Choosing the right exercises to do internally, with clients, and with users can be challenging and complex. For this project, we set out to take a library of user research methods and make them easy to find and navigate.
Most of the exercises on this site are taken from the NYT Product Discovery Activity Guide – a guide produced by the New York Times with around 75 different activities for ideation and collaboration when developing new products. Since not all of the activities in the guide pertained directly to the type of tools that we developed, we went through all of the activities with a fine-tooth comb and assessed if/how each would be useful to us. We compiled our findings in several spreadsheets:
After the exercises had been decided, we worked closely with the developer on the project to tag data effectively so that it could be easily updated and fed into the application:
Fittingly for the simple nature of the app, the key workflow is also quite simple. We gathered inspiration from tools like Google Fonts and the Material Icons site, where the user "shops" for digital items and places them into a basket, which upon completion of the session, can be packaged up and downloaded. In our tool, designers would similarly "shop" for exercises that they liked, add them to their basket, then download the basket of exercises in a single PDF when they were finished. While the magenta didn't make it into the final design, the workflow did.
As a result of pulling the exercises from an existing library of resources, we knew which data we had, thus how we would be able to allow users to filter their results. Along with a smart search algorithm written by the talented developer we worked with, this would be the means for finding exercises.
In addition to the data that we already had, we decided to make the effort to go through each exercise and tag it with data about which materials were required (e.g. "stickies"), as well as what elements of the product need to be defined in order to do the exercise (e.g. "well-defined personas"). Ultimately, we ended up with a dark, simple UI characterized by nice typography and fun microinteractions. Below is a screen recording of the developed version of the site.
After gathering feedback from users over several months of use, a handful of enhancements to the workflow and interface that would improve the experience came to light:
