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Wired Moon uses an industry standard five-phase approach to web site design and production, although we tailor it to the needs of each project. The basic site development phases are:
We believe the first phase, Strategy and Definition, to be the most important phase and the one that often determines project success. During this phase we will establish the business, project and user goals. We may do extensive qualitative user research to inform the site architecture, features and the site marketing campaign. The usability of a site is always one of our main concerns. A site that is not usable, simply fails. We have trained usability specialists on the team as well as very deep expertise in user interface design in both software and websites. When ever possible, we engage the project's users in the design process. One of the first steps is establishing the user's goals by doing human-centered design research. Human-Centered Design Research: Methods & Uses Human-centered design puts human needs and desires at the center of product or technology development processes. The goal is to create products and services that fit neatly into people's lives. Context-in-use is a central principle of human-centered design. An understanding of the context in which people will use the technology or product guides the development and design to ensure both usability and usefulness. The human-centered design approach holds that people's real life activities and goals need to be understood to create solutions that are both usable - easily learned, intuitive, pleasurable - and useful - the product fulfills a human need or desire. Qualitative user research provides the foundation for understanding the components of human experience. This understanding can be leveraged to inform and support the strategy, design, and implementation of technology solutions. Primary & Secondary Research Human-centered user research can include both primary and secondary research. Primary research is carried out by collecting data "in the field" from real people and analyzing that data for patterns and themes. Conducting interviews and formulating recommendations from the findings is an example of primary, or field, research. A taxonomy of primary field research methods and examples will follow in the next section. Secondary research involves analyzing existing data and information, such as, books, articles, past research findings, and web sites. Another term for secondary research is "context research." A lot of times we do secondary research first, before field research, to get an understanding of what's already out there or, in other words, the contextual landscape from a user, business, and cultural perspective. Setting the context then provides insight into how to design the primary research. Context, or secondary, research is often used internally as part of the team's requirements gathering. However, sometimes secondary research will take the place of primary research due to lack of resources. For instance, we wrote a point-of-view piece about how people use the internet in Japan using mostly secondary research sources. The goal of the deliverable was to communicate the cultural and social dimensions of internet usage in Japan and how these factors could link to business opportunities for consulting company we worked for. Primary Research Methods In-depth Interviewing (also sometimes called 'contextual inquiry') The purpose of in-depth interviewing is to discover and explore the experiences, beliefs, attitudes, and behaviors of the user. This method is used when we want to learn:
In-depth, semi-structured interviews can get at people's experiences of a product, service, life stage, work practice, etc. They are conducted in an open-ended manner that allows the participant to share what he or she feels is most significant about their own experience. Interviews are conducted on-site whenever possible as environmental context often provides important additional data. Interviews conducted "in the field" are often much more informative and richer than research that takes place outside the user's normal environment. The analysis of interviews helps designers and business strategists gain a contextual picture of the end user's world. Opportunities for functionality, information organization, and look and feel emerge from this picture.
For instance, a user may report that she has no problem using a computer application. However, when this individual is observed, it is revealed that she goes through a series of "work-arounds" to interact with the technology and accomplish her goals. Identifying the ways in which users must adjust their own behavior to use a technology can reveal innovation opportunities. Observational techniques also help us gain understanding of social interaction patterns, such as, a work team's knowledge sharing activities. Observation-based research helps get at aspects of experience that people aren't aware of because their behavior - what they do - remains largely tacit to the individual. That is, people are often not aware of how they do things and therefore can't articulate this knowledge in an interview, but through observation their behavior is revealed. Like interviews, observational research can be very open or more structured. Unstructured observation could involve hanging around a work group for several hours to get a picture of a typical work day. Unstructured observation focuses on aspects such as: Artifacts - physical objects in use (technologies, pens, whiteboards, documents, toys, etc.) Deliverable would typically be a report describing which types of information and features users want in relation to this product or service and how users want to interact with that information (i.e., do they want an everything-but-the-kitchen-sink home page in the Yahoo tradition, or, do they want more elegant categories, like Infiniti's home page: *Discover,* *Acquire,* and *My Infiniti.*). The information architect would extend user research findings into the site concept and site map. Of course, user preferences must also be aligned with technical constraints, brand strategy, and business goals of the project. While it is desirable to have clients and internal team members involved during the earlier research activities, it is crucial that as the project moves toward concept that those responsible for content strategy and information architecture participate in this phase of the research. This collaboration ensures that the team's activities are in synch. Usability Testing Usability tests are usually structured by a series of task scenarios. The task scenarios are designed from a contextual understanding of the uses of the technology. Users perform tasks embedded in the scenarios and in so doing highlight less usable aspects of the interface. Deliverables take the form of evaluative reports about pain-points in the user's experience of the interface and specific directives about how to improve task flow. The primary field research methods described above can be thought of as existing along a continuum from divergent - exploratory - to convergent - validation-focused. User research activities inform and are also influenced by the goals and constraints of the business and project objectives. |
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