Many clients get in touch with us when they have a big project for us to work on. They might want us to usability test an entire website, redesign a website, or design a new app. Whatever the project, they seem to have a one off large chunk of budget assigned to UX which they are intent on ‘blowing’ in one go. Whilst there are occasions when this is needed, we find that the little and often approach is much more beneficial to the long term usability of a product. But it does take a mind-set shift within the organisation.

Break down the project into smaller chunks of UX activity

We find ourselves helping clients to reduce their initial budget and instead breaking the project down into smaller chunks. Our revised plan utilises us in a more cost effective way and ensures we are involved throughout the project and not heavily in one place and then not again for several months.

When you think about the logic of this approach and apply it to other areas of life, it makes a lot of sense. You don’t  go to the dentist once every 5 years and get a load of work done at once, instead you go every 6 months to keep things in order and treat problems as they arise.

Focus on the core user journeys one at a time

The little and often approach allows us to consult with clients on a specific area of their site as they are working on it. This allows us to focus on improving a specific user journey rather than brushing over it as part of a larger project. We can get an intimate understanding of a particular part of the customer decision making process to help clients isolate barriers and deliver experiences which go beyond expectations. Clients get our support in small affordable chunks as and when they need us and we can plan and schedule the work easily, meaning we can be more responsive to deadlines.

So, next time you’re planning your budget allocations for UX, try not to think big and blow your budget all at once. Think more strategically at the key aspects of the user journey you’ll want to focus on in more depth throughout the year and split your budget accordingly.

If you’d like some advice on how you can best utilise your budget, get in touch and we’ll arrange a call or pop in for a chat.

About Ali Carmichael

Ali (or Alasdair) is an experienced project manager who loves his Gantt charts and milestones! He has over 12 years' experience managing successful online experiences for world class brands. Ali is responsible for ensuring our clients love what we do for them. Follow Ali on twitter @AliJCarmichael

I still don’t know what to say when people ask me what I do. After 13 years of being in the user experience profession I should have a standard response by now. But I either over complicate it by explaining in detail what I do, or I over simplify with “I’m a design consultant”, “I do market research” or” I’m in web design”. Recently I’ve tried explaining that I help companies design products that look great, work well and fit users needs but I still get that vacant expression in response.

Having a difficult to explain job means I’m always seeking good examples of communications that help people ‘get it’ quickly. That’s why I wanted to share the following 3 videos from Google. They offer a great example of why user experience is important. It’s easy to identify with the scenarios in the videos and they do a good job of making the problem obvious. Sadly, Google Analytics is not the right solution to the problem, but putting that aside the videos are great.

Online checkout user experience

Landing page user experience

Site search user experience

I’m not sure these videos solve my party introduction problem, but I could whip out my phone and show a quick video if I really struggle explaining things.  If you have any suggestions for some nice simple ways to explain user experience to people at parties, I’d love some advice!

If you’d like to learn how to improve the experience for your customers, we’d love to meet you for a chat. Please get in touch.

About Damian Rees

Damian has worked as a usability and user experience consultant for over 13 years. He has worked in senior roles within companies like the BBC and National Air Traffic Services where he has researched and designed for users in a variety of different contexts including web applications, voice recognition, and air traffic control interfaces. Follow Damian on twitter @damianrees

A report recently published provides an overview of charitable giving in the UK. It says that charity donations are down by 20% since the previous year. The report suggests that the overall number of people donating fell as well as the amount they are giving.

So what can charities do to boost their donations in difficult times? From hours of research with users we found the following 5 actions any charity can take to ensure they keep online donations pouring in.

1. Clearly demonstrate why donations are needed

Some charities are guilty of assuming that people understand what they do and why donations are needed. However, in our research we found users would search for a specific cause they were concerned about i.e. a particular disaster, or a broader theme i.e. cancer, then struggle to understand what specifically each charity did to solve the problem.
Users need to see a clear mission statement along with examples of what projects and initiatives the charity runs to support the cause.

