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

When usability testing charity websites we see the same user need being unfulfilled time and again. Before making a decision to donate, volunteer, or fundraise for you, users need to know where the money goes.

They’ve heard about charities eating up all the money themselves and only a small amount getting to the people who need it. They want to know your charity isn’t like that. But you also know that users aren’t going to read your AGM notes and won’t invest time reading about your financial structure. So what do you do? In this article we’ll show you some of the sites doing it well and give you some inspiration on how to fix your site to generate more online donations.

Offer a simple ‘where the money goes’ graphic

The simplest way to show users their money is going to the right place is to show them where the money goes using a basic graphical representation of the income you receive and what happens to the money. Users just need a simple understanding to tick the box in their mind which either adds you to the credible list, or puts you in the reject pile. Here are some examples of how some charities have done this well:

Unicef provide a page summarising where the money goes with a simple pie chart and a summary of their spending in 2010. A little out of date and wordy, but still a useful overview.

Plan UK is one of our clients and testing showed that users struggled to understand where the money was going. We recommended they create content for this and then in subsequent usability tests we found it worked well.

Oxfam provide a very simple overview using a pie chart. Like Unicef they also provide a useful understanding to show what happens to the money from every £1 donated. This is a great example of how to cover this off for users in a very small piece of real estate with a link to find out more.

Action Aid take more of an infographic approach which incorporates a summary of what happens with the money donated as well as a good overview of how users can help.

Centrepoint show that a pie chart isn’t the only way to show this information with a very simple breakdown of where their money is spent.

Key takeaways

• Show simple overview of where the money goes, a simple pie chart is enough (Unicef, Oxfam, Plan UK)
• Infographics can be a useful way to demonstrate lots of information easily (ActionAid)
• A breakdown of how the money has been spent is useful (Centrepoint)
• Simplifying the spend in terms of pence in a pound is useful (Oxfam, Unicef)

Provide evidence of what impact the money has had

For some users seeing a basic overview of where the money goes is enough to move them on to donations. However, for other users in our research, we’ve seen them look more into what the charity has actually achieved. They get an overall sense of what causes it supports, but often we observed users seeking direct evidence and tangible examples of what impact the charity has had. Users want to see the good their money can do.

Ideally they want to see brief case studies and news stories showing some of the recent success stories you’ve had. Giving them a basic overview of some recent projects with some engaging content such as video and photos would be a fantastic start, however we struggled to uncover many good examples of easy to find summaries of the impact voluntary support and donations have had. Our recommendation is to stop hiding this content deep in the site in impact reports, newsletters, and PDFs and bring it right to the front of the website. Show the proof of what successes big or small you’ve had in the last year. Here are some of the better examples we found, but we did struggle to generate many great examples:

Oxfam provide an area titled ‘The impact of our work’ which provides compelling video and imagery. The layout of the content also allows users to scan the content and get a good overview of what Oxfam are doing.

Shelter provide an excellent visual slideshow which takes users through a summary of their recent achievements. The content is visual, doesn’t take too long to go through, and easy to digest.

War Child offer a video highlighting the impact of their work last year. Users get an excellent visual overview of what the charity has been doing.

Comic Relief offer an excellent statistical view of the difference they have made. This is an excellent way to deliver a lot of information in an easy to glance manner.

Key takeaways

• Not many charities do this well
• A well presented statistical summary is a useful option if you want to avoid detailing recent projects (Comic Relief)
• Simple and easily digestible chunks of information showing this year versus last year is useful (Shelter)
• Videos and images offer compelling ways to show impact (Oxfam, War Child)
• Using inclusive language such as ‘see for yourself’, ‘we did this’ helps users engage (Oxfam)
• A section called ‘2011 highlights’ is a useful home for this content (War Child)

Helping users understand where the money goes and what impact their support will have in tangible, easy to understand ways is critical to receiving more support through your website. With these examples you have some inspiration to take action on your website. If you’d like to talk to us about how we can help you generate more revenue and support online, 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