Author: Jerry Cao

Jerry Cao is a content strategist at UXPin where he gets to put his overly active imagination to paper every day. In a past life, he developed content strategies for clients at Brafton and worked in traditional advertising at DDB San Francisco. In his spare time he enjoys playing electric guitar, watching foreign horror films, and expanding his knowledge of random facts. Follow him on Twitter.

Free e-book: Interaction Design Best Practices

Interaction design is one of the toughest fields of design. It requires a mastery of UX design, UI design, visual design, and a sixth sense for human psychology. 

In our latest free e-book, we boil down interaction design theory into practical advice. Read on to learn what we’ve included.  

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How To Mix Dogfood Into Product Development

As you build the product, it’s important to test internally and externally to get out of the development bubble. Dogfooding is a quick internal sanity check that ensures the product team stays empathetic to users. On the other hand, beta testing can be more in-depth since it is the last comprehensive user review of your product before you hand it off to be shipped. In this piece, we’ll discuss helpful processes and documents to use for both types of testing.

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How to Write a Painless Product Requirements Document

How to Write a Painless Product Requirements Document

While the bulk of documentation is produced in the earlier stages, the implementation stage is one of the most crucial phases of the UX design process.

While you do a lot of concepting during the research, analysis, and design phases, it’s now time to get to the heavy lifting. We understand that documentation doesn’t always equal a product, so that’s why we’ll just explore the essentials.

In this piece, we’ll look at Product Hunt‘s product requirements document as a best practice and explain how to make it work for you. Follow along, then use our free PRD template.

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Usability Testing & Design: New Yelp Prototypes (Part 2)

In Part 1, we described how we started sketching and wireframing based off the qualitative insights and quantitative insights from our user testing on Yelp’s website.

Now, we’ll look at low fidelity prototyping, high fidelity prototyping, and the final new design.

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User Analysis Before Diving Into Design (Part 2)

User Analysis allows you to get actionable insight about users and their behavior which will inform your UX design strategy.

You need to know your user as a person, understand how and why they’d use your product (and how often), and all the experiences that come between them and your product. That multi-dimensional understanding is the only way you’ll be able to prioritize your features appropriately — otherwise you might enter the Design stage without even knowing you’re on a course for disaster.

For more smart ways on incorporating documentation into the design process, download the Guide to UX Design & Process Documentation. Expert advice is featured from Aarron Walter, Laura Klein, Ian McAllister, and dozens others. Visual examples are also shown from companies like Vurb, MailChimp, Apple, Google, and many more.

 

Usability Testing & Design: The New Yelp Design (Part 1)

In our previous posts, we described the qualitative insights and quantitative insights from our user testing on Yelp’s website. Now that the results and analysis were done, it was time to put pen to paper and our cursors to the screen to get designing.

We’ll show side by side comparisons of the current Yelp design and our new look. We’ll also explain our process of sketching and low fidelity wireframing. In Part 2, we’ll look at low fidelity prototyping and high fidelity prototyping.

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User Testing & Design: 6 Quantitative Insights Into Yelp

Our last post talked about our qualitative analysis of the user tests on Yelp’s website. We found 7 key insights, such as learning that the Events tab wasn’t very helpful and that the filters could use improvement.

In this post, we’ll take a closer look at quantitative analysis on the Yelp site by discussing the insights from card sorting and click testing. To test the Yelp site, we ran a closed card sort and first click test.

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User Testing & Design: 7 Qualitative Insights Into Yelp’s Website

The first part of our analysis involved examining the qualitative data collected through the screen-recorded user tests we mentioned in our previous post.

As you might recall, we ran a series of tests on 5 users (as recommended by Jakob Nielsen). When choosing users, we were looking for semi-frequent Yelp users. Our 5 users included 3 users who had Yelp accounts and 2 who did not (since some of our tasks required accounts). Both groups of users were assigned common tasks like finding a restaurant and less-common tasks like finding an event. By choosing all kinds of tasks, we hoped to cover the spectrum of general use cases.

In this piece, we’ll uncover the insights and explain how they might influence our redesign of Yelp’s website.

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