2. Show them where the money goes

In addition to a clear mission statement and examples of charity initiatives, users look for case studies and concrete evidence that the charity is actually making a difference. They want to see what the money they give goes towards and specifically how donations are allocated to the different projects they are running.

3. Tell them how much money will reach the cause

Once users are convinced that the charity is a worthy cause, and is a credible candidate for their support, users then want to see how much of their donation reaches the cause. Users can be sceptical of how much of their money actually sees the front line. Those charities that did well to reassure users were the ones that broke down how many pence in a typical pound went to the cause, to future investments, internal administration costs, and future research.

4. Allow them to donate to specific campaigns/disasters

Users who were concerned about specific campaigns or disasters run by a charity were frustrated when they were unable to donate to that specific cause. Instead, they were forced to give a generic donation which the charity would allocate for them. This prevented some users from donating, which can result in them Googling an alternative charity who tackle their concern directly. Allowing users to choose which campaign or disaster to donate to would encourage more donations.

5.Provide easy ways to give one-off donations

Understandably, many charity websites encourage users to donate on a monthly basis rather than a one-off donation. However, this is often dealt with poorly making it confusing for users to select the one-off option instead. We found several users would give up easily on their donations if they found it difficult to select the one-off option. We were also surprised by the high proportion of users who prefer to donate by Paypal as an easy alternative, yet many charities did not offer this option.

In Summary

Whilst the economic climate is resulting in many people being more frugal with their spending, charities can improve the amount of donations they receive online by following the above guidelines. Donors have a variety of charities competing for their attention, meaning that charities have to work much harder at demonstrating why users should choose them.

If you’d like to talk to us about how we can help you get more online donations, please get in touch or read more about our charity expertise.

Further reading:
http://www.ncvo-vol.org.uk/sites/default/files/uk_giving_2012_full_report_1211.pdf
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-20304267

About Ali Carmichael

Ali (or Alasdair) is an experienced project manager who loves his Gantt charts and milestones! He has over 12 years' experience managing successful online experiences for world class brands. Ali is responsible for ensuring our clients love what we do for them. Follow Ali on twitter @AliJCarmichael

Focusing on users at the very beginning of a project sets a solid user-centred foundation for a project. It can be difficult to remain focused on users when technical reasons, business aims, project objectives all combine to kick off a new project. To help you remain focused on users here’s five core questions we use when we first get involved in a project.
The questions we’ve used here are for a website redesign project, however, they are just as relevant for any digital product or service, whether it is being re-designed or developed from scratch.

1. What’s the story of how the project has got to this point?

Start with the big picture. What has generated action on the project? Is it technology-driven? Is the website under performing? Have business targets or a shift in strategy triggered a change? Or has the website grown organically and become stale? Understanding why the project team are motivated to start the project is critical to seeing where you can help, and understanding where users fit into the overall picture.

2. Who are the different types of users? What are their goals in using the website?

It’s surprising how many times we get a vague answer to these two questions. If you sense hesitancy, confusion, or fabrication in their answers this will clearly point to the need for you to start the project with user research to understand who is using the site and why. Once this research is complete, your next task should be to design user profiles to help everyone remain focused on users (See our previous article: How to do quick and effective user profiling).

3. What other sites (or other sources) will people to use to achieve these goals? Why will they use this website instead of alternatives?

It’s critical to understand the wider context in which the site exists. Are there a variety of other websites, apps and offline resources already available to users? If there are several alternative methods, your initial research must set out to understand what sources they use, why they choose those sources, and what user needs exist that are currently un-met. An in-depth understanding of what the site needs to do to migrate users from what they use at the moment to your site is the key to the success of a project.

4. What are the aims of the project?

By this point, you should already have a good understanding about why the project is important. However, it is still important to ask this question. Sometimes there can be additional aims that have not yet been discussed. You can also use this question as a guide when setting out the tasks you plan to undertake. It can be useful to set out the UX tasks and deliverables you will complete in order to help the project team achieve each aim.

