UX Research for Apps: User-centric from Concept to Launch

In this lesson we'll discuss the importance of exploring ideas before you commit. Where do you start? Why ask WHY as you begin the process? The Shaping the Concept section is about starting with the kernel of an idea and arriving at an idea that you can commit to.

Central to app concept design is being able to find and see problems in a new way. How do you do that? This PDF provides a list of research-based exercises that will help you think divergently.

There is a wealth of research data available online in almost every discipline. In this lecture we will touch on some of the online tools for exploratory research that you can use to inexpensively get data from users.

In this lesson we consider tools to find competing apps in the app stores and ways to compare those apps

The App Definition Statement is a semi-formal way to quickly define your app concept.

Inherent in every new product is re-consideration. There is no straight line between a pure idea and product delivery. We discuss the pivot and the importance of continually looking back at the app definition statement.

How do you screen ideas and determine which are the best to invest in? As large consumer product companies know, only the best ideas deserve to move forward in the idea funnel. We'll talk about how to screen and decide which app concept deserves further investigation.

We need to go deeper than our cursory understanding of the customer and really understand the needs - expressed and unexpressed - of people who will be interacting with our product. We discuss the rationale and tools used to understand the customer, allowing us to have an empathetic understanding of our customers/users and understand where our product fits in.

Interviews with stakeholders will give a baseline of expectations. With multiple stakeholders, a review of the prevailing ideas about the project provide a measure of how cohesive the thought is through the organization. Interviews provide a way to understand the perceived needs and gaps. Initial interviews also form the basis for ongoing interaction and sets the stage for team updates.

In this lesson we talk about ethnography and its variants - ways to understand the needs of users and to get to insights that are either unspoken or hidden.

It may seem obvious, but surveys are a key tool for customer insight. Quality responses come from well-written survey instruments. We cover the basics in this lesson.

In-depth interviews are qualitative tools to get into in the world of customers. We talk about how to do IDIs.

Empathy Mapping is a powerful tool to help teams get into the mind of customers. We will talk about the use of Empathy Mapping and how to create an Empathy Map.

In this lesson we discuss the creation and use of personas.

We look at various Journey Maps and tools to create journey maps. We talk about ways to use journey maps with stakeholders and customers.

You may have begun Benchmarking earlier, but at this point in the process, there is a rationale for critically evaluating features and functional benefits. We talk about ways to do both an internal and external audit of products.

Co-creation with users is a tenet of user-centered design. But how do you effectively bring users to the table to make design choices? In this lesson we talk about how to effectively create a user-centered design experience that can yield usable insights about what the design a product should (and shouldn’t) be.

Prioritization of features is an often-used process in product co-creation. Understanding what is most valued and needed from users allows you to match the product to the needs of the customer. In this lesson we look at the rationale for feature prioritization and techniques such as Card Sort to group and prioritize features. We look at some online tools to help accomplish this.

At various points along the way as you are describing your product to stakeholders and to users, the need arises to describe your product. The storyboard is a lo-fi presentation that may be used at various places in the process to explain and garner support for a product. In this lesson we discuss the use and creation of storyboards and how to test them with users.

In this lesson we talk about how to conduct a test of a paper prototype to evaluate the organization and structure of the product.

Testing content and creative decisions can be done easily. We discuss tools and approaches to quickly get a read on how users will react to content or creative.

As the product is moving into the development phase, we need to consider what the evaluation strategy will be. What do we need to know to ensure that the design decisions were on target and what would we like to know to optimize the design of the product?

What is the roadmap for evaluation of the product, which will be critical in the first release?

Beta testing is typically the domain of QA, focused on testing apps for bugs and crashes. But beta tests can provide useful data to the UX designer as well.

Usability testing is foundational to the UX designer. Mobile UX testing is being made easier with new tools and approaches.

In this lesson we review methods and tools for testing and optimizing using A/B split tests.

The role of the UX designer continues after launch. We talk about the importance of continuing to determine opportunities for design improvement beyond launch and about tools that can be used to gather insights.

How do you dig into patterns of app use behaviors that might indicate opportunities to improve or augment your app? We talk about the tools that are currently available for App Analytics.

In this lesson we cover ways to gather satisfaction data from apps post launch.