain empathy, a day in the life could be a useful technique.
Diary study
Why?
Report detailed information about routines and long-term experience.
Fly on the wall
Why?
Find out how people act in real life by using a non-obtrusive observation technique.
Focus group
Why?
When the topic asks for it, or for efficiency reasons, opinions and experiences can also be gathered through group discussions called focus groups.
Interview
Why?
It is hard to design for users you do not fully understand. Interviews allow you to understand users better by gathering their opinions, behaviours, goals, attitudes and experiences.
Participant observation
Why?
Sometimes the best design ideas arise from ‘first hand’ experience with the situation you are designing for; so “be the user”.
Survey
Why?
Collect, mostly quantitative, information from a large sample of your target group.
Lab
To measure is to know
Be certain your solution works and is relevant for the end-user. Will your design work out the way you intended it to?
A/B Testing
Why?
A minor change in a design may alter user behaviour in ways that are hard to detect in a usability test. An A/B test allows you to compare real-world user behaviour across different versions of the product.
Biometrics
Why?
To get objective data about users' attention and physical state.
Field Trial
Why?
Participants never act completely naturally in a lab setting, so consider testing your product in the ‘wild’. This can be particularly valuable when real-life disturbances are important for your design, as is the case with mobile apps.
Online analytics
Why?
Gain insights from real usage statistics in order to continue improving a website, app or social media campaign after it is in use, or monitor it’s use for marketing purposes.
Thinking aloud
Why?
Understand the reasons behind user behaviour, or uncover the mental models of the user in a usability test.
Usability Testing
Why?
Detect problems users have with your design and correct these before the product goes live.
Wizard of Oz
Why?
A Wizard of Oz: acting out the systems functionality, can help when a system has not been build yet, but a realistic user test is necessary to drive design.
Showroom
Know & show your contribution
Be certain your ideas are better than what is already done. Proof the rigor of your design by showing it to experts, test against guidelines or decide on its USPs.
Co-reflection
Why?
Involve stakeholders and other experts early in the design process in order to set an innovative direction and to create openness for novel ideas among stakeholders.
Expo
Why?
By placing your work in the spotlight, you learn about its value for others in ways you might not expect yourself.
Heuristic Evaluation
Why?
Complementary to user research, or when user research is too costly, a heuristic evaluation can be used to detect and repair usability errors.
Peer Review
Why?
“With many eye-balls on the code, all bugs are shallow.” Colleagues and experts can help position and improve your work, certainly if it needs to be reused by them.
Pitch
Why?
Get a grasp on your unique selling points and practice concise communication about them.
Provocative Prototyping
Why?
Friendly provocation can help uncover hidden values and requirements from your stakeholders.
(Product) Quality Review
Why?
Ensure the product is perfect before it is released to the client or users.
USP (Unique Selling Points)
Why?
In a competitive business situation you need to be able to identify and communicate clearly and concisely what it is that sets you apart.
Workshop
Seek variation and improvement!
Explore opportunities. Prototyping, sketching and co-creation activities are all ways to innovate and to gain insights in what is possible and how things could work.
Co-creation
Why?
Gain inspiration from your users by involving them in the design process. It may lead to unexpected and sensible project outcomes.
Ideation
Why?
Generate and develop new ideas.
Morphological chart
Why?
Generating ideas in a systematic manner.
Proof of Concept
Why?
Demonstrate the desirability or the feasibility of your idea or design.
Prototyping
Why?
Develop, evaluate or communicate a concept or design.
Scamper
Why?
When it is hard to develop an initial idea into an elegant solution, a morphological technique such as scamper can help.
Sketching
Why?
Explore and communicate forms and ideas.
Storytelling
Why?
Make abstract concepts concrete and strengthen the empathy for the user in your team by using storytelling.
Tinkering
Why?
Come up with novel idea's based on technical opportunities and affordances.
Stepping Stones
Condense, communicate, combine
Condense your insights into tangible representations that can be re-used in the rest of the project and help to communicate findings to the team and client.
Business Model Canvas
Why?
Dream up in a structured and visual way, how a new company can reach its customers and make revenues in order to understand, discuss, create and analyse a business idea.
Concept
Why?
When you develop a new product or service, the concept summarizes 'the big idea' or 'the main principle' on which your solution will be based. For example, most traditional churches have a floor plan based on a cross so God can recognize a church from the sky. Validate your concept(s) with stakeholders to determine desirability and feasibility.
Comparison Chart
Why?
A comparison chart, or comparison table, describes and compares attributes and characteristics of existing products or tools in order to determine the best option for your project.
Customer Journey
Why?
Visualize the user experience of a service over time and across the different interaction moments (touch points) within the service.
Design Specification
Why?
Describe the characteristics of a product, like a website or an application, in order to inform the designers and developers who are involved.
Empathy Map
Why?
Summarize and synthetize findings from observations and interviews in a structured way. Empathy maps can offer valuable and unexpected insights in the user.
Expert Review Report
Why?
In the early stages of design and open-ended projects, the opinion of experts can be used to give direction and focus to a project. The expert review report communicates the results of an expert review to all stakeholders.
Inspiration Wall
Why?
Save and organize creative ideas during a project, or even permanently, in order to have access to them very quickly and let ideas ‘simmer’ for a while.
Mood Board
Why?
Before you start to make a design, a mood board can help describe the ‘mood’ or the ‘feel’ of the envisioned product.
Persona
Why?
Represent the user in discussions about the design in an elegant way.
Prototype
Why?
Test an early model of your product with users, peers, experts or your client. Test goals can vary from testing the concept, to testing functionality, user experience, content breakdown, usability, or technical feasibility.
Requirement List
Why?
To ensure your design meets all demands, a complete list of requirements can serve as a planning tool and checklist.
Risk Analysis
Why?
Determine which risks are acceptable by making an inventory of the possible threats in a project and determining the probability and impact of each threat. Possibly also determine the effect in, for example, terms of costs.
Scenario
Why?
Different types of scenarios exist that each serves a different purpose, for example to develop user requirements, to generate ideas or to reflect on a concept.
Task Analysis
Why?
When your product has to support people performing some kind of task (for example repairing a car), a task analysis will help you and other designers understand the task better.
Test Report
Why?
Describe test results, show the analysis of the results and conclude with lessons learned and recommendations.