5. In the future when all your concerns and challenges have been overcome, how will you know it is successful?

Finally, you must understand how they will track and measure success. Some projects have complex aims but very basic success criteria. Sometimes, the project team are focused on the wrong metrics and this is a good opportunity for you to highlight some more user-centric metrics they could use to measure success. It’s also a great opportunity for you to set out some before stats to use as a benchmark to measure against at a later date.

Having a set of questions you always include in kick-off meetings can be a really useful way to ensure you have a good understanding of the project aims, who the users are, and also what UX activities you are likely to start with. In your next kick-off meeting you’ll now be prepared to ask the right questions and really make a difference to user experience. When you’re done, come back and tell us about how you got on.

If you’d like to talk to us about how we can help you integrate UX into all your projects to generate more online revenue, please get in touch.

About Damian Rees

Damian has worked as a usability and user experience consultant for over 13 years. He has worked in senior roles within companies like the BBC and National Air Traffic Services where he has researched and designed for users in a variety of different contexts including web applications, voice recognition, and air traffic control interfaces. Follow Damian on twitter @damianrees

As with any topic in the field of interactive media, it’s tough to know where to start if you want to learn more about user experience (UX). Many of our clients find our newsletter and blog useful, they might read other blogs and read the occasional book but rarely get the time or budget to attend formal training (either with us or elsewhere). Many of the organisations and charities we work with are finding less training budget available each year and are struggling to find viable learning opportunities.

We’re often asked for recommendations for ways to learn more about UX. Although we have plenty of books and blogs we can suggest, we’ve struggled to recommend courses people can do in their own time for little budget. So we’ve been doing some research to put together this list of short courses you can do in your own time for free or without breaking the bank. In this guide you should find plenty of inspiration for courses specifically about UX or in a related field.

We have grouped the courses into three categories: free, pay per course, and paid subscriptions. Under each of those categories, we’ve grouped the courses by source website. Each course gives a summary outline of what’s covered and who delivers the course material so it shouldn’t be too hard to assess credibility.

Free short courses

Coursera.org

Human-Computer Interaction

Online Games: Literature, New Media, and Narrative

Gamification

Udemy.com

Introduction to Web and eCommerce User eXperience Design

Pay per course

Udemy.com

Practical Statistics for The User Experience I ($199)

How To Develop & Document Personas & Scenarios ($89) 

Secrets of Intuitive & Usable Design: The Conceptual Model ($179)

Web Usability Made Simple ($199)

Design Your User Experience in 7 Simple Steps ($197)

How To Develop & Document A Task Analysis ($129)

Optimizing The Early Phases of Innovation ($20)

UXDesignEdge.com

UX Design Basics ($295)

Uie.com Virtual Seminars

A range of future and past virtual seminars offered from $129 per seminar

Paid subscription

Lydia.com (Subscription from $25/month or $250/year)

Interaction Design Fundamentals

Fireworks CS5: Rapid Prototyping

Interaction Design: Process and Inspiration

Dale Herigstad & Schematic, Interactive Design Agency

Web Form Design Best Practices

Hot Studio, Experience Design

Web Accessibility Principles

Pluralsight.com (subscription from $29/month or $299/year)

Creating User Experiences: Fundamental Design Principles

We hope you find this a useful learning resource for UX. If you have any other suggestions for short courses you can complete online, in your own time let us know so we can keep this list up to date. If you give one of the courses a try, we’d love to hear how you get on with it.

If you’d like to talk to us about bespoke UX training please get in touch, alternatively you can keep on top of what’s new in the field of user experience with our monthly newsletter (sign-up below).

About Damian Rees

Damian has worked as a usability and user experience consultant for over 13 years. He has worked in senior roles within companies like the BBC and National Air Traffic Services where he has researched and designed for users in a variety of different contexts including web applications, voice recognition, and air traffic control interfaces. Follow Damian on twitter @damianrees