Portfolio Project Checklist:

Early-Design Testing
You can check each item in the checklist as you do it and save the document to keep track
or print out the page and check items with a pen or pencil.

01: Choose a website or app to evaluate. This could be your own, a friend’s, an
employer’s or just a solution you think could do with improvement.

02: Decide on a research objective. Your research questions will be driven by the
objective. Think about the needs of both the solution’s owner and its users. What
are you going to do with what you’ve learned? For example, are there any important
issues that have already been identified and need further examination before a
remedy can be devised? Or is this a new idea that needs some validation?

03: Devise some research questions based on the objective. You don’t want your
tests to be too long; plus, most of the free online tools have a relatively low limit.
Because of the limitation of online tools for early-design testing, you will probably
want to create only three activities for users.

04: Decide on who you want to take this survey. Do they need experience of this site
or one of its competitors? Should they engage in some specific activity on a regular
basis? Come up with two or three screening questions to start the survey. Include
these when writing up the report for this exercise, but screening participants would
normally happen before we get to the early-design tests. So, we won’t worry about
the screening questions except for noting what they might be.

05: Express your research questions as goals for users given the design artifact
you’re planning to show them. For a first-click test, this would be a page image of
some sort (from pencil sketch through to high-fidelity screenshot). For a tree sort,
it would be the menu hierarchy of a website or app. Be sure to use language and
concepts that your participants will understand and avoid repeating terms that are
used in the design artifacts.

06: Test the study out with a couple of likely participants.

[Continued on next page]

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07: Launch or distribute the study and collect responses. For first-click tests,
where on the image users click is the most important piece of information, but how
long they took to arrive at their decision might also be useful. In tree testing, the
navigation paths that were taken – including backtracking – and the overall timing
are all informative.

08: Summarize the results in a brief report, discussing any conclusions you can
draw. What design changes do these results support?

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Quantitative research is about understanding user behavior at scale. In most cases the
methods we’ll discuss are complementary to the qualitative approaches more commonly
employed in user experience. In Data-Driven Design: Quantitative Research for UX, you’ll
learn what quantitative methods have to offer and how they can help paint a broader
picture of your users’ experience of the solutions you provide—typically websites and apps.

Since quantitative methods are focused on numerical results, we’ll also be covering
statistical analysis at a basic level. You don’t need any prior knowledge or experience of
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