My pinned cards
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.
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Benchmark creation
Why?
Existing products in your niche can be a valuable reference and source of inspiration.
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Best, good & bad practices
Why?
Why invent the wheel again? Incorporating what others have learned is an important practice.
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Biometrics
Why?
To get objective data about users' attention and physical state.
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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.
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Card sorting
Why?
Find out what information organisation structures are considered intuitive by users.
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Co-creation
Why?
Gain inspiration from your users by involving them in the design process. It may lead to unexpected and sensible project outcomes.
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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.
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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.
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Competitive Analysis
Why?
Find a niche or unique selling point competitors are not filling.
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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.
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Customer Journey
Why?
Visualize the user experience of a service over time and across the different interaction moments (touch points) within the service.
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Design Pattern Search
Why?
Find common solutions for recurring problems and a description of the context in which these solutions work best.
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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.
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Diaries & probes
Why?
Collect detailed information and inspiration about values, thoughts, routines, and long-term experience of your intended users.
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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.
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Ethical check
Why?
Norms and values differ between people and societies. Make sure your design and development decisions do not lead to conflicts with certain norms and values.
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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.
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Expo
Why?
By placing your work in the spotlight, you learn about its value for others in ways you might not expect yourself.
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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.
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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.
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Guideline conformity analysis
Why?
Conforming to guidelines and standards helps ensure the credibility of the quality of your product and prevents reliability, privacy and security issues.
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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.
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Ideation
Why?
Generate and develop new ideas.
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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.
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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.
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Literature Study
Why?
Find contextual information, guidance and best practices.
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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.
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Morphological chart
Why?
Generating ideas in a systematic manner.
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Observation
Why?
Get a feeling for how your intended users will use your product by unobtrusively observing them and their behaviour in their daily environment.
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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.
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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.
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Persona
Why?
Represent the user in discussions about the design in an elegant way.
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Pitch
Why?
Get a grasp on your unique selling points and practice concise communication about them.
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Proof of Concept
Why?
Demonstrate the desirability or the feasibility of your idea or design.
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Prototyping
Why?
Develop, evaluate or communicate a concept or design.
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Provocative Prototyping
Why?
Friendly provocation can help uncover hidden values and requirements from your stakeholders.
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(Product) Quality Review
Why?
Ensure the product is perfect before it is released to the client or users.
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Requirements list
Why?
To ensure your design meets all demands, a complete list of requirements can serve as a planning tool and checklist.
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Scamper
Why?
When it is hard to develop an initial idea into an elegant solution, a morphological technique such as scamper can help.
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Scenario
Why?
Different types of scenarios exist that each serve a different purpose, for example to develop user criteria, to generate ideas or to reflect on a concept. Storyboards are a particularly common form to capture scenarios.
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Security test
Why?
Connected products and online services are prone to misuse by rogue users. Security tests identify weaknesses of the system and thus help prevent misuse.
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Sketching
Why?
Explore and communicate forms and ideas.
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Storytelling
Why?
Make abstract concepts concrete and strengthen the empathy for the user in your team by using storytelling.
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Survey
Why?
Collect, mostly quantitative, information from a large sample of your target group.
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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.
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Thinking aloud
Why?
Understand the reasons behind user behaviour, or uncover the mental models of the user in a usability test.
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Tinkering
Why?
Come up with novel idea's based on technical opportunities and affordances.
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Trend analysis
Why?
Catch up with novel developments before your competitors do.
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Usability Testing
Why?
Detect problems users have with your design and correct these before the product goes live.
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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.
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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.